By Miriam (Mim) Loomes
Based on a thesis in 1973 for conversion to three-year trained status as a teacher. Revised for a talk in 2008 to the Society’s ‘History in The Club’ when Australia was experiencing the effects of the Global Financial Crisis.
The years 1929 until 1935 are usually regarded worldwide as the years of the ‘Great Depression.’ It was a time of great economic difficulties, political and social upheaval and it had a major effect on the people and economy of Canowindra.
In Edna Carew’s book, The Language of Money, a Depression is defined as ‘a time of low economic activity, distinguished from a Recession by being prolonged and sustained, characterised by continuing falls in output, high and rising unemployment and companies burdened with unsold stock because demand is low.’
The Depression commenced on 29 October 1929 with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange. What followed was a dramatic fall in export prices in Australia as sales and trade dropped by two thirds. There was a fall in overseas loans lending, leading to a reduction in government capital spending and a drop in residential construction.
In Canowindra the overnight drop in prices for wool, wheat and lucerne had an immediate effect on the agricultural industry and a flow on effect for the town’s economy. Unemployment figures rose from 10% in October 1929, doubled to 21% in mid 1930s and peaked in mid 1932 when 32% of all Australians were out of work.
This level of unemployment had a huge impact in the large cities as ‘sacked’ workmen took to the road to find work or to meet the government requirement of being in a different location every five weeks to receive food rations. This resulted in the depopulation of large cities, lowering of living standards, children leaving school at an early age and women supporting the households. During this period suicide rates increased while marriage and birth rates were lower.
Canowindra was fortunate at the beginning of the Great Depression to have many facilities and established businesses in a small, self sufficient country town. The years prior to the 1930s were almost boom years in Canowindra. Many of the town’s buildings and large homes were built either just before or after the First World War 1914 -1918.
Prior to October 1929 the district’s main products, wheat, wool and lucerne were recording high prices with wheat at about 5/- (about $21 in 2022) a bushel, wool at over 40 pence (about $14 in 2022) per lb and lucerne was worth over £8 (about $670 in 2022) per acre. The average wage was about £3/5/0 (about $275 in 2022) per week.
Canowindra’s wealth was largely built on agriculture and the town had many facilities and services which larger towns did not have at that time. The Waddell Bridge over the Belubula River had been built in 1901 and this provided easy access to the town for both locals and travellers.
The coming of the railway in 1910 proved a great asset to the town for moving goods out for sale and for goods and people coming in for trade and recreation. The goods yard was a busy place with local carriers making deliveries to the town from the trains. People went by train to sporting fixtures or to Sydney and the annual show time visit by the circus was made by train.
Town electricity became available in 1912 through the efforts of William Cobley. The generator was originally steam driven and later oil fired and became the Canowindra Electric Light and Power Supply Co Ltd in later years. A town water supply was turned on in 1928. The telephone exchange was also operating by the 1930s.
During the Depression years, Canowindra had four main general stores, several smaller stores, three bakeries, a butter factory, killing works, two dentists, two doctors, three solicitors, two chemists, an accountant, a tailor, a boot maker, a barber, a newspaper, post office, four hotels, five banks, two hospitals and five churches.
The terms of the government sustenance support forced many people from across Australia into an itinerant life style to collect their food rations, so ‘circuits’ formed as groups of people moved about the countryside meeting this requirement. These food rations were supplied under the supervision of the local police. This moving population lived where they could find shelter: under bridges and trees, in old sheds, in railway yards and halls or they built makeshift shelters from hessian, kerosene drums or whatever was available.
Canowindra saw an influx of these ‘swaggies’ or ‘bagmen’ swelling its population of approximately 1500 people. Temporary dwellings were set up by displaced families or single men on reserves, such as the one opposite what is now Moyne Eventide Home near the old stock saleyards.
Official figures published in The Canowindra Star show the results of the Boree Shire Unemployment Questionnaire Results for August 1930 that were taken from Police figures. This report showed that unemployment figures were highest in Canowindra at 180 persons while Eugowra had 60, Cargo 20 and Cudal 7 persons. This figure does not include the travellers who frequented the town and storekeepers remembered that often 300 people came in for food rations over 1 or 2 days a week.
At the time of the Great Depression there was no government welfare scheme and dole payments, as known these days, did not exist. The system of food rations provided only a basic subsistence for the unemployed and itinerant people. There was a government scheme to encourage people to go mining but many found that the low price of gold made this not worthwhile.
