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	Indigenous Law Resources Reconciliation and Social Justice Library
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NEW SOUTH WALES, VICTORIA AND TASMANIA - The Great Depression

The 1930s Depression interrupted the Aboriginal political movement by closing off the few economic options they had had in the 1920s. The Protection Board, in a bid to meet the shortfall in its budget in the first lean year of 1929, appealed to the government to allow it to take control of the recently granted Child Endowment payments to Aboriginal families. It argued that Aboriginals could not handle the cash, but the only complaints the administering body had made was that some Aboriginals were underspending their grams. Nevertheless, the Board was granted control over all Aboriginal families' Child endowment and used the additional funds to cover the cost of its increasing ration lists as Aboriginals were thrown out of work.

Aboriginals faced heavy job losses, but were systematically excluded from receiving the new State unemployment benefits in New South Wales, although eligible in Victoria for that State's dole. The New South Wales Department of Labour decided that Aboriginals would have to prove they had 'performed a white man's work', a test which no-one defined and which effectively excluded most unemployed Aboriginals in the judgment of the issuing officers, who were the local police. Despite Aboriginal and Protection Board protests, Aboriginals were forced to turn to Board rations, although they were equivalent to only half of the meagre Unemployment Food Relief available to white unemployed. Excluded too from Local Government administered Work Relief, Aboriginals were forced in increasing numbers on to the Protection Board's resources, until over 30% of the known Aboriginal population was under the direct and dictatorial control of Protection managers by 1935 and many more were on reserves under the surveillance of the police. The Board was forced to admit the failure of dispersal: Aboriginals had not disappeared or 'merged' with the white working class. Over 10,000 people were identified as Aboriginal by the census collectors, a role also filled by the police.