ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the representations, the realities and the results of the settlement schemes. Frontiers were and, in some contexts are, turbulent and transitional areas situated at the margins, as D. Meinig puts it, of more established settled areas and beyond which lay indigenous populations and pristine lands. Within this context, settlers, regardless of the nature of the settlement schemes or the individual choices that brought them there, were and are confronted with isolated and inhospitable physical environments and lack the most fundamental and basic of services. Economic and social representations of the benefits of the schemes were conflated with discourses of modernity and development. For many of the other schemes, representations of a new life in a new country, such as Canada or Australia, or even in a new region, such as Amazonia or the Dutch polders, also conflated economic development, technological advancement and social transformation.
