IMAGE: Image shows a sketch of an interior of the dining hall at Randwick Asylum with children sitting at tables. The hall is decorated perhaps for a Christmas celebration. Source: The Illustrated Sydney News
1890–1940 Depression and war and the beginnings of Commonwealth welfare provision Major trends and influences of the period
When the six Australian colonies came together to form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 the country had just survived a tumultuous decade. In the early 1890s the long economic boom that many Australian colonies had enjoyed ended as the price of wool – Australia’s major export – fell, British banks began to refuse further loans to Australian colonies and British investors began to withdraw their funds from Australian banks.123 Unemployment rose, particularly in the cities and particularly in Melbourne where it was estimated that 28% of trade union members were out of work in 1893.124 At the same time as thousands suffered in the eastern states, Western Australia, which achieved responsible government in 1890, experienced gold rushes, attracting an increase in population, many of whom had left behind the spectre of unemployment in the eastern states to try their luck on the Western Australian goldfields. The new Commonwealth Government did not immediately assume responsibility for the provision of welfare services to Australian citizens. This continued to be administered within states and was still frequently the work of voluntary, charitable or religious organisations. However, an early Act of the Commonwealth Parliament established the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court to arbitrate on industrial relations matters that crossed state boundaries. One early decision of the first president of this court was the Harvester Judgement, set down by Justice Henry Bourne Higgins in 1907 in a case involving H V McKay’s Sunshine Harvester Factory in Victoria. The Harvester Judgement set a new precedent in the concept of a minimum living wage, suggesting that wages should be paid according to what was a decent amount for a man and his wife and family to live on. Though Higgins’s judgement in this case was later overturned by the High Court, the concept of the basic wage – based on the cost of supporting a family – gradually came to be accepted as the basis for determining the wages of Australian men, but not women, during the twentieth century. In 1919 Higgins set the basic wage for women at 54% of the male basic wage.125
Between 1914 and 1918 Australia was at war. Over 58 000 Australian men were killed during World War I, and about four times that many were wounded or suffered illness.126 These huge losses cast a shadow over the newly formed nation. The desire to recognise and reward the sacrifices made by Australian servicemen and their dependants during the war led the Commonwealth Government to legislate for pensions for disabled ex-servicemen, the widows of ex-servicemen and their dependent children even before the war had ended. One aspect of the repatriation plan was the effort to establish ex-servicemen as earners and providers through Soldier Settlement Schemes in the 1920s.127 Over 37 000 ex-servicemen were settled on the land through this scheme, though many ultimately were unable to make
a living from the land.
Australia descended into economic depression again from the late 1920s. As in the lead up to the 1890s depression, Australian governments had borrowed heavily from British investors in the 1920s. Worsening economic conditions globally meant that these sources of funds not only dried up, but British banks began to demand repayment of loans from Australian governments. Once again, there was massive unemployment and consequent misery for thousands of Australians. Thirty percent of workers were estimated to be unemployed at the height of the Depression in 1932.128
Despite the severe impacts of two depressions and World War I, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Australia and New Zealand were dubbed by some overseas observers the ‘social laboratory’ of the world. In Australia this reputation was gained by the democratic forms of government adopted in the colonies in the mid-nineteenth century and the achievements of the trade union movement in such areas as the eight hour day, the achievement of the idea of a minimum ‘living wage’ and the beginnings of a system of social welfare supported by the state.129 These beginnings of a social welfare system were the aged and invalid pensions introduced by the Commonwealth Government in 1909 and 1910 respectively. Many of the ideas behind these democratic and welfare achievements had been imported into Australia by nineteenth century immigrants from Britain and were being debated and introduced overseas. They were not particularly unique to Australasia.
Ideas, attitudes and beliefs
The hardships suffered by much of the Australian population during the 1890s helped to force the beginnings of a rethink about the provision of welfare in Australia, just as the Commonwealth began to take its first steps. The fact that many quite deserving people suffered during the Depression despite the fact that they had lived hitherto thrifty and morally upright lives began to challenge the notion that people brought misery on themselves through their own actions and blurred the lines between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor which had held sway amongst both governments and some charitable organisers during the nineteenth century. Now for the first time, many hardworking people were first to seek charitable assistance as their savings were wiped out. Their exposure to this experience helped to reframe questions about how this charity was delivered. The sheer inability of many established charitable organisations to cope with need during the 1890s helped to pave the way for the introduction of the idea of a national welfare system. The introduction of pensions for the aged in Victoria and New South Wales at the turn of the century and in Commonwealth Legislation in 1908 was a reflection of the beginnings of change in the mentality of entitlement to support.