Local storekeepers, such as the Finns, McDonaghs, Maloufs and Browns, allowed their customers credit and many debts were written off by the shop owners at the end of the Depression. Often banks and storekeepers purchased bankbooks and insurance policies at about 7/6 in the £1 for the value of the deposit. Gold was also traded. Many businesses ran with reduced staff hours or family staff members only and made little or no profit during this time.
Mr Andrew Purcell
The story of Andrew Purcell illustrates the fortunes of one local storekeeper. Andrew Purcell had interests in many farms down the Rivers Road. For many years he bought and sold properties and made a good living from lucerne sales. He built the large store next door to the Rural Bank building and his own home, Lucerne, later the home of the Lyndon Community in Blatchford Street, and a large oil fired bakery, now the CWA hall, in Blatchford Street opposite the general store of Cahill and Betsy Malouf.
When the Depression hit, Andrew Purcell, over committed financially, went bankrupt. His assets were liquidated and he left the district, ‘a broken spirited and penniless man after being one of the town’s greatest benefactors’, to quote one of his friends. Mr AR Lhuede managed his large store for a time but he also went bankrupt and left the town following the Depression.
Government Assistance
There was some government assistance to the town in the form of project work funding. Some farmers applied under the Farmers’ Relief Act for a payment of £10 a month on which the family had to exist and meet their commitments. There were nine of these applications from Canowindra in 1930 as reported in The Canowindra Star
At the end of 1929 the Canowindra Development League was formed. Under the leadership of Messrs AR Lhuede, FB Hinton and WJ Sweeny, they tried unsuccessfully to petition the government for funding of work projects to be carried out in Canowindra.
During the early months of 1930 the Canowindra Unemployed League was established with Mr T Mortimer as president and Mr R Brown as secretary. Both these Leagues had suggested to the government important major works that would have been lasting assets to the town and have provided employment but they did not eventuate, due to the stressed financial state of the government
In August 1930 the Boree Shire held a special meeting to discuss how a £2,000.00 grant could be best used in the Shire. The grant had come from the Unemployment Relief Council and Canowindra’s share was £1,100.00. It was mainly spent on providing 2/- a day for workers to chip out weeds, clean out gutters and do minor road works using picks and shovels.
Later, after agitation from the Unemployment League, the Boree Shire granted £30 for workers on a park in Rodd Street. The work was mainly to clear gum trees from the area and plant the park. More than 25 men were given work and priority for employment was given to men with large families. These ‘lucky’ ones received £1 for a full week’s work. More than 70 men turned out to do this work and stayed grubbing out stumps and burning up timber for many days. Mr Lloyd Morris was the Boree Shire Engineer at the time and the park was later named after him. Canary Island Palms, recommended to Lloyd Morris by the curator of the Botanic Gardens as suitable for the climate, are a lasting feature of the park.
The only other government-funded activity was the construction of two more classrooms at the District Rural School (Canowindra Public School). In 1934 a grant of £889-7-0 was made available from the Unemployment Relief Council to Beddie and Brown for the building of the classrooms. All other forms of assistance for people in dire need as a result of the Depression came from the Canowindra community itself.
Community Help
From April to October 1931 a Citizens’ Committee, under the leadership of Messrs JV Crowe and LC Marshall, ran a Food and Clothing Pool. In July 1931, at the peak of this work, 114 persons were looked after each day with the support of the Canowindra community.
A comparison can be made with the current Canowindra Food Basket, which commenced on 19 October 2009 with the aim of providing food to low income families and individuals on a service fee basis. This project, run by the Co Operating Anglican and Uniting Church Parishes, has 124 registered participants with a weekly average of 30 people. For returned soldiers, assistance was available from the RSSILA through the local sub branch led by Mr F. Hinton and again supported by the Canowindra community.
It is interesting to note that in most Canowindra Star newspapers of this time, the pages are filled with accounts of religious, social and sporting activities with little mention of the effects of the Depression. The community was well supported by all the schools and churches. Concerts, card parties, dances, harvest festivals and church picnics were commonplace. The town also had its own orchestra, Dramatic Society and the picture show screened on two nights of the week. The main sports were football, cricket, tennis and golf while race meetings always had a good attendance. The other news items were reports of weddings, birthday parties and other social events.
