AustLit

'Reflecting on the process of writing history, Tom Griffiths argues that it is ‘the product of a fascinating struggle between imagination and evidence’. He adds that ‘it is our job to release reality, enable it to be seen, enable voices and silences to be heard’. Many Australian historians have expended considerable effort in seeking to understand the reality of the Great Depression of the 1930s, analysing its political, economic, social and cultural dimensions. There are still, however, ‘voices and silences to be heard’, including those of Brisbane women who suffered financial hardships in this period and who actively responded to those hardships by accessing government relief, generating income and reducing their and their families' expenditure. Attempting to retrieve and evaluate those responses suggests that the ‘voices’ are inevitably accompanied by ‘silences’ — that the pictorial, documentary and oral sources which offer valuable insights into Brisbane women's lives also prompt questions that cannot be answered from those sources. In addition to providing an overview of how Brisbane women ‘made ends meet’ during the Depression, this article emphasises the limits of historical knowledge. Those limits are especially apparent in my attempt to reconstruct — or imagine — the experiences of one of the hundreds of unemployed women who visited the Female Labour Exchange during the 1930s.' (Introduction)