Dimensions
162 x 242 x 36mm
Tradition has it that the Great Depression of the 1930s swept through Australia like a raging flood, tearing up the garden of the 1920s and imposing terrible suffering on the population at large.
When David Potts began teaching history at the University of Melbourne in 1965, he ran a program for students to interview anyone who remembered the period. Many of the respondents recalled painful experiences, as he anticipated. But others spoke of the early 1930s with affection. They said that they had coped well, that the Depression "gave life meaning" and that "people were happier then".
Potts wondered how these apparent contradictions might be explained. After his students interviewed 1,200 Depression survivors, and Potts himself trawled through many first-person accounts, it became evident that good things occurred in the 1930s that the Depression itself did not undermine, and to which it might even have contributed.
What Potts discovered has led to this thorough and lively social history of the early 1930s that covers not just the usual stories of suffering, but extends into compelling tales of resilience and happiness even among people who were poor and unemployed.
