A life-long teetotaller, in 1886 he created an Australia-wide sensation by spending a night in the Brisbane lock-up disguised as a drunk, and subsequently reporting the conditions of the cells as "Henry Harris".

With the growth of the Australian labour movement , Sketcher's columns, especially his "Labour Notes" in the Evening Telegraph, became increasingly an outlet for the Trades Hall , and Lane himself was to be seen at meetings supporting all manner of popular causes, speaking out with his "American twang" against repressive laws and practices, on the one hand, and the Chinese on the other.

After becoming the de facto editor of the Courier, Lane departed in November 1887 to found the weekly The Boomerang , "a live newspaper, racy, of the soil", in which pro-worker themes and lurid racism were brought to a fever-pitch by both "Sketcher" and "Lucinda Sharpe". He became a powerful supporter of Emma Miller and the Women's suffrage movement. A strong proponent of Henry George 's Single Tax Movement, Lane became increasingly committed to a radically alternative society, and dropped the Boomerang for its private ownership issues.

In May 1890 he began the community-funded Brisbane weekly The Worker , in which the tone became increasingly threatening towards the employers, the government, and the British Empire itself. The defeat of the 1891 Australian shearers' strike convinced Lane that there would be no real social change without a completely new society, and The Worker increasingly became the organ of his New Australia utopian idea.

Working Man's Paradise , an allogorical novel written in support of the shearers involved in the 1891 Shearer's Strike, under his pseudonym John Miller was published early in 1892. In the novel Lane articulated the belief that anarchism is the noblest social philosophy of all. Through the novel's philosopher and main protagonist he relates his belief that society may have to go through a period of State socialism to achieve the higher ideal of Communist anarchism . Mary Gilmore , a New Australia colonist and later a celebrated Australian writer, said in one of her letters "the whole book is true and of historical value as Lane transcribed our conversations as well as those of others" .