How Did Unemployed Men and Women in South Australia Endure the Depression in the 1920s and 1930s?

The Great Depression which took place in Australia (as well as other parts of the world) occurred during the 1920s and 1930s. Officially it began in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed in the United States1, but unemployment had already been high in Australia before that. In fact acute unemployment had been standard in Australia from as early as 1890 and continued through the depression right up until World War Two2. Long dole queues were a characteristic sight across the nation during this period, as well as morose faces and dejected outlooks. In this essay I hope to highlight some of the things that the South Australian population experienced during the depression years. To do this I have used a range of primary sources to tell their story. Going into detail for a whole state in a limited word length would be difficult so I have attempted to give an overview of different areas of the state. I have focused on men and families in the city surviving on rations and the dole, men who took to the road in search of limited work, life for people living in the country and women’s roles throughout the depression.

It has been argued that the conditions were worse in South Australia than in any other state in Australia during the depression. This is because the number of unemployed people was higher in South Australia, coupled with the fact that the living standard of those on the dole was also lower than those in other states.Wages for the working class were already quite low in the 1920s, and took a further blow in 1931 when the Arbitration Court imposed a 20% cut in the wages of all workers3. There was already a geographical divide among the working class and the middle class in Adelaide during the 1920s, and this divide was only to become more pronounced with the depression. The more prosperous residents of Adelaide lived to the South and the East of the Torrens, while the working class populated the inner suburbs and industrial areas to the North and North West of the river4. Being a source of residential divide was not the only role the Torrens played in the Depression. It also became a “home” for the unemployed and homeless for many years. Many men were forced to give up the homes that they could no longer afford and camp out in rough huts along the south bank of the Torrens (behind the zoological gardens)5. These huts were not torn down until as late as 1938, when the city council removed the huts and everything around them. Similar stories abound of men building huts out of mallee poles and tacking bagging over them for shelter. The floor would have lime on it, or often just be dirt6.