Rural Modernity, Masculinity and British Child Migrants at Burton Hall and Dhurringile Training Farms, 1949–1967

This research compares for the first time the agricultural rationales held by two post WWII Australian farm training institutions and the remembered response of British child migrants that they trained. These schemes sought to address rural outmigration by developing modern ' family-farm like' environments or by using scientific agriculture to stimulate farming vocations. We reveal how the child migrant experience was informed by care and training approaches that drew upon idealized age-based cultural characteristics embedded in the yeoman ideal. We investigate the category 'yeochildren' and rural social scripts associated with hard work and hardship, to determine how boys and male youth from poor British backgrounds accessed and reformulated traditional romantic meritocratic tropes of the stoic, capable, self-realizing white male farmer. Their experiences of hardship and hard work, we argue, fostered appreciation of 'whole-of-farm' modernity that supported the future viability of intensive agriculture in the Goulburn Valley and their own wellbeing.