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Adversity & Resilience: Adulthood
Battling through the Depression
For many Ipswich people, the Great Depression was a time of hardship and lost opportunities which affected the rest of their life. Here are some of their stories:
Vic Loetzsch: In the Great Depression, my mother used to make paper flowers and we’d go out to sell them to get enough money to buy a loaf of bread or a pound of lard – there was no such thing as butter then, just bread and lard. You’d go to the fruit shop and buy a packet of spec fruit [speckled or slightly damaged fruit] for three pence or six pence and you’d go to the cake shop and get stale cakes. My mother was a widow. She had a very hard life and my eldest brother Bert had to leave school when he was about 11 or 12 to go out with her selling fruit on a fruit cart. They would go right out to Colleges Crossing or Kholo. We also used to get prickly pears and she made jam out of them. It was quite nice, too, the way she made it. Things were tough in those days.
Roy Edwards: Losing his job during the Depression proved to be a lucky opportunity for electrician Roy Edwards. His family said that in 1931, Roy was retrenched from the Railways. He borrowed £5 (about a week’s wages) from his aunt and walked or rode a push-bike door to door seeking electrical work. His brothers Allan and Mervyn joined him in contracting and the eventual development of a retail showroom. They obtained work when power was connected to outlying areas such as Kalbar and Boonah and during the war, carried out electrical work at the new RAAF aerodrome Amberley. R.T. Edwards is still a major Ipswich retail and electrical repair company.
Col Bannerman: Dad was working as a coach-uilder at the Railway Workshops. He was retrenched in 1931. A great many good workers found themselves on the streets looking for work. Dad cut and sold clothes props, bought pineapples from farms and sold both of these door to door, as he also did with fresh fish. He bought bottles from farms in the district and sold them to a dealer. He did some labouring – this was known as relief work and was paid for, I think, in food vouchers. To carry the things he was selling, he had an old Whippet utility which later became his sole means of livelihood when everything else had dried up. In 1935, a friend who managed a local cash-and-carry grocery store was looking for someone to deliver grocery orders on a contract basis and Dad was given the chance.
