La Chacarita, along the Paraguay River. Photo / Getty Images
Raised on stories of an exotic-sounding town in Paraguay, Eleanor Black decided to head there and find out more about her own past.
When I was a child, my favourite stories were Paraguay stories; the damp red earth, the stultifying heat, the snakes and jaguars, the drag of the plough and the slap of the bullock's tail - they were intoxicating for a suburban kid who wanted a big, bold life and I swallowed them whole.
The stories were second-hand recollections of my grandmother's remarkable childhood as shared by my father. Although humour and derring-do were stressed (and wild, cheeky children were usually the stories' heroes), the key themes were survival and grit - and the devastating consequences of groupthink.
My family were socialists. In a fit of optimism during the great Australian shearers' strike of 1894, my great-grandfather put all of his money into a scheme hatched by his unionist friend William Lane, who recruited disenfranchised shearers and bushmen (and a handful of women), bought a ship and sailed to South America to start again. My great-grandfather, Jack Delugar, married Lane's young sister-in-law, Eleanor McQuire, on arrival in Paraguay, beside a stand of orange trees.
That is how my French-Scottish grandmother, Annette Delugar, came to be born in Cosme, a tiny speck southeast of Paraguay's capital Asuncion. Even today it is isolated and difficult to get to; you wouldn't go there unless you had good reason or an invitation. At its peak in the early 1900s, Cosme had its own school, community hall, nurses' station, athletics club, library, leather tannery, newspaper and home-grown propaganda.
In a poem called It's Nice to Live in Paraguay, someone called "The Doctor" imagined a time when there would be 3 million settlers at Cosme inspired by the 60-odd who founded it: "It's nice to live in Paraguay, if only in a tent; For there the Fat Man can't come round and strike you for the rent; And even though we've little hardships here, we let them pass, my boys; When thinking of the future, its comforts and its joys … "
I was about 8 years old when I decided I needed to see Cosme for myself. My father tried to visit in the 1970s following his mother's death but was prevented by flooding, a common feature of life in Cosme.
When my husband, Tim, and I flew into Asuncion decades later we had no idea how we would get to Cosme or even exactly where it was. My dad had also died by then and our best information came from a book about the failed experiment published in 1968. Called A Peculiar People, it was a colourful history spanning 70 years, based on the recollections of long-gone colonists. Tucked between its pages was a map my dad had sketched of the settlement based on my grandmother's memory. We didn't speak Spanish, we didn't have much money and we didn't have a plan.
Our first piece of luck was finding accommodation at the historic Asuncion Palace Hotel. Colonnaded and painted the colour of an ageing flamingo, it looked exactly like the sort of place a moderately successful drug baron would hang out in. Graciela, the owner, spoke perfect English, having spent a year in California as an exchange student. Our first morning in the city she sent us into the grand dining room to munch through a platter of sliced cheese and meat served with bread and fruit while she got on the phone to her friend Julia Maciel, an angel in double denim.
Within hours, she had called around her friends and relatives and made the connection between her uncle and his business partner Randy Wood who, like me, was descended from Cosme settlers. Randy was an architect, one of the country's best, and happily keen to see Cosme again for the first time in 10 years and to take his daughters.
While we waited for a convenient day to drive to Cosme together in a 4WD vehicle that could handle the road, Tim and I played tourist. Most Paraguayan journeys begin in Asuncion, where the civic buildings are grand, although crumbling and battle-scarred, and the rococo mega-mansions are tucked behind massive security gates. The city's obvious focal point is the Paraguay River, a lazy green serpent that separates the city from the Chaco, a vast and arid wilderness with few inhabitants. Well-meaning locals warn visitors against going anywhere near the riverbank because it's where thousands of impoverished fishers and other workers live in a sprawling slum called La Chacarita.
