1930s: the Great Depression and the path to war

The 1930s were characterised by society’s struggle to recover from the Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929. James Scullin’s Labor Government—with EG ‘Red Ted’ Theodore, the former Queensland Premier, as Treasurer—swiftly implemented various measures for coping with the depression. It abandoned the gold standard, cut assisted immigration, raised tariffs on imports and increased social services.

Despite this, the Labor Party lost the 1931 election to the United Australia Party (UAP), a forerunner to the Liberal Party. It could be argued that the real cause of their defeat began in Queensland with the Mungana Mines affair. A Royal Commission set up in Queensland in 1928 under the Chief Justice, Sir James Blair, found that Theodore, when Premier of Queensland in 1919, had personally benefited by the sum of £30,000 from the sale of the state-run Mungana Mines. The findings caused Theodore to step down as federal Treasurer on the eve of his first budget, which would have set the tone for Australia’s recovery from the depression. A subsequent judicial investigation exonerated Theodore but by then Joe Lyons had resigned from the Scullin Cabinet in protest and subsequently led the UAP to victory.

Statistically, Queensland was still the least urbanised of Australia’s states with 48 per cent of its population in rural areas. About 70 per cent lived in the southern portion of the state, 10 per cent in the central division and 20 per cent in the north. With so much of the state’s population in rural areas, the effects of the depression were less harsh than in urbanised areas. People grew their own food, bartered with their neighbours and generally ‘made do’. Unemployment reached as high as 30 per cent at the height of the Great Depression and often these men would go to the old goldfields such as Charters Towers and the Palmer River to work over the mullock heaps. Many families were sustained by the arrival of a tenshilling or one-pound postal order from the old goldfields.

Queensland entered the depression with a coalition government which held power until Labor returned in 1932. The department was well served under both governments—firstly by Neil Francis MacGroarty, who had the unique distinction of being elevated to Attorney-General after being elected for his first term to the Legislative Assembly, then by John Mullan, who had been Attorney-General for both Theodore and McCormack throughout the 1920s.

Generally there was a tightening of belts across the public service. In 1930, the weekly wage was reduced, initially from £4 5s to £4, and then by another six per cent later the same year. The hours of work increased from 44 hours a week to 48 hours a week and by the end of 1935, Queensland had met all obligations set by the Commonwealth Loan Council with regard to borrowing and debt.

The focus for government spending was on large-scale building projects that offered meaningful work to unemployed workers. In Queensland, these projects included the University of Queensland and Brisbane’s Story Bridge (named after JD Story, the Public Service Commissioner).

In 1935, the Nanango Courthouse was built, and there are records of extensions and refurbishments to a number of regional and remote offices. The department served the people of Queensland well under trying circumstances, particularly through the courts service. Having lost some of the earlier functions and titles through either rationalisation of workloads or repeal of legislation, clerks of petty sessions still continued to be the senior government officials in many provincial cities and smaller communities. They served as the agents for the Public Curator (later Trustee), the State Insurance Office, and the Agricultural Bank and State Advances Corporation, all of which were heavily involved in depression relief. The clerk of petty sessions was also agent for state and federal taxation offices as well as being land agent, mining registrar and harbour master.

The 1930s were also a time when depositions, usually taken by hand, were beginning to be taken by typewriter. As typing was still only taught to girls in schools and nearly all clerks were male, typing had to be learned on the job. Some clerks became proficient touch typists and were sought after by magistrates as the ‘deps clerk’. Technique and the touchtyping approach were jettisoned in favour of blind speed and passable accuracy. This created a tradition whereby all court staff possessed some typing skills and when the computer age finally dawned in the courts, the one skill staff did not have to learn was the keyboard.

While Australia as a whole took considerable time to escape the impact of the depression, Queensland, with its larger rural base and its abundance of natural resources, was more capable of coping with recession than most other places. The Mungana Mines affair however, led to the loss of Theodore as the guiding Treasury hand as well as Attorney-General Neil MacGroarty, who served only one term. After his defeat by Vincent Clare Gair for the seat of South Brisbane in 1932, Macgroarty never returned to politics, devoting his energies to his legal practice. Nationally, the fall of the Scullin Government allowed the forces of political conservatism to wrest control, culminating with the appointment of Robert Menzies as Prime Minister in 1939.