As the major repatriation programme of the First World War, soldier settlement placed more than 100,000 men, women and children on farms throughout Australia in the 1920s. The last phase of the eighty-year-old project to create a yeomanry in Australia was largely unsuccessful.

‘The limits of hope’ is a history of work: settlers’ lives were dominated by work, and the demands for ‘efficient’, ‘scientific’ farming, in the absence of capital, constituted a new tyranny. Not only did the nature of work change, but the meanings attributed to it were also transformed.

‘The limits of hope’ is a history of women, situated in the economic and political context. Central to the model of the yeoman was the family as a productive unit. In practice, this meant that women and children comprised a reserve army of labour, usually unpaid.

‘The limits of hope’ is a history of politics. Encouraged by the RSSILA, settlers’ organizations and the newly formed Country Party, settlers campaigned for a ‘living area’ and for public acknowledgement of their innocence of personal failure.

An innovative social history, this book charts the relationships between the work process, family life and political mobilization. Drawing on letters, petitions and memoirs of Victorian settlers and their wives, it blends social analysis with a vivid depiction of individual experience to produce a moving historical account.