Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 23

After the dreams and excess of the 1920s came a doozie of a global economic depression, which began on the Wall Street stock market in New York and spread rapidly to take in most of the world. Australia, up to its eyeballs in debt at the same time as prices for its major export commodities such as wool and wheat were crashing through the floor, was acutely vulnerable.

When the economic crisis hit, the politicians and bankers proved themselves unable to agree on what measures should be followed. The Labor Party, which had the misfortune of regaining government for the first time since the end of World War I at about the exact same moment as Wall Street crashed, split for a second time within 20 years over the disagreement.

Unemployment trended upward to a peak of around 30 per cent. After the frenetic expansion years of the 1920s, and the pursuit of new enjoyments with new inventions such as automobiles, cinema and radio (see Chapter 14), ordinary people found themselves thrown back upon their own resources. Luxury items that had been considered essentials a few years previously were now eschewed, garden lawns were converted back to vegetable plots and broken items now found themselves being fixed rather than replaced. (See Chapter 15 for more on life in Australia during the Great Depression.)