DEPRESSION -1927-1930’s

Hundreds of interviews were recorded for research which slowly will appear on this channel. The forward of “Weevils in the Flour”, is written by Manning Clark, a great Australian historian and the author of the best-known general history of Australia.

He writes this is “One of the great social histories of Australia. Lowenstein notes that it was the development of the portable tape recorder that enabled her to travel around Australia in the 1970s collating working class memories of the Great Depression. One question the book seeks to answer is why, despite the widespread suffering among the working classes, there was no serious uprising.” The range of interviews is immense … covering plumbers, swagmen, teachers, mothers, the unemployed workers movement, the waterside workers, rural farmers and more.

What does the family breadwinner do after suddenly getting the sack?

How do you manage when you are working every second week only or your wages — but not your mortgage — have been cut by 20 per cent?

Working for the dole, living in shanty towns, squatting in empty buildings, standing forever in queues, despised by bureaucrats and slowly losing self-respect — all these experiences and more are described vividly within these pages.

“Weevils in the Flour is a magnificent oral record of the experiences of ordinary Australians during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has been continuously in print since it was published in 1978.

The interviews give the real experience of our parents, grandparents and many immigrants who lived through the “Great Depression” in Australia, in circumstances way beyond the current generation’s imagination. Now, more than 90 years after the events it deals with, Weevils in the Flour rebukes a new generation of failed policy-makers. This edition carries a new preface by the author which comments angrily on ‘the same old capitalist system, with the gloves off’ that has produced such prolonged, intense distress.