John Miller

Born in Bristol, England, on September 6, 1861, William Lane became a journalist, novelist, and influential voice in the Australian labor movement. He wrote some of his fiction as John Miller, the name attached to The Workingman's Paradise, and was known not just as a writer but as an activist and editor with strong social and political convictions.

Lane helped shape labor journalism in Australia and became closely associated with trade union politics and utopian socialist ideas. His life took an unusual turn when he led the New Australia settlement project in Paraguay, a bold communal experiment that reflected the same reforming spirit found in his writing.

He later lived in New Zealand, where he died on August 26, 1917. Today he is remembered as a writer whose books and journalism were tightly bound to the struggles, ambitions, and controversies of working-class politics in the late nineteenth century.