Charles Byrne

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story is based on Charles Byrne’s service dossier NAA: B2455, BYRNE C R; his soldier settlement file State Records NSW: 12/7305/8440; and his repatriation record NAA: C138/4, M3444. To date, published studies of soldier settlement have focused on Victoria rather than New South Wales, but a general introduction to the scheme is provided by Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915–1938 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987); Kent Fedorowich, Unfit for Heroes: Reconstruction and Soldier Settlement in the Empire Between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2005). For further discussion of that strong sense of entitlement shared by men promised ‘a land fit for heroes’ see Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer, ‘ “I intend to get justice”: The moral economy of soldier settlement’, Labour History, no. 106, June 2014, pp. 229–253.