Managing men, managing failure: deviant diggers in the soldier settler program in New South Wales

Abstract

This article, based upon research into the soldier settlement scheme in New South Wales in the inter-war years, illuminates the complex dynamics of failure within that scheme, and in the lives of men returning from the Great War. It argues that the administration of the scheme was complicated by the relationship between management of soldier settlers’ loans and the failure of the scheme’s vision. The dissonance between these two was rationalised by inspectors and surveyors through the employment of moralising language, targeted at those ‘deviant diggers’ who did not live up to the ideals that were the scheme’s inception. These men were a class of settler ‘unsuitable from the start’, a label that propelled and was propelled by failure.