Perhaps that is why we have had to wait so long for fresh insight into what is by any standard a major incident in Australian history. Scarcely a word was written after L.J. Pryor’s unpublished Melbourne MA thesis of 1932 on the origins of Australia’s repatriation policy. Subsequently, historians have relied on Justice Pike’s inquiry into the failures of soldier settlement 1927–29 and the more accessible primary sources, with Ernest Scott’s five pages, Kristianson on the RSL, and the Australian Encyclopedia for backup, plus My Brother Jack. Perhaps because Pike did a good job, or because soldier settlement after World War II was a success, or maybe due to embarrassment at the fate of Vietnam veterans, the subject dropped off the agenda for two generations. Thus Marilyn Lake’s Limits of Hope is the first book to appear on soldier settlement. As such it is very welcome.

Lake is well equipped for the task. Her first book, A Divided Society (1975), which analysed the impact of World War I on Tasmania, was until very recently the only such case study and it remains a standard reference. Limits of Hope is a revised version of her prize winning PhD thesis. The result of revision is a well-produced book of readable length with numerous tables and figures, some of which are as poignant as the generous array of period photos which supplement the text.

The story of soldier settlement in Victoria is presented in three parts: the settlement project; life on the farm; and political responses. It begins in 1915 with general acknowledgement of past failures of closer settlement and the first plans for employing returned soldiers; and ends in 1938 when the Closer Settlement Commission, formed to make soldier settlement efficient, closed its books. On the basis of 300 files – some of which must have been very long, since settlers were regularly inspected (the ‘pink form’) and closely supervised and the State government had first claim on income of the indebted, which meant practically everyone – Lake aims not to measure success or failure, since official statistics do that more or less, but to present the range of settler experience, and to illuminate social process and relationships. Most of the skills and preoccupations of the new social history are brought to bear. The result is analytic rather than narrative history, though nonetheless accessible for that.

Lake insists that soldier settlement in Victoria is best understood as the last, doomed, phase of ‘an eighty year project’ to create an independent yeomanry in Australia, this time in the name of wholesome national development appropriate to imperial needs, social order, and – nicely done, this – maintaining a suitable number of volunteers. Critics didn’t stand a chance. When the Anzacs came home their needs cut a swathe through the fashionable panacea of scientific agriculture. Off they went, as many as could manage it, and plenty that couldn’t, to the Mallee, the Western Districts, Gippsland (Lake’s sample is drawn from these three districts, the largest soldier settler districts in Victoria).

As Part two convincingly shows, life on the farm was hard beyond all expectation, especially for those with no capital, no experience, bad luck in the land lottery, and many another disadvantage – such as the poor health which beset so many returned soldiers, not to mention falling prices. The files come into their own here; and Lake breaks new ground with a bold argument that women’s exhaustion, born of the dual role of wife/mother and unpaid agricultural labourer, became a political issue.

Even so, it is surprising how much energy was left for politics. The settlers succeeded in establishing that they were not to blame for the problems and costs of the scheme. They also fought to stay on the land (or for compensation when they left it.) We learn that they could strike a hard bargain, also that they played a significant role in consolidating the country interest in Victoria, crucial ever since.

I used to think I owed a lot to cows. Without the cream money, we girls would have had none. But it was not enough, and no-one wanted to do milking for the rest of their lives. From reading Limits of Hope I know now that this was not individual perspicacity nor parental enlightenment but a twenty-year­long echo of rural protest and politics. It strikes me that most small farmers were in the same boat in the interwar years. Certainly it wouldn’t have been obvious had some of the photos in Limits of Hope been replaced by others from my own family album, pictures of the young uncle who died clearing the mallee on the West Coast of South Australia or the women who died from tuberculosis thought to have been contracted from overwork, though none of these went to the first world war. Nor can it be forgotten that at the same time the Depression hit small farmers so hard, twenty-five per cent of the work force was unemployed. No wonder soldier settlers determined to stick to the land, which other poor devils, as portrayed in Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers, were told to scavenge for survival.

In a brief epilogue, Lake suggests that soldier settlement gave the land a bad name. ‘The magnitude of soldier settlement failure, especially its cost, and the inordinate publicity it attracted – a result of the peculiar status of the settlers – spelt the end of the eighty-year-old project of land settlement, the end of the Australian attempt to establish a yeomanry.’ Still, many settlers survived on the land. And whose project was it? The prospect of a farm of one’s own was dear to the hearts of working people, who rightly demanded the best that Australia had to offer. Footscray and Collingwood were not it. Those who proposed factory work for returned soldiers were not more realistic.

Down on the farm in the fifties we thought, as we reaped the benefits of the efforts of the previous generation, that we were lucky to be so far from those cramped asphalt playgrounds city kids had to make do with. It’s what they think still on the Northern Rivers, where as many people live on social security as did soldier settlers on war pensions while they battled it out on uneconomic dairy farms or malice wheatlands. Since the fifties, it has seemed increasingly incredible that more than ten per cent of the population could hope to make a living off the land. But due to the great beauty and diversity of this country, the dream will never die, even though experts, and expert historians, know it’s futile. As Marilyn Lake’s patient research reveals, especially those into children’s reactions, there are some things you can’t weigh.

However, comparisons might be made. It seems likely that the Victorian experience of soldier settlement was far from the worst. Ernest Scott said, by way of explanation for his five pages, ‘a complete account of soldier settlement would require as many chapters as there are States’. This means there’s a long way to go. Soldier settlement is undoubtedly part of the history of land settlement. But it is also a symbol of the long-term effect of World War I on Australian society. That is an even more disturbing subject.