Wages were cut by 20 per cent, but not the mortgage. The dole was a pittance. People lived in shanty towns and camped in empty buildings. They stood in queues, seemingly forever, despised by bureaucrats and slowly losing their self respect...And there were weevils in the flour. This book was five years in the making, taken from over 200 taped interviews - teachers and carpenters, soldier settlers, wharfies, Communist spokesmen, miners, swaggies, policemen and businessmen. There are interviews with those who were children at the time; housewives, husbands, single men and women. This is a grass roots study of a period of Australian history described by the people to whom it happened, who endured, suffered and made the best of it. But more than that, it is a study in human understanding - as we learn to live someone else's life: to beg for food, to walk miles to find walk, faint with hunger, to jump trains, make clothes out of flour bags, live for days on half a case of rotten pears, to make do...and still preserve our human dignity. The Sydney Morning Herald: 'The range of this book is immense...it should become a major work of reference in Australian social history.'