Joan Beaumont mentions the Great Ocean Road only briefly in her magisterial new study, Australia’s Great Depression. The statue might have been a useful metaphor for one of the book’s central themes. Australia’s experience of the Great Depression has long been treated as an intermission event between two world wars that have preoccupied the national consciousness and mythmaking. Details of 1929 to 1932 are ‘lost in popular memory’. As a pre-eminent historian of Australia at war, whose previous book, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013), won a Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Beaumont knows this well. Yet this book does more than foreground the Depression as an event of national significance. Published as Australia emerges from its worst economic downturn since the 1930s, it poses questions about Australia’s capacity to endure and transform during a crisis.

Australian historians have by no means ignored the Great Depression. Rather, they have tended to pick it apart to satisfy specialised interests. Beaumont’s foremost achievement is an extraordinary synthesis. Oral testimonies, private correspondence, letters to prime ministers, and local histories from across the country combine with economic and political analysis. The thirty-five tightly woven chapters oscillate between an absorbing political narrative and cinematic vignettes of the uneven experiences of Australia’s Depression.

Beaumont begins the story in 1919, a decade before the infamous New York stock market crash of October 1929. This chronology draws attention to both a nation wounded by conflict, and the war’s economic fallout that triggered the Depression. As Beaumont notes, the 1920s Australian economy was still largely colonial in character, dependent on British markets for both capital and commodity exports. When the global economy collapsed in the late 1920s, Australia fell hard, with state and federal governments heavily indebted to London as export markets dried up. 

Depression-era politics were fundamentally about how to repay Australia’s City of London debts while relieving the unemployed. A conservative Senate, London bankers, the Commonwealth Bank, and emerging professional economists all argued that orthodox ‘sound finance’ – balanced budgets, low inflation, the gold standard – must be prioritised. In radical contrast, New South Wales Labor Premier Jack Lang promised to renege on debts altogether, freeing money for relief. A host of alternative ‘plans’ occupied the middle ground, led by federal treasurer Ted Theodore’s reflationary proposals to increase the money supply, adjust the loans, and abolish statutory gold reserves. In an era before macroeconomic theorising, such ideas were revolutionary for politicians and public alike. Beaumont takes us into cabinet meetings, conferences, and diplomatic dinners at London’s Savoy Hotel, depicting high-stakes power plays. Sound finance prevailed, inflicting greater misery on ordinary people than necessary.

The fiscal constraints placed on the Scullin government by the bankers and Senate compounded economic contraction and political polarisation. Unemployment skyrocketed – peaking at thirty per cent in 1931 – which aggravated moral afflictions on both the right and left. Many were primed to turn to violence. Populist citizen movements attracted mass rallies for those dissatisfied with mainstream politics. Paramilitary groups, most prominently the New Guard, stood armed to confront rumoured communist uprisings. The labour movement and the Communist Party mobilised their own forces. Unemployment relief groups led eviction riots and sieges, clashing with police. Wartime experiences coloured this activity. ‘Honour’ provided a powerful trope: Australia should meet its loans. Cuts to public spending were defended in terms of ‘equality of sacrifice’. Work for the dole schemes were resisted by unions as economic conscription, echoing the conflicts of 1916–17.

For all this political drama, the book is often most powerful in its portraits of quiet despondency. Beaumont treats her subjects with tenderness: the unemployed who took jobs selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners door-to-door; women who sought backyard abortions or induced miscarriages by taking Epsom Salts, doubting their ability to feed another infant; the desolation but also community spirit of relief work camps. This sympathy is balanced with judicious consideration of the extent of Depression-era starvation, fascist elements in the New Guard, the foibles of oral history, and limits to Theodore’s proposed deficit spending.

Beaumont completed Australia’s Great Depression amid Covid lockdowns and recession. Queues outside Centrelink in early 2020 prompted loose comparisons with the Great Depression, affirming Beaumont’s original premise: the Depression is ‘a memory that lacked any specificity’. Nonetheless, Beaumont notes similarities between the two events. The isolationism of some states during the first two years of Covid has been redolent of Depression-era secession movements and regional campaigns to create new states in New England, the Riverina, and the Monaro. Then, as now, governments legislated for mortgage relief while extremism briefly overran city streets. Covid also inspired a new monetary politics, foregrounding advocacy for Modern Monetary Theory and a Green New Deal. 

The biggest difference between 1930 and 2020, Beaumont says, is state capacity. Where the Morrison government had the facilities and support to launch an $89 billion JobKeeper program, the Scullin government ‘lacked the power, institutional apparatus and perhaps the courage’ for radical intervention. And yet the early Australian state was noted for experimentation. Federation-era ‘new protection’ policies and public works programs in the 1920s (which racked up London debt) prompted W.K. Hancock’s withering characterisation, in 1930, of the Australian state as ‘a vast public utility’. If state capacity grew after the Depression, one wonders whether Australians have come to expect less of it since then.

This is not a story of continuity and change, but what Beaumont describes as Australia’s Depression-era ‘resilience’. Political institutions survived extremist threats; communities and individuals endured through volunteer groups, councils, and families. This may seem like an unambitious interpretation. Beaumont’s own evidence and observations reveal a nation transforming itself, not just surviving. The citizen movements reorientated the middle class as the basis of Menzies’ Liberal Party. Economists arrived as leading policymakers. The need for a mature central bank was affirmed. Labor’s agenda for postwar reconstruction was germinating. Meanwhile, poverty experienced by Indigenous communities prompted the settler state to shift from protectionist to assimilationist policies, even as the 1930s witnessed growing Indigenous activism.

An emphasis on a changing nation, however, only makes sense in retrospect. What distinguishes this book is an immersion in the Depression moment. Three decades after Federation, Australia’s new institutions remained fragile. Given events in Europe, their survival was no small achievement. Resilience was manifest in John Monash’s reverence for the democratic constitution, rejecting New Guard proposals to install him as national leader. Resilience showed itself in the vast array of community relief efforts, if prone to religious sectarianism and ostracising European migrants and itinerant workers.

Yet resilience is a slippery term. In contemporary parlance, it is a buzzword of motivational gurus and neoliberals, where dependence implies inadequacy. Resilience can be a foil for defenders of the post-welfare state. It can marginalise those needing care, and bears contested meanings for people with disabilities and First Nations peoples. Beaumont is not, of course, reading these meanings into the past. But there are striking parallels. Contemporary resilience talk is a genus of nineteenth-century self-help. The Depression tested this ideal. If some thought the state a utility, others considered assistance a weakness, tearing up ration coupons and rejecting relief work as affronting their manhood.   

All this points back to whether we should be satisfied with the state’s resilience and the expectations of stoic citizens. In the 1930s, commitment to ‘sound finance’ meant that cost-cutting took precedence over collective well-being. There are continuities with the present, too. The disasters of deflationary policies during the Depression taught economists of all stripes, Keynesian and monetarist, the importance of stimulus during a crisis. JobKeeper again embodied this lesson. But for all its fiscal muscle, Australia implemented Covid measures which only aimed to maintain the status quo, ‘hibernating’ the economy and preserving its inequities. Many see this as a missed opportunity. Unlike the Depression, we have no Great Ocean Road-like investment to show for recent spending. Now, after seasons of fires then floods, Australians continue to be asked to be resilient. Yet as such disasters become more frequent, resilience may no longer be enough. Even so, Beaumont’s outstanding history soberly reminds us of the difficulties of political transformation even as a crisis demands it.