We did the classic Asuncion circuit, visiting the old central train station, watching dancers at the municipal theatre and touring the lolly pink parliament building, which has been turned over to collections of indigenous Guarani art, and celebrations of Paraguay's best actors, musicians and writers. Everywhere we went, street corners heaved with vendors hawking cellphone covers, designer knock-off sunglasses and football T-shirts. Artisans sold brightly coloured lace and leather bags, patriotic keyrings and reusable cups for yerba mate, which locals drink constantly, sipping the mild stimulant though metal straws.
Because everyone says you must, we ate lunch at the Lido Bar, a 50s time-capsule diner across the road from the Panteon de los Heroes. Lido wait staff wear checked orange and white uniforms with tiny pillbox hats and serve local favourites like empanada, fish soup and sopa Paraguaya, a cornbread cake. Seated at the wraparound bar, we watched the changing of the guard at the Panteon, where three military leaders are buried, including President Francisco Lopez, one of a succession of despots and lunatics to rule this beautiful country.
We can blame Lopez for the War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s, which pitted Paraguay against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay - all at the same time. Paraguay lost up to 70 per cent of its adult male population in that war, which is why German Mennonites, French farmers and yes, socialists from Australia, have been so warmly welcomed there.
When the big day came, it took us four hours to get to Cosme. We made a short stop in Villarrica, widely considered Paraguay's prettiest town, once home to the British doctor who cared for Cosme's residents. His house is still there and we stopped to take pictures and to see the town plaza. Then we visited Caazapa, the region's governing centre where, thanks to Julia's political connections, we met the mayor, who loved our story of dumb luck and naivety so much she teared up.
Rolling into Cosme was truly one of the best moments of my life. We drove straight to the biggest house, a Queenslander built in front of one of the original homesteads. It belonged to Francisco Wood, Cosme's "boss man", a formidable figure with white hair and bright eyes who walked around town with a rifle and an ammunition belt. His youngest child, Ringo, named for the spaghetti western A Pistol for Ringo, was in nappies.
Francisco showed us what was left of the original Cosme: some Australian-style fence posts, the remains of the "ballroom" and settlers' graves. The place was smaller than I had imagined and, according to Julia, typical of a rural Paraguayan settlement. Animals ran free: dogs, pigs, cows, ducks, chickens and geese. Francisco described his home as "tranquil" and said he had never wanted to live anywhere else, although some members of his family had returned to Australia.
According to my family lore, the great experiment dissolved due to money arguments, after some founders pulled their funds and left. In 1899, William Lane moved his family to Auckland where he took a job as a leader writer for the New Zealand Herald and eventually became editor. My family and many others found themselves in a desperate situation, attempting to repay loans from the Banco Agricola for the farm equipment needed to crush cane, grind corn and cut wood. It took my great-grandfather years to earn enough money to get his family on a ship to New Zealand, once again following William Lane.
My grandmother maintained a fondness for the children she grew up with but she was scornful of Cosme. According to my father, she hated the dirt and the physical labour. She hated the dangers that loomed large over everyday life. She hated her uncle for having dragged all these dreamers across the ocean and she blamed her father, who loved an adventure, for getting swept up in his vision. She saw what raising children in grinding poverty did to her mother and when she left Paraguay in around 1910, she never wanted to return.
When the author of A Peculiar People, Gavin Souter, contacted her while researching his book, she refused to talk to him. But before her death, she and my father read it together and he made notes in the margins. My favourites recount silly domestic spats because others, about suicides and dead children, are just too sad. Towards the end of the book, when the colony is coming apart at the seams, Dame Mary Gilmore, a famous Cosme resident, wrote an angry letter that she never sent.
"Somehow the cold selfishness of my near neighbours, Mrs C Ray and Mrs Delugar, have given my feeling towards Communism the severest blow it has received yet," said Gilmore. To which my grandmother has crisply replied, "Mary Gilmore was lazy and dirty."
By this point, the "free-built homes of Cosme, with their bare mud-plastered walls" were no longer inhabited in "brotherly accord". The dream was well and truly over.
Three ocean swims over three days? How hard could it be?