After becoming the de facto editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Lane departed during 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".
The Workingman's Paradise, an allegorical novel written in sympathy with the shearers involved in the 1891 Shearer's Strike, was published under his pseudonym John Miller in early 1892.