This is one of the most unusual soldier stories from Gallipoli, yet nonetheless poignant, and, in its ending, tragic.
For it is of a Tasmanian boy who had been born into what had been envisaged as a Utopian dream of equality, and, hopefully, a peaceful life in a transplanted colony in a far off country.
And when it failed how that boy was brought to Tasmania, grew up, and went to war – only to die in the terrible carnage that was Gallipoli.
Horace Francis Donald was his name, Sergeant Donald, of the 1st Battalion, Australian Infantry Force, killed in action on August 7, 1915. He was just a month from his 21st birthday.
There is an intriguing background to the short life of Horace Donald, worthwhile recounting at this time when there is such widespread media attention on the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing.
He was born near Asuncion, in the heart of Paraguay, South America, becoming part of a bold, but ultimately failed transplanted colony that was called “New Australia”.
It was the brainchild of William Lane, a socialist journalist and activist, who was born in England and arrived in Queensland in 1885 after a newspaper career in Canada and the United States.
In her 1997 book Paradise Mislaid, in Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay, Anne Whitehead said Lane’s thinking had been radicalised by a wave of general strikes across America in 1877, brutally crushed by police and troops (with more than 100 strikers and bystanders killed).
“Lane no longer believed he was in the land of the brave and free and left for another which he thought could still be,” wrote Whitehead.
With his American wife Lane settled in Brisbane and soon made a name as a journalist, noted for strong articles exposing social injustice, with personal accounts that Whitehead said showed the “underbelly of city life, the horror for inmates of prisons and hospitals, in effect early experiments in gonzo journalism”.
But, as she added, his concept of justice was exclusively for Europeans – he was racist. He declared: “We are white and progressive and we will stay white and progressive.”
Co-founder of a newspaper, The Boomerang, he saw the best protection in the then new trade unionism, negotiating an affiliation with trade unions, and the 1889 establishment of the Australian Labour Federation. But this worried the pastoralists, the Queensland Pastoral Employers’ Association. The battle lines were drawn and nasty conflict followed.
In another book that also explored Lane’s progress and the establishment of New Australia – Gavin Souter’s 1968 book A Peculiar People, The Australians in Paraguay – he reccorded how the Brisbane press branded Lane as the arch-conspirator behind the bitter shearers’ strike of 1891.
Souter said Lane certainly invited that description: “In his writing and even more in private conversation, he sounded very much like a revolutionary. He is said once to have daydreamed of pirating a consignment of bullion on the high seas and taking it to Paris, the centre of world revolution: but in cold print his aspirations were somewhat less fanciful. Lane had a greater following than any other polemical journalist in Australian history. He wrote mainly for the bush workers of Queensland, whom he idealized with romantic intensity.”
Souter also noted that Lane sometimes wrote about co-operative village settlements which he hoped would lead Australia to a better way of life, and at other times considered the possibilities of violent change.
But the fiery industrial times of William Lane in that Australian era is a whole story in itself, and this article’s focus is on a young Tasmanian who fell at Gallipoli.
Lane eventually saw the solution of finding a new socialist answer elsewhere and 1893 saw almost 500 Australians set sail for Paraguay. Again, why Paraguay is a fascinating story in itself, but to concentrate on the life of Horace Donald we find that his mother was Annie Elizabeth Beadle, a housekeeper from Launceston, his father Tom Donald, a carpenter from Queensland.
Annie had gone to Paraguay …
Annie had gone to Paraguay with her family and met Tom there. They were one of the first three couples married in the colony, in 1894. But through personal conflict, New Australia fell apart, William Lane’s personality a major factor in it. There were expulsions and secessions, final disillusionment, with Lane moving away with a group to find a new separate colony at Cosme.
Finally, the Donalds returned to Australia, to Launceston, when Horace was two. He was educated there at Glen Dhu State School, became a draper in his young adult life, and when the call came to go to war enlisted in Launceston, on September 14, 1914.
And he was a soldier luck deserted. After sustaining a groin injury from shrapnel on May 4, 1915, and being sent to hospital in Egypt, he returned to his battalion on July 28. The fates were again against him for on August 7 he had fingers blown off his right hand – and on the way to get the wound dressed was shot dead by a sniper.
He is remembered at Gallipoli’s Lone Pine Memorial, and on the Honour Roll of 101 names at North Hobart’s former Anglican Holy Trinity Church. He is also honoured at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on their Roll of Honour
The Donalds weren’t the only New Australians to lose a son at Gallipoli – so did colony founder William Lane.
After the disintegration of the colony Lane made Auckland, New Zealand, his destination. There a journalist friend on The New Zealand Herald found him a job as a leader-writer, and eventually he became this major newspaper’s editor.
His son Donald, a corporal with the New Zealand 16th Waikato Company, was killed in action during that fateful April 25 landing at Gallipoli. He was 22.
He displayed conspicuous bravery leading a machine-gun section. The orders were to cross a gully to link up with Australians on a ridge. It was in the face of the Turks who were concentrating their fire on the allies’ boats.
In the gully Corporal Lane was shot in the right forearm but refused to go back, saying the wound was nothing. After his section reached the Australians he was again hit, this time in a thigh muscle. Again he refused to retire, staying on to give orders and controlling the firing of his men.
Ambulance men with a stretcher wanted to carry him to the rear but he refused, saying that he had only received a flesh wound.
Then it was decided to make a charge, but when Corporal Lane rose to his knees to give the order his luck ran out – he was mortally wounded when hit in the head by a machine-gun bullet.
The Lane family had suffered earlier tragedies while in Paraguay. A three-year-old daughter died from convulsions, and their eight-year-old son Charles in an unusual incident. He had been sent to have a haircut, stopped on the way to join a game of cricket but while facing the bowling was hit in the chest by a ball, fell, and died within minutes.
