The Great Depression was almost a hundred years ago. My mother was born during it, and I remember my grandmother saying that their family managed all right because her parents had helped them buy their house. My grandfather worked as a clerk at Dunlop during the war, and I assume he might have had the same job while the depression was on. So my family was pretty lucky, though I'm sure that living in the lower-middle class and working suburbs of Preston and Thornbury, they saw plenty of poverty and suffering.
Wendy Lowenstein's oral history of the 1930s, Weevils in the Flour, is a confronting read. It's not a short book, and I admit I skimmed through some of the chapters, especially the ones about long-ago politicians and strike actions, but I was riveted by the stories of how families coped (or didn't) -- evicted onto the streets, making clothes out of flour sacks, the men waiting for hours on the off chance of some casual labour, toiling on road works for sustenance relief (and expected to perform hard physical labour despite being badly malnourished), children not attending school because they didn't have shoes, people living on wild-caught rabbits and home-grown vegetables.
There were stirring stories of how the left wing organisations, particularly the unions, fought for fairness: when a family was evicted for not paying the rent, a group might rush to the house and start to tear it apart -- after a few such occasions, the landlords stopped evicting their tenants! There were unions for unemployed workers who agitated for greater support. The most frightening aspect of the times is that no one seemed to really understand what was happening or how to deal with it -- politicians just kept bleating that 'there was plenty of work.' It's hard to imagine how cruel this must have sounded to the people who knew damn well that it wasn't true. And then the war came along and fixed it all...
Lowenstein admits there are omissions in these accounts -- not enough women, not enough from the self-employed. I would add that there is not a single First Nations voice in this book, and not many non-Anglo stories either.
A knowledge of this history helps to put our current economic woes into perspective. Our current standard of living is so insanely high -- everyone seems to expect multiple yearly overseas holidays, regularly renovated bathrooms, new cars every couple of years, constant new clothes and furniture as a matter of right. And this high consumption lifestyle is burning our planet out from under us. It's sobering but weirdly reassuring to read about a time when expectations were so low and that people (mostly) managed to survive.