Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 425
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[Page 425]
209
ly curtail the State's borrowings, and there was a Black Thursday when the State Treasury had barely enough money to pay the Civil Service salaries for the past fortnight. Jack Lang, the Labour Party Premier did not like this, and in a sudden move drew £250,000 in Commonwealth Bank Notes and dumped them in the Treasury vaults, as a standby.
To create employment for the men laid-off when nearly all the Public Works were closed down, the Administration put them to levelling the sandhills at Maroubra and digging new road excavations, for which they received the minimum rates of pay and were only allowed so many days of work each week according to their family responsibilities. A single man without dependants was alloted two days a week of this "relief work"'; a married man with several young children got a full five-day week. A lot of it was heartbreaking monotonous work, and some of it, such as sand shifting, rather useless.
As the effects of the depression grew worse, and more widespread, more erstwhile white-collar workers found themselves behind a wheel barrow with a shovel, after applying for some of this work.
Anyhow, these shifts only partially solved the tremendous unemployment problem, and one afternoon I witnessed a long procession of jobless men, carrying placards on long sticks, marching from the Domain and up Macquarie St towards Parliament House. A closely-spaced line of burly well-fed policemen right across the street awaited them, truncheons at the ready. The head of the pathetic column attempted to continue their march through this wall of navy blue, which immediately sprang into action. Some very feeble resistance was soon quelled by the constables, with professional skill, some of the placards were seized as evidence, several of the leaders were thrown into waiting police vans, and the rest of the procession was scattered and hunted away with kicks and blows. It included many returned servicemen who had risked their lives in the war to "make the world safe for democracy": it seemed that they had only made it safe