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Amateur genealogists are everywhere. The world over, people are trying to build an accurate family tree, all secretly hoping to uncover a long-lost marriage that links them to Shakespeare, Einstein or Alexander the Great.
For ANU Senior English Lecturer Dr Rosemary Campbell, the process worked in reverse: academic research into a famous historical figure led her to stumble across her family history.
In the early 1990s Dr Campbell taught an undergraduate course linking literature and social movements in the 1890s and first became interested in enigmatic writer, MP and socialist Walter Head, who later changed his name to Walter Woods. Through his associations with great literary and political figures of the time, and his own contributions to literature and history, Woods’ name(s) repeatedly surfaced in accounts of the period.
“A lot of the people who were involved in literature at the time were also involved in the period’s political movements,” Dr Campbell explains.
“A person I kept hearing about was Walter Woods and I thought he sounded fascinating.
“He certainly seems to have been a multi-dimensional personality.”
One of the founders of the New Australia Movement, which saw a band of idealists set up a socialist utopia in Paraguay in the 1890s, Walter Head was advised by his lawyers to ‘disappear’ when trouble in paradise drove some of the settlers back to Australia seeking a refund.
He later resurfaced in Tasmania as Walter Woods, a Parliamentarian, journalist and inventor of a “device for removing growth from ships’ hulls”.
Biographies exist of many of Woods’ associates, including authors Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore and New Australia founder William Lane, and the historical events that he was a part of are well documented, yet nobody has ever devoted a book to Woods himself. Dr Campbell, whose field of research expertise is late 19th and early 20th century literature, decided this would be a worthy project, but due to other commitments, it found its way to the backburner.
Then, in 1996, when her mother revealed Dr Campbell’s great-grandfather had actually been part of the New Australia Movement, it renewed her interest. Her great-grandfather, she learned, was none other than Walter Woods.
“I discovered he was my great-grandfather quite by accident. It’s serendipitous that this man I found so fascinating, whose life I had always wanted to research, is part of my family history,” she says.
“I had always thought his was a story worth telling — discovering he was my great-grandfather made me more interested.”
Dr Campbell is now on a year’s sabbatical, writing and researching Woods’ remarkable life. She plans to paint a “complete picture” of a man who, despite featuring so prominently in Australia’s literary, social and political history, has never been studied in more depth than an honours thesis.
Born in Melbourne in 1861, Walter William Head was the son of the first white man born in the area. As an adult, Head became involved in the trade union movement, working as an organiser for the Shearer’s Union, and later founding a newspaper called The Hummer.
“He was a socialist so he became a union man, but he was not just a union man, he was a socialist visionary,” Dr Campbell says.
In 1893, he moved to Sydney, renaming the paper the Sydney Worker. In this period he became friends with Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore, who introduced him to the New Australia Movement.
Head was so committed to the movement that he sent his 10-year-old son, Wally, on the first ship to Paraguay, while he remained in Australia, editing the organisation’s newspaper and waiting for the next boat to leave.
However, disaster struck. Head’s four-year-old son got lost in the Victorian bush and died.
This factual event inspired Henry Lawson to write The Babies in the Bush. It also caused the break up of Head’s marriage.
Meanwhile, disaffected settlers were returning to Australia from Paraguay, as their utopian paradise had not lived up to expectations.
“Walter Head held responsibility for the organisation and the legal advice was he was the only person they could come back on. His lawyers advised him to disappear. He spent a short time in New Zealand then Walter Ashe Woods appeared in Tasmania in 1895.”
The next 11 years saw Woods edit newspapers in Launceston and Hobart, found the Tasmanian branch of the Australian Journalists Association and change his name again — swapping Ashe for Alan.
One of the founders of the Tasmanian Labor Party, he stood for the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1906 and held a seat there until 1931, becoming known as the Father of the Tasmanian Parliament. He was Speaker of the House from between 1914 and 1916 and from 1926 to 1928. His career as an entrepreneur, an editor — he edited the influential Labor newspaper The Clipper — and as a writer of poems and short stories continued to flourish and he remarried in 1910 and had two further children.
His son Wally never returned to Australia and eventually settled in North America. He never spoke of his Paraguayan experience to his own descendants, Dr Campbell has learned. Woods’ two surviving children were Alfred and Ethel, Dr Campbell’s grandmother.
Controversy over liability for the New Australia Movement had calmed down by 1897 and although Woods no longer had to hide, there was no reincarnation for Walter Head.
“He thought about changing his name back at one stage, but he had established a political identity as Walter Woods so he took this name legally.”
For many family historians the trail goes cold when names change or people move. For Dr Campbell, it just adds to the excitement.
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