People Australia

Peter McNaught (1852-1934) builder, anarchist, New Australia representative and Rationalist

Birth: 4 June 1852 at Greenock, Scotland, son of Peter McNaught (1810-1869) and Grace, née Wood (1828-1888). Marriages: (1) about 1876 at Greenock, Scotland, to Agnes Bunting (1856-1895). They had six daughters and one son. (2) 1902 at Sydney, New South Wales, to Elizabeth Young. They had no children. Death: 5 June 1934 in St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst, late of William Street, Sydney. Religion: Presbyterian. 

• Arrived in Melbourne, Victoria, with wife about 1887, from New Zealand, where three daughters had been born between 1878 and 1885. His son and a daughter were born in Melbourne in 1877 and 1890 respectively.
• Was an Anarchist in Melbourne around the 1880s-1890s. Amongst a small group of seven people who were self-declared, active anarchists in the Australasian Secular Association (ASA), and in opposition to Symes.
• Attempts were made to close down the ASA by state and clerical hierarchy, from time to time. Anarchism was unpopular and with police ignoring physical attacks in the mid-1880.
• On 2 February 1891 Mr and Mrs Peter McNaught and five children arrived in Sydney from Melbourne aboard the Koonawarra. He soon became “principal organiser in Sydney for the Eureka Assembly of the Knights of Labor, an organisation of American origin . . . His home at Hunter’s Hill was a rendezvous for socialists”.
• William Lane of the Brisbane Worker, described him as: ‘the Master Workman of a southern Knights of Labor Assembly’ (p.156). McNaught, an effective speaker and “a bearded Scotsman of imposing appearance”, quickly became Lane’s deputy chairman of the New Australia Co-Operative Settlement Association.
• From his base in Sydney, he travelled around the country as representative of the utopian movement recruiting settlers. Was particularly active in Adelaide, South Australia. He helped to organise the departure from Sydney of the Royal Tar on 16 July 1893 en route to Paraguay.
• In March 1894 he received reports of trouble among the New Australia settlers one of whom requested that he come to Paraguay to “help us to keep things together. Lane is no overseer and we must have someone who can lead a movement of this sort”.
• However, McNaught remained in Australia as agent of the old New Australia organisation, rather than Lane’s breakaway group at Cosme, until Gilbert Casey returned from Paraguay in June 1894. That month he broke with Lane over the latter’s emphasis on religion in the group, publishing a letter in the Australian Worker on this topic.
• A daughter born in Sydney in 1893 died in infancy and his wife died in childbirth in 1895. In his later years he was a prominent lecturer, Rationalist and Henry George single-tax supporter in NSW. In 1901 he was elected president of the newly-reformed Single Tax League, whose secretary was A. G. Huie. McNaught’s second wife was also an active single-tax supporter.
• At his death he was an old age pensioner. Cause of death: epithelioma of maxilla.

Sources
Bob James, Anarchism and state violence in Sydney and Melbourne, 1886-1896: an argument about Australian Labor history, (Newcastle East, 1986); Gavin Souter, A Peculiar People: the Australians in Paraguay, (Sydney, 1968).