This article explores the intersection of gender, race, environment and economics in a specific spatial and temporal case study–the Callide Valley, central Queensland, in the 1920s and 1930s. Government propaganda focused on the ideal male settler and his agricultural labour for the settlement’s success. Women were assigned a supportive role, although family survival and the agricultural industry depended on their work beyond the home. Yet, rather than challenge the patriarchal myths that underpinned the closer settlement’s legal and administrative system, female labour paradoxically helped sustain them.