Purls of Depression era wisdom from a strong Mum

When I joked to Mum that kids these days needed to experience a war or Depression, she didn’t think I was being ironic.

On holiday at a beach shack in Port Campbell; mum knitted all the kids’ jumpers.

Big weekend last weekend. My mother turned 90. Bit of a do at my place in Melbourne. Everyone was there. Mum. Her much loved younger sister Shirley. My sister from Sydney. My brothers from country Victoria. Grandchildren. Great grandchildren. In-laws. Cousins.

Afternoon tea and cups of tea and old photos and speeches with lots of kids. Some sadness about the loss of dad four years ago and of my brother and sister from cancer in the 2000s.

But life goes on. Mum is remarkably resilient. Remarkably stoic. She remembers with startling clarity the Depression eight decades ago. Growing up during the Depression kinda shapes your thinking for the rest of your life.

Mum once asked me whether the unset blinking clock on a video machine used more electricity than a clock that was properly set. This question didn’t occur to me but it did to her.

I sometimes wonder what this most frugal of generations really thinks of the values and the priorities of modern-day Australians. I once cheekily suggested that what we need is a jolly good recession or a bit of a war to shake us up. She didn’t see the irony in what I was saying and promptly agreed.

As a kid I would ask incessant questions about the war, about the Depression, about my parents’ 1940s courtship. My aunty says that when they were courting they would go for walks on the farm and upon coming to a fence, dad would dashingly sweep mum up and set her down on the other side. I loved stories like that as a kid.

Apparently kids went to school without shoes in the Depression. Surely only in summer? Mum and dad were young adults during the war. The bombing of Darwin in 1942 reverberated across the continent, delivering fear into isolated communities in western Victoria. Then there was the sheer relief, and gratitude to the Americans, for stopping the Japanese in the battle of the Coral Sea. Although my parents seemed to think the battle of Guadalcanal was the real turning point. Not that mum particularly liked American soldiers: on leave, they had shoes whereas our boys had boots.

She was always a bit of a leftie. She still watches parliamentary question time on the telly. Always up for a bit of a chat about politics. Always concerned for the wellbeing of the working man, as she puts it. She didn’t think much of prime minister Menzies; she thought him arrogant. She liked his early successors Curtin and Chifley. She only had a few years of primary schooling. Yet with this she leveraged a life that was remarkably well read. A cousin of dad’s, on meeting her for the first time, asked if she was a teacher.

Mum had had six children by the time she was 33. Her hardest but probably most satisfying years were in the 1960s when she managed a family of eight in a housing commission house on a working man’s wage. Her budget books itemised every penny.

Like others born during the Depression, my parents were resourceful. We grew vegetables in our back yard and had chooks. The boys had paper rounds or did odd jobs for money. Mum made our clothes where possible. There’s a photo of us [above; the writer front left] taken by dad; we’re on holiday at a beach shack in Port Campbell. Mum knitted all the jumpers.

Here is a young woman, a young mother, at the crest of life’s grand arc surrounded by her loving and admiring family. Here is a photo of the peak years of the last of the resilient, the frugal, the quite remarkable Depression generation.