During the 1890s the belief in the power of a rural ideal as offering more, in terms of independence and self-reliance and in terms of health, than life in the cities was revived once again. Policies to help the urban unemployed during the 1890s depression were an expression of this idea, as were the Soldier Settlement Schemes of the second decade of the twentieth century. Some child welfare authorities also continued to prefer to place the children of the urban poor with rural foster families. From the 1880s, particularly in Victoria, there was a stronger thrust to remove children from what were seen as tainted living environments and successive legislation in many of the colonies broadened the definitions of what constituted a ‘neglected’ child or a child in ‘moral danger’.
At the same time the falling growth of Australia’s population in the last decade of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century prompted a greater concern for preserving infant life and both private and faith based charities and state governments redoubled their efforts to preserve infant life through legislation and through the provision of services for children and mothers. The huge loss of life during World War I added further emphasis to the importance placed on helping children to grow up as strong future citizens of the new nation. Finally the growing numbers of aged people as a proportion of the population, and the increased demand for accommodation for these people during the depression of the 1890s began to force a rethink on the ‘entitlement’ of some portions of society to be supported by that society and not by charity. Many of the immigrants of the nineteenth century who had reached old age by the 1890s had never married or had families and there were growing concerns that these ‘pioneers’ should be adequately cared for.
Recipients of welfare The aged and invalid
From the mid-nineteenth century each of the Australian colonies had offered institutions for the destitute aged and invalid – similar to poor houses. The proportion of ageing Australians within the Australian population increased by 60% in the 1890s; twice the growth rate of the population in general.130 Amid the economic crisis of the 1890s, there was growing pressure on the existing institutions catering for the destitute aged. In Queensland in 1897 the government began paying an allowance of five shillings a week to the aged who remained out of the Dunwich Asylum. This was a cheaper way of supporting these people than had they been placed in the asylum.131 The Victorian, South Australian and New South Wales Parliaments each conducted inquiries into the condition of their aged poor in the late 1890s with the result that both Victoria and New South Wales introduced pensions for the aged in 1900. Although there were economic reasons to introduce pensions, there was also a recognition by some Members of Parliament that an aged pension was ‘a gift’ to those ‘who have for a fair period assisted to create our civilisation, aided in the development of the resources of the country and helped to bear the public burdens of the community by the payment of taxes’.132 Both the NSW and Victorian pensions had certain conditions attached; Victoria’s more rigorous than those in NSW. Some of these conditions were replicated in the Commonwealth Invalid and Old-aged Pensions legislation enacted in 1908. This gave a pension of 10 shillings a week for men over the age of 65 and for women over the age of 60. The pension was means-tested and, like the NSW and Victorian aged pensions, was based on residency in Australia. To qualify for the pension, one had to have lived in Australia for 25 years and be of ‘good character’. Men who had deserted their wives or families within the previous five years were also denied the aged pension. Aboriginal people, Asians and aliens (non-British or Australian-born) were excluded from eligibility.133 The same Act also allowed for invalid pensions to be introduced at a later date. Any person over sixteen who, through accident or being an invalid, was incapacitated for work could apply for an invalid pension. The same restrictions applied as did for the aged pension, although the claimant only had to have resided in Australia for five years. There was an added clause, however, stating that the invalid pension would not be paid to those who had relatives who supported them.134
There was no set amount for the invalid pension. Each case was to be determined by the Commissioner of Pensions.135 By 1913, 82 943 Australians had taken up the pension. Nevertheless, the government destitute or benevolent asylums remained for the really poor aged and private charities continued to offer shelters for the homeless. Moreover, as was pointed out in the annual report of the State Children Relief Board of NSW in 1920, poverty remained a problem for the families of incapacitated or invalid men, who received the invalid pension but had little other income to rely on.136
The unemployed
Severe economic crises in both the 1890s and the 1930s threw many Australians out of work. In the 1890s the colonial government initially relied on the private and philanthropic charities to offer sustenance in the form of food rations, though the Western Australian Government did provide some cash payments to the destitute. In the 1890s some colonial governments, such as New South Wales, established labour bureaus where the unemployed could register for work and employers could hire them. Victoria’s first labour bureau was established by the Salvation Army in 1889 and later taken over by the government.137 In Victoria during the early 1890s, clergyman Horace Tucker and Charles Strong, the founder of the Australian Church, pioneered the idea of village settlements for the unemployed and their families. The village settlements were intended to be cooperative rural settlements to which the unemployed of the city could move with their families and work small farms. Tucker and Strong established such settlements in Gippsland and central Victoria between 1892 and 1894, though they ultimately failed due to inadequate capital and mismanagement.138 Nevertheless, a number of colonial governments legislated to settle the families of the urban unemployed in village settlements during the 1890s and village settlements were established in Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales under this legislation. In Tasmania, while there was no formal legislation, a small village settlement was established at Southport. Alongside the village settlements, some colonial governments also established labour colonies, such as at Leongatha in Victoria where unemployed men worked at clearing forests and farming in exchange for subsistence wages. A similar labour colony was established in 1896 at Pitt Town in NSW.
