Guest speaker, Daniel Wilksch, works at the Public Records Office Victoria (PROV) whose main focus is to preserve State and Local Government records for a long time, in some cases for more than 100 years.
Daniel told us that 60,000 Victorians came back from overseas at the end of World War 1. Up to 12,000 of these veterans took up leases under the soldier settlement scheme offered by the Federal Government.
However, by 1929, 17% of the properties had been abandoned due to:
The lot sizes were too small to derive a satisfactory income.
Poor quality of the land.
Insufficient water to grow crops and to nurture livestock.
Inability to effectively manage the land due to injuries received during the war.
Increasing debts.
PROV had a massive amount of physical records relating to the settlement of returned soldiers and their ultimate successes or failures. In 2001, Daniel and a group of volunteers, in conjunction with the National Archives of Australia, started a project to digitise the thousands of hard-copy records relating to the allocation of farm land to soldiers returning from World Wars 1 and 2.
Following that exercise, he was instrumental in creating the Battle to Farm website to give the public the opportunity to learn more about the history of the program and read and hear about some of the personal stories of hardship.
It's interesting to note that many areas of Werribee, in particular Werribee South, were occupied by returning soldiers. The following map shows some of the local properties that were allocated to veterans.