Kylie Tennant
For two of the Depression years, Kylie Tennant and her husband, Lewis Charles (LC) Rodd, lived in the community. Kylie and Lewis were married in 1933 and boarded at the Hotel Canowindra. It was here that Kylie wrote her famous novel, Tiburon, about life in the Depression years, based on her perceptions of living in Coonabarabran and Canowindra. ’Roddy’ was a teacher at the District Rural School and Kylie was trained in journalism. She was a non conformist and often dressed as a swaggie. She worked with the men on the chaff cutters, sat in the gutter with the unemployed and talked to them and wrote about their plight. She agitated successfully for a shelter hut on the reserve west of the town.
Kylie, a socialist and disillusioned by a brief flirtation with the Communist Party, always campaigned for the rights of working people. Tiburon and Battlers both won the SH Prior Memorial Prize and Tiburon was published in The Bulletin by weekly instalments. Local people looked forward to working out which local personality she had depicted in her story. Two of her novels, The Battlers and Ride on Stranger, became TV mini series about people in The Depression times. Her other famous deeds were raising money to send a man with a cancerous lip to Sydney for treatment and her walk from Canowindra to Cudal to a Boree Shire Council meeting to agitate for a water tank on the shelter hut on the reserve. An astounding woman!
In a letter to the Canowindra Historical Society in 1968, Kylie Tennant wrote about her time living in the town:
"I loved Canowindra enjoying my stay of two years. There were so many places to go for camping weekends, and the greater part of the school staff used to pile into our battered car and guide me down breakneck roads like watercourses.. . I remember the limestone caves, the creeks, the fun we had driving out at night to have barbecues by the river...
My husband and I lived at the Hotel Canowindra by the railway station and I wrote Tiburon in the room overlooking the hotel yard... We were very young then.
I had a dramatic society and produced plays, the money going to the local hospital. I also got up an agitation for better wages for the agricultural workers which sent a shock through the community and the local police looked on me with great suspicion.
I produced a small paper on a flatbed printing press in our bedroom at the hotel, The Agricultural Worker, and distributed it free on the street corner.
I remember walking to a council meeting in a neighbouring town (Cudal) or getting a lift, to argue that a tank should be put on the camping ground as there was a dead horse in the river where the travelling unemployed got their water. The town clerk argued that he had drunk that water for years but the tank was put up.
Tiburon was an amalgam of two towns - Coonabarabran and Canowindra. The hotel in Tiburon bore some resemblance to the Canowindra Hotel as it then was and the conditions described in Tiburon - but not all of them bore some resemblance to the local state of affairs at the time.”
It is probably true that country people generally survived the Depression years in a slightly easier way than their city counterparts because they had the facilities and space to be more self-sufficient. Most grew their own vegetables, kept a cow and chooks in the backyard. Going ‘rabbiting’ also helped to supplement food supplies. Clothes were unpicked and recycled. Flour bags and parachute silks were made into underwear. Children wore hand-me-down clothes and mostly went barefoot. Shoes were kept for school and going out and these were often resoled and handed down.
There was no television and motor vehicles were limited. Few farm families had electricity. People worked to help, not always for payment, and some lived-in for keep only. Housewives often helped starving ‘swaggies’ who came to the door and not many were turned away. Common items asked for were tea, sugar, bread and cold meat in return for wood chopping or gardening.
There were many bank foreclosures, business went bankrupt and people were evicted from their homes for non payment of loans or rent. If people lost everything, they survived some way and started over again. Some people did not survive; they left home and were never seen again. Very few people applied for the pension as that was viewed as beneath their dignity. People had a totally different lifestyle in the 1930s compared with today’s generation. Their survival was the key issue.
Some words from two Canowindra men, who lived through the Depression, summarise the feelings of the time:
‘The attitude of the people was different then. The situation was… and so we made the best of It, hoping always that tomorrow would open up better things.’
‘Yes, we were poor, everyone was, but we were happy and made the most of what we had… enjoying our Saturday tennis and Sunday Church activities, and looking out and helping other people when we could.’
Canowindra has changed in many ways since the 1930s but there is still to be found that spirit of neighbourliness, kindness and compassion that may be partly the result of the dark days of the Great Depression 1929 to 1935.
REFERENCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
References largely come from The Canowindra Star newspapers, Australian Year Books and talks recorded in the 1970s with Tom and Leo Finn, and Athol Brown
Special thanks to Dorothy Balcomb, Alison and Richie Biddulph, Beth Bowd, Ian and Betty Brown, Canowindra Historical Society & Museum Inc, Helen Coyle, Frank Daniel, Josie Drummond, grand daughter of Andrew Purcell, Jan Harrison, Max Loomes, Bev McCloskey, Len Nash, Rosanne Nash, Debbie Rutter, Thelma Scoble, Roy Tranter, Berna Wright
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