This is above all a human document, in which about 130 Australians, the people who themselves suffered during that time, tell the story of a great tragedy, the Depression of the 1930s.

Five years in the making, for this book Wendy Lowenstein travelled widely in Australia to tape over 200 interviews. Here are teachers and carpenters, soldier settlers, wharfies, spokesmen for the New Guard and the Communists, coal-miners, swagmen, policemen and businessmen; people who remember the Depression as they were small children, school children, housewives, husbands, single men and women - all ages (the oldest is now over 90) primarily from the working class, for this is a grass roots study of a period in our history, described by the people to whom it happened, those who suffered and made the best of it, who somehow endured. For these are the stories of the survivors.