an orchard. A government loan of £500 (worth about $35,000.00 in 2021) on which interest was to be paid, provided the initial capital for returned servicemen, though the land they farmed was what was left over in a largely settled Victoria. On repayment of the initial investment, a further £500 could be granted provided the farming was successful, especially tough in the Mallee where success came only where there was irrigation. In addition to working to establishing his vineyard and a rudimentary canvas-roofed dwelling, Chandler wrote and photographed for Bush Charms, and Jacky the Butcher-Bird, both published 1922 and very early examples of children's books illustrated with photographs. The latter was reviewed in Table Talk, and The Queenslander notes that “Messrs. Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd. have published a really choice selection of Australian nature story readers, including...”Jacky, the Butcher Bird," by L. G. Chandler...all thoroughly tested Australian stories, as Australian as the gum tree, and the cheap, well-printed re print brings them within the reach of everybody.” In addition to making photographs many of his activities, often making self-portraits with a bulb release, from 1900 Chandler kept a life-long diary in shorthand. There, and in articles he wrote, he expresses sympathy for the plight of indigenous peoples of the region in which he settled; "In those early days before the white man came, the blacks little thought that their hunting-grounds that stretched away from the river into the forests of pine, belar, mallee-gums, sugar-wood and other vegetation, would be taken from them and one day cleared…". He had come to love the Mallee before the war, being guided around it by aboriginal princess Mary Woorlong (1879-1942) a Latji Latji or Muthi Muthi woman and daughter of King Wyrlong, a Muthi Muthi from the Euston area, descendants of Mungo Man, and who worked as a domestic servant. He learned much from her and made her portrait, and after her death was instrumental in marking her grave at Mildura Cemetery with a headstone. His 1935 Walkabout article details evidence of Aboriginal occupation in north-west Victoria in kitchen-middens, and trees from which canoes, coolamons and shields have been cut and the method used to trap codfish under trees. Conservationist Naturalists Donald Macdonald and Charles Barrett, and later his work with E. Brooke Nicholls and bird photographer Arthur Mattingley, influenced Chandler. He was a foundation member of the Mildura Historical Society in 1949 and,