Skint! Making do in the Great Depression

Overview

You may remember a little thing called the Global Financial Crisis. It happened a couple of years ago, resulted in $900 extra dollars in the piggybank thanks to Uncle Kev, a nation-wide spending spree and cheaper plane fares. Crisis? Bring it on!

You might not be so casual about a Great Depression, however. After the 1929 New York stock market crash, Australia was plunged into the kind of poverty that would make Charles Dickens choke on his gruel. 'Skint! Making do in the Great Depression', at the Museum of Sydney, is a collection of artefacts, testimonials, photos and sound grabs from that time, the depths of which found one-third of all men unemployed and families forced onto the ‘susso’ (sustenance relief), into humpytowns or even the caves along the coast beneath Bondi. ‘Making do’ was an absolute necessity — whether that meant petty crime (being a “shonk to survive”, says one lady in a video excerpt) or simply stretching old socks into rugs, gasoline drums into kitchen cabinets, packing crates into natty chaises.

It’s the kind of mentality that was totally absent from the GFC, partially due to the pervading economic theories of each time, one favouring deflationary over inflationary tactics. Whatever the cause, the Great Depression was a time in which our resilience and imagination came to the fore. While some of the propaganda posters of that time promised “gloom to-day, joy to-morrow”, that was not to be, and the effects of the Depression lingered until World War II. A certain Australian je ne sais quoi grew from the difficulty, however: a ‘making do’, and doing it bloody well.