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Growing up on a soldier settlement block in the 1920s and 30s

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Soldier Settler – James Longmore

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Diary of a Soldier Settler – Walter Ash

This account is by Kelvin Dagg about his father Roy Edward Dagg.

• Read Kelvin’s account:

If you’d like to send in information and/or photos of relatives listed in the Soldier Settler Case Studies please contact us.

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Recollections of the Richmond River – a Soldier Settler’s Son

This account is by Marjorie Myers about her father Walter Arnold Davis.

• Read her story

If you’d like to send in information and/or photos of relatives listed in the Soldier Settler Case Studies please contact us.

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My father Walter Arnold Davis – Soldier Settler

We received some photos and a wonderful recollection of life on a property at Pappinbarra Creek from Tony Ostler, a son of the soldier settler, Ernest Ostler.

• Read his story

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Recollections of a Soldier Settler’s Son

The case studies are compiled from a variety of sources including State Records of New South Wales and the returned soldiers’ digitised records held by the National Archives of Australia.  There were over 9000 soldier settlers in New South Wales and this tiny sample has been extracted from our voluminous files. If descendants of the subjects in these case studies would like to supply more information, or a WWI portrait picture, we invite them to contact us and we will gladly update the biographical notes.

• Browse the list of Case Studies (alphabetical by surname)

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More case studies added

To quote from the post:

Not quite seen as “heroes”

Australian women who served overseas during World War One as nurses were entitled to apply for land under the Returned Soldiers Settlement Scheme. Land settlement as a method of repatriation was to become central to the rehabilitation process in Australia, and nurses were included in repatriation legislation under the broad category of ‘soldier’. Central to the soldier settlement scheme was the philosophy of providing for returning soldiers, ‘land for heroes’.  Yet, the men of the AIF were considered the ‘heroes’ by State and Commonwealth governments – not the nurses who served.

Read the post in full »

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World War One Nurses as Soldier Settlers

Over 300,000 soldiers returned to Australia from WWI. In all some 40,000 returned servicemen and women took up an offer of farming land, made possible by Soldier Settlement schemes in all the states of the Commonwealth; fewer than half remained on the land fifteen years later.

NSW boasted the largest of Australia’s Soldier Settlement Schemes. This project, which has been generously funded by the Australian Research Council, Monash University and the University of New England, under an ARC linkage scheme, together with linkage partners State Records NSW and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, will be exploring the history of soldier settlement in NSW.

As part of the project this website, dedicated to these pioneer soldier settlers, was developed by State Records NSW in conjunction with the National Centre for Australian Studies and the University of New England.

• See the newsflash at the University of New England

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Official launch of A Land Fit For Heroes