Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 427
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[Page 427]
210
for autocracy.
It was a sad, depressing and almost nauseating sight, this victory of law and order over adversity and weakness. The Labour party Premier, Jack Lang, might have had the grace to receive at least a small deputation from the procession, the members of which had behaved in a passive manner, even in their brief encounter with the police. After all, the votes of the majority of these demonstrators had helped to put this Government in power. If the Premier was unable to hear them, a Senior Minister would have done. It was certainly an occasion when a decent "policeman's lot was not a happy one".
The building industry was one of the worst hit by the depression, and by the middle of 1929, brickyards, cement works, timber mills, steel works, and all other suppliers of building and construction materials were finding it difficult to keep going, and were reluctantly laying-off valued staff and operatives as unsold stocks of material piled up in their yards. This applied to my own Aerocrete products, and though the directors were willing to have kept me engaged for a while longer in the hope that things would improve, I felt obliged in fairness to them and the shareholders, to resign my position. The fees of a few small consulting jobs I had cultivated kept me going for a short time, but soon no more of these "pickings" were forthcoming.
One of the biggest structural consultants in the city was gradually reducing his staff. One of them, a brilliant fellow-graduate of mine was out of work in engineering design for eighteen months, and forced to take all sorts of work not connected with the profession.
As New Zealand was not nearly so industrialised as Australia, it was, at first, not so disastrously affected. I had many good friends among the New Zealanders settled in Sydney and through them I was led to believe that chances of getting some consulting work over there were good, and I was given some very useful letters of introduction to influential businessmen in New Zealand. So I decided to try my luck in working up a practice in a new country, and near the end of the year 1930 I