The yeoman ideal in Victoria envisaged a multitude of owner-occupying farmers improving the lands of the colony. The influence of this ideal on policy and public discourse has been recognised in Victorian historiography. Yet its attraction as a form of economic independence is disputed by evidence. The popularity of occupation licences through-out the 1860s, which did not secure freehold title, and a significant campaign to legislate for ‘commons’ suggest demand for to obtain one’s own land was weaker than has been claimed. It showed the small settler understood, like the pastoralist, that mixed farming, licences to occupy and access to commons was economically sound and less risky than ownership. Furthermore tenet farming and common right has greater heritage in English land use than yeoman farming. This paper will outline such evidence and argue historians such as Belich and Waterhouse are correct in doubting the significance of land hunger in informal settler ideology. It will argue the yeoman ideal, rather than responding to a public demand, was instead about attaching immigrants to the land, to create permanent roots in a settler colony that depended on what Wolfe has described as ‘destroying to replace’ and ‘being here to stay.’