Joan Beaumont

I don’t remember The Great Depression ever being a topic of discussion among my family. My maternal and paternal grandparents were born in the mid to late 1920’s so they would have been young children at the time, and my great great grandparents had all passed away by the time I was six. All I really know of its impact comes from American novels set during the period that I studied in high school like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Though I don’t care much for economics as a subject I am increasingly interested in learning more about Australian history.

Australia’s Great Depression by Jean Beaumont is a comprehensive examination of the global crisis’s impact on the nation, particularly between the years of 1929 and 1932. Australia was amongst the hardest hit nations, with the economic crash triggered by a combination of wartime and repatriation spending, the collapse of export markets like wheat and wool, the rising price of imports, and high overseas debts.

I have to admit that I found some of the economic and political detail to be tedious, but I do feel it was explained clearly.

Of more interest to me was the impact on the population. Unemployment in Australia ranged between 25 and 30 per cent, and was at its highest in 1932. Beaumont shows that not all sectors of the economy equally affected, and hence the impact of the Great Depression varied according to location, age, marital status, gender, ethnicity, class and former military service. I found the specifics of the variables to be intriguing , though none were too surprising.

I also found the brief discussion of the parallels between the behaviour of political parties and politicians around the Depression and the current economic downturn post-CoVid to be of interest. It was also interesting to note, given current woefully low unemployment payments, that the ‘susso’ payment introduced during the Great Depression, was similarly set at a meagre rate, and for almost the same reasons that the government uses to justify it today.

There is a collection of photographs and other images included at the end of the book. So too are Beaumont’s extensive lists of References and Notes for anyone interested in further reading.

At nearly 600 pages I wouldn’t recommend Australia’s Great Depression. to a casual reader unless the topic is of specific interest, but I feel I learnt a lot about the nation’s socioeconomic history and the complexity of the Great Depression experience by reading it.… (altro)