THE 1930s DEPRESSION

The Depression was not necessarily central to the life stories of all the interviewees in the project. Most participants were growing up during the Depression and reached adulthood during World War II.  They describe their parents’ experiences and how it affected the family. Depending on their age when the Depression hit, for some it affected whether they were able to get their first job.  Others were forced to curtail schooling and find work to help the family survive. Only a few recall the Depression as an adult with responsibilities and obligations.

Some of our interviewees were cushioned from the effects of the Depression if their family retained the full employment of main breadwinner or had already acquired property or wealth.  In Mosman for example, some land and houses were retained through several generations. For others, the period was one of unrelenting hard work and pressure for survival.   In between were those who were aware they had to ‘tighten their belts’ but were not seriously affected.

Bradley Short recalls:

There were no work about I remember during the Depression. My father used to get teams of workers sent down from the Mosman Council, I think it was people on the dole, and those poor people there were all sorts of people solicitors and barristers… and clerks all sorts and those poor blokes… a married man got 5 s a day and a single man got 2 shillings and 6 pence a day and they worked from about 7.30 in the morning until 4.30 in the afternoon. It was an 8 hour day and these poor people doing work they were quite unaccustomed to it, they humped big rocks and logs.

The Depression had a general psychological effect on a whole generation and their children. The experience of economic insecurity or the sight of people, desperate, out of work, and homeless had a profound effect. As adults, the children who lived through the Depression valued security of employment, were careful with money and material goods and rarely allowed themselves to be vulnerable in terms of loans or hire purchase goods.

Dallas Dyson remembers:

Seeing all the furniture of the house taken out of the house …and put on the footpath by…I suppose they were bailiffs or something, I don’t know. I was only a kid and one thing more than anything always reminds me today…the piano which is still in my lounge room here …but to see the piano lugged down the stairs by these big men and put on the footpath

Bill Marsh recalls:

They’d get all the bread from The Corso… and they’d take it down to Clontarf which was all shantied there was no houses at all at Clontarf… they were building the big sewer tunnel there… but everybody lived in these shanties.  They were wheat bags done with whitewash. And about every sixth family would have a place for a fire, a place where they could put a kerosene tin on and they would get coupons and 6 families would put their coupons together and make up a big stew. And that’s how they lived… in that shanty town there were solicitors, accountants…