In July 1919, Harold returned home from France and moved back into the two-roomed house with his wife and four children. At his request, the block was brought under the Discharged Soldiers Settlement Act in 1920, but 1922 was one of the driest years on record across the northern plains. At the end of 1924, the Commission informed the Watermans that the 'utmost leniency' had been shown them, and because no payment had been made since a deposit on the land in 1911, no further delay could be permitted. The family was managing an orchard of twenty-one acres of prunes, apricots and peaches, a lucerne crop of thirteen acres, barley and oat crops of four and eight acres respectively, and milking two cows in July 1924 when Roy visited to report on progress. Later in the same year, Roy wrote that prospects for the family were improving:

The SRWSC threatened 'drastic action to compel a settlement' twice in 1925. Harold had promised a payment of £50 from the proceeds of the sale of dried fruit but because of a slump in the price of this commodity owing to large quantities arriving at the Melbourne markets from South Australia, and because 1925 was another dry year, the Watermans did not realise the expected returns.

Letters demanding payment of outstanding arrears of £990 remained unanswered throughout 1926, and six memos sent to Roy in the first half of 1927 brought only one response from Lillian who informed the Commission that Harold was in Caulfield Military Hospital recovering from an operation necessitated by war disabilities; she hoped that 'some day we will be able to straighten matters out'. In July 1927, £712 of the Watermans' arrears were written off under the terms of the amended Discharged Soldiers Settlement Act. In October of that year the Closer Settlement District Enquiry Board reported that Harold's health had been detrimentally affected by the war, and recommended that no pressure be made for payment for two years and that instalments on arrears be spread over three years. However, even under these conditions no payments were forthcoming, and by October 1930 the Watermans were in arrears by £483. In February 1931 their consolidated debt was £1299, and by June 1933 their debt measured £1543. Harold wrote in November 1930 that 'with the exceedingly low prices for all our products, the best intentions in the world cannot produce more returns until the markets look up'. Roy took a somewhat different view, however, describing the land as good and Harold as sober but noting his propensity to 'mess things up like Barwood'. The Closer Settlement Act of 1932 provided for the adjustment of accounts of all settlers, and in 1937 the Watermans' liability was reassessed at £1287. Harold, Lillian and their son managed their forty-two acres of fruit trees as a registered partnership from the late 1930s, and in January 1944 gained a freehold title to the block by paying off the closer settlement liability of £1271 5d in full. Almost thirty-two years after moving onto their fifty-acre block at Ballendella, Harold and Lillian Waterman finally owned their land.

The story of the Waterman family records the realities of life under the official vision of irrigated closer settlement. Paradoxically, as environmental uncertainties were downplayed, 'hazard risks', shaped by the vagaries of distant markets and climatic variability, were amplified. As Heathcote has argued, official policies encouraged 'the transformation of the variety of the original ecosystems into commercially productive and simpler ecosystems. The results have been an increased ecological and economic vulnerability [original emphasis]'.³¹ Farmers who used irrigation came to depend on a regular water supply over the summer growing months. In dry periods, when this supply was reduced or dried up altogether, they were unable to realise the financial return on which their livelihood depended. Moreover, irrigation schemes radically altered the natural hydrology of the plains, left little water in reserve for dry seasons, and raised salinity levels. In seeking to bring certainty to the northern plains through the introduction of new technologies, the country was only made more uncertain, and its reputation as a place of capriciousness was entrenched.

This article, through a close study of one section of land, has highlighted the processes that conditioned the making of settlement visions for the northern plains, and has traced the impact of these visions on the landscape and on the people who lived there. These same settlement visions were applied throughout Victoria, and indeed Australia. The point to be made here, and one which this article has defined, is that the northern plains became a particular focus of larger economic and political agendas because of the country's very nature - a nature that defied human demands for patterns of ordered white settlement expected to contribute to the economic prosperity of the individual, the state, and the nation.

The documentary record testifies to the conflict between human dreams and environmental actualities. The place itself, the physical environment, has been, and continues to be, an active agent in the settlement process. By telling the story of how people have exploited the opportunities and minimised the challenges thrown up by the environmental variability of the plains, it is evident that populations have increased their vulnerability to climatic variations by moving 'further down the rainfall gradient'³² into semi-arid regions, and, in doing so, have judged the country as defective. Perceptions of the plains reflect the physical abundance and scarcity brought to the country by a variable rainfall, but just as importantly reflect the potency of mental landscapes that imagine abundance and scarcity. With growing concerns about human-induced climate change, a new epoch of uncertainty has begun. If the future is to be imagined in any meaningful way, past and present reactions to uncertainty need to be understood. Our role as creators of landscapes needs to be recognised by coming to know the difference between the actualities of the country and the country inside our heads.