Australia and the Great Depression

The Great Depression had a significant impact on Australia. The Great Depression affected Australia in a variety of ways these included unemployment, inability to support family, evictions, growth of shanty towns and impact on the economy. The Australian government responded to The Great Depression in a range of ways such as sustenance or susso for short, asking Sir Otto Niemeyer to come, deflation, Melbourne Agreement, inflation, Jack Lang's Plan and the Premiers' plan. Some responses were more effective than others.

An impact that the Great Depression had on Australia was large numbers of unemployed people. Companies all over the country started to collapse as their share value went down making the company go bankrupt. This meant that workers working for the company lost their jobs. The families that had lost there jobs had no money to pay there rent so faced getting evicted from there home. There small number of possessions was thrown out onto the street if they had been evicted. The homeless people usually went to makeshift settlements in public parks or on the outskirts of town. During 1933 there were over 40,000 people living in shanty towns. One well known shanty town was called Happy Valley in the sand hills of La Perous to the South of Sydney. Unemployment had a big impact on Australia during the Great Depression because at one point during the Depression there were 60,000 people unemployed. The response the Australian government had to the large numbers unemployment was the sustenance or susso for short. To be eligible for sustenance, a man had to enlist and prove that he had been unemployed for a curtain amount of time and that he had no mean of support. If you had sustenance you were not given cash but given basic food rations, mainly bread and potatoes. This response was effective because lots of families got food to live on and if they had not had the sustenance families would have died of hunger.