Thirty or forty years ago, when historians, among them myself, undertook research on the 1930s Depression, we found oral history a useful adjunct to more traditional source material. Old people who had been young adults during the hard times often had vivid stories to tell. During the 1970s oral history established itself as a methodology empowering groups whose voices had not previously been heard sufficiently in mainstream history: blue-collar workers, housewives, migrants and Indigenous Australians. The discipline came of age with the publication of Wendy Lowenstein’s anthology of Depression memories, Weevils in the Flour, in 1978 and with the establishment of the Oral History Association of Australia in 1979. Critics such as Patrick O’Farrell were already pointing out that memory is fallible and of limited use in securing an accurate representation of past events, but young historians enjoyed the potential of oral history to provide insights into underdog history. The 1930s Depression seemed to provide scope for recovering authentic narratives of battlers enduring adversity, especially since at the end of the decade the battlers were swept into World War II. It was easy to believe that after 1945 the generation who lived through these experiences wanted the security of home ownership and voted for politicians who provided them with a buoyant economy and reliable social services.

Practitioners of ‘history from below’ launched the four-volume People’s History of Australia in 1988, only to find that many of its insights had already been incorporated into such mainstream historical projects as the ten-volume Australians series. Most of the authors in the People’s History took a somewhat dour view of the effects of capitalist society on ordinary lives – once or twice the Monty Python sketch of the four Yorkshiremen came irresistibly to mind – but Drew Cottle reminded readers that there was ‘a sunny side of the street’. Although wages were reduced during the Depression, living costs fell even further, so that those securely in work, especially middle-class professionals, were scarcely aware of the 1930s as a time of hardship. This is generally accepted by historians of all ideological shades, but controversy continued to rage about the impact on the less fortunate.

Potts argued in 1990 that memories of the Depression revealed a positive culture of poverty. His informants did not present themselves as cowed victims of the system, but often showed resilience and ingenuity in coping with poverty and unemployment. Some have criticised this as romanticism. In a spirited debate in the Journal of Australian Studies, he was refuted by Joanne Scott and Kay Saunders, but stood his ground. Geoffrey Spenceley also entered the fray, asking whether oral accounts of the Depression were ‘people’s history or bourgeois construction’, and declaring that the hard times had left permanent and debilitating effects on survivors, especially the unskilled. Potts remains unconvinced, and The Myth of the Great Depression is the magnum opus in which he sums up his case.

‘Myth’, however, is a misleading word. Potts does not deny that the Great Depression happened, nor that at least twenty-five per cent of Australian workers experienced unemployment, with the figure rising to forty per cent in some industrial suburbs. He does not deny that many individuals suffered privations, nor that the crisis stimulated unusual activity at both ends of the political spectrum: the New Guard and the Communist Party. He deplores what he sees as the tendency of some historians to exaggerate the hardship, such as Michael Cannon’s assertion that ‘half the population went hungry half the time’, but he is far from claiming that the Depression is a myth in the sense of being a fable. His myth is the story that says that the Depression left lasting psychological scars on a large section of the Australian people. For Potts, this is a belittling concept that underestimates human capacity to adapt and survive, and to take pride in that survival.

Unfortunately, a decade and a half of controversy has left its mark on his analysis. Like most of us when challenged, he entrenches himself more deeply in defence of his perspective. In reaction to historians who practise what he describes as ‘gloomy-ism’, he takes whenever possible the optimistic spin on the evidence from Depression interviews. An incautious reader might come away with the impression that the Depression was quite an enjoyable experience, perhaps even more so than the pleasures of modern affluent consumerism. Doubts remain.

Potts and his critics both justify their standpoint by appealing to oral history, but this raises important methodological questions that bring us into the realm of psychology. It is well known that in later life we tend to sanitise our pasts, or, like Shakespeare’s veterans at Agincourt, ‘remember with advantage’. Luisa Passerini, a fine oral historian, has shown how working-class informants recalling the fascist years in Milan seem genuinely to have suppressed memories of having co-operated with the régime. Old Londoners recalling the Blitz and the experience of evacuation in the 1939–45 war sometimes present themselves as having behaved better than was always the case. Potts has done his homework on research in this field, and tries to weigh the extent to which informants suppress or exaggerate memories good and bad over the years.

I have tested his findings against two Western Australian projects involving oral recollections in the 1930s. This has not proved conclusive, since our results sometimes tally and sometimes diverge. We found, as he did, that after a sharp rise in 1930 the Depression did not result in more suicides during the rest of the decade. We would agree that nobody actually starved, though we seemed to find more evidence of malnutrition than he does. We would be inclined to question his view that the media exaggerated the grimness of the Depression for the sake of a good story. The Perth papers, especially The West Australian, prided themselves on the sobriety of their reportage.

Researching in 1970, we found that women often expressed pride in their ability to manage their households and to keep their children fed and clothed by ingeniously ‘making do’ on small resources. Men who had been obliged to walk off their farms or tramped the streets for months unsuccessfully looking for jobs were less willing to talk about it. That generation was reticent about feelings. Few spoke of the domestic tensions stimulated by squabbles over money or the sexual abstinence required to avoid unwanted children. It was only in the 1990s, while interviewing children of the Depression, that some informants remembered their parents as having been warped by these experiences.

In the house where I later lived, a young mother asked a teenage friend: ‘How can I make milk for my baby when I have only lettuce to eat?’ In old age, the teenager related this story to me. When we located the even older woman who had worried for her baby, although her memory was generally fairly good, she denied the story entirely. A man reported in The West Australian as having taken part in a 1932 communist-led demonstration of unemployed people said he knew nothing about it; it must have been somebody else of the same very unusual name. Had he genuinely forgotten or, grown respectable, was he holding back?

Potts has encountered numerous similar problems, but out of it he concludes that the Depression experience for many Australians was a triumph of the human spirit. They endured, they survived, and considered themselves the better for it. Many of them in later life contrasted their frugality with the more spendthrift ways of their affluent grand-children, and Potts himself is rather given to implying that the simple life brightened by family entertainment and rambles in the bush made for greater happiness than the plentiful consumer goods of our own day.

It would be comforting to believe this, but how can this be accurately quantified? It is beyond doubt that both Labor and Liberal governments in the decades following the 1930s saw a need to legislate for social security and job protection, and they drew on what they saw as the lessons of the Depression to justify these policies. In recent years, governments elected by the children of affluence have withdrawn to some extent from job protection and social security. It would be a pity, and a disservice to Potts, if they concluded from this book that a little Depression experience never did anyone much harm.