Weevils In The Flour: An Oral Record Of The 1930S Depression In Australia
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the hungry years of the 1930s, when bread queues snaked through Australia's cities and families were torn apart by unemployment and poverty, ordinary men and women endured hardships that history books too often reduce to mere statistics — Weevils in the Flour restores their voices, capturing the raw, unfiltered testimony of those who lived through the Great Depression on Australian soil. Compiled from hundreds of interviews conducted across the country, this landmark work of oral history presents the Depression not as an abstract economic event, but as a lived human catastrophe, told through the words of swagmen, factory workers, housewives, unionists, and the destitute, each account a fragment of a vast mosaic of suffering, resilience, and solidarity. Wendy Lowenstein's methodology is as rigorous as it is compassionate, allowing the voices of her subjects to carry the full moral and emotional weight of the era without editorial intrusion, a technique that places this work firmly in the tradition of the great oral histories of the twentieth century. The cumulative effect is devastating and deeply moving — a chorus of the forgotten that speaks directly to questions of class, dignity, and the social contract that remain urgently relevant today. For anyone seeking to understand what economic collapse truly means to the human spirit, this chronicle is utterly indispensable — and its final pages leave a silence that demands reflection.
Author: Wendy Lowenstein
Format: Paperback
Published: 1978, Scribe Publications
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the hungry years of the 1930s, when bread queues snaked through Australia's cities and families were torn apart by unemployment and poverty, ordinary men and women endured hardships that history books too often reduce to mere statistics — Weevils in the Flour restores their voices, capturing the raw, unfiltered testimony of those who lived through the Great Depression on Australian soil. Compiled from hundreds of interviews conducted across the country, this landmark work of oral history presents the Depression not as an abstract economic event, but as a lived human catastrophe, told through the words of swagmen, factory workers, housewives, unionists, and the destitute, each account a fragment of a vast mosaic of suffering, resilience, and solidarity. Wendy Lowenstein's methodology is as rigorous as it is compassionate, allowing the voices of her subjects to carry the full moral and emotional weight of the era without editorial intrusion, a technique that places this work firmly in the tradition of the great oral histories of the twentieth century. The cumulative effect is devastating and deeply moving — a chorus of the forgotten that speaks directly to questions of class, dignity, and the social contract that remain urgently relevant today. For anyone seeking to understand what economic collapse truly means to the human spirit, this chronicle is utterly indispensable — and its final pages leave a silence that demands reflection.