During the 1920s the Commonwealth Government attempted, and failed, to introduce a national insurance scheme to cover those who might be incapacitated for work. The Queensland Labor Government, however, succeeded in passing the Unemployed Workers Insurance Act in 1922. The scheme was intended mainly to cover seasonal workers such as shearers and cane cutters whose work left them vulnerable to regular periods of unemployment. Employers, employees and the government contributed equally to this insurance scheme. While there was support in place for the aged, the invalid and poor families via destitute boards and child welfare departments by the 1920s, there was still no formal support system in place to cope with the massive unemployment that descended on the Australian workforce once again during the 1930s. As in the 1890s, some state governments relied initially on subsidising private charities to distribute relief in the form of food, sustenance and rations, while other governments such as South Australia continued the system of distributing sustenance through its government Destitute Board.139 The unemployed were often required to register with labour bureaus in order to qualify for this sustenance and the process could be demeaning. In Queensland, for example, applicants for sustenance had to sign a statement declaring that they were indigent.140
In some states single men were ineligible for sustenance. They were herded into unemployed camps, away from the city, such as at the Broadmeadows Army Camp in Victoria or Black Boy Hill in Western Australia. The Commonwealth Government made available funds for the relief of the unemployed. However, it was left up to the state governments to disburse this funding. It was largely distributed as sustenance, not cash, in exchange for labour on public works, sometimes administered by municipal authorities, as well as state governments. The work was usually rostered amongst the unemployed to spread the share. The work provided was hard physical labour. Amongst the public relief works offered during the Depression was forestry and many young, single unemployed men were directed to forestry camps in rural areas. Reforestation, swamp drainage and land reclamation, road construction and the construction and beautification of public parks were amongst the kinds of work offered in return for rations to unemployed men. The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne was one project constructed by unemployed relief workers.141
IMAGE: Image shows an interior black and white photo of a hospital interior named the Anzac Hostel Ward, 1919. The photo shows a home-like interior with three patients in bed looking at the camera and a nurse, standing, also looking at the camera. Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial. Photo ID number H13066.
Ex-servicemen
Ex-servicemen and the families of deceased ex-servicemen were the recipients of substantial amounts of assistance after World War I, through the newly established Commonwealth Department of Repatriation, through state government bodies and through self-help groups, such as the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia, later called the Returned Services League of Australia. Three thousand unemployed ex-servicemen were given work constructing the memorial Great Ocean Road in Victoria from 1919 to 1932.142 Incapacitated returned servicemen and their wives and children were assisted through a number of repatriation measures established by the Commonwealth even before the war had ended. These included pensions for incapacitated ex-servicemen and their wives and dependent children, assistance with building homes through the War Service Homes Scheme, and the Soldier Settlement Scheme, which, once again, attempted to offer an independent living to individuals and families through settlement on the land. Some state-funded psychiatric hospitals expanded their facilities in the wake of the war, while some, such as Mont Park Hospital in outer Melbourne, were established specifically to cater for the war wounded. Repatriation hospitals were also established to care for war wounded. Many permanently disabled ex-servicemen lived out their days in ANZAC Hostels established in each state. These were often located in large homes that were donated for the purpose of caring for returned soldiers. Some of these ANZAC Hostels would later become aged care facilities for returned servicemen or war widows.
Children
From the late nineteenth century in the Australian colonies there was a broadening interest in rescuing children from what were perceived to be circumstances dangerous to their physical and moral development. Inspired by the international child rescue movement, reformers such as Selina Sutherland in Victoria, advocated removing children from slum environments or places of perceived moral danger such as hotels and brothels. The child rescue movement was most strongly expressed in Victoria, where legislation in 1887 included provision to allow privately licensed organisations or individuals to legally apprehend children perceived to be in danger or neglected and act as guardians to these children, as a parallel system of child care to that operated by the state. In some colonies societies for the prevention of cruelty to children were established in the 1890s as part of the broader movement of child rescue.
Between the 1880s and the First World War each Australian colony/state moved to establish government departments specifically devoted to managing, controlling and protecting children, as distinct from including them within the purview of a larger department for the destitute. Queensland was the last to do so in 1911. In the same period, the parameters for which a child could be committed to the care of the state were broadened. Legislation in all colonies allowed for the removal of the children of drunkards and vagrants, and children who were ill-treated or simply not being properly cared for. Children found in brothels or licensed premises, found begging or selling newspapers unlicensed in the street at night could be taken into the care of the state. Much of the legislation also made it difficult for parents to retrieve their children once they had been committed to state care. The legislation provided that children would be committed to state care through the court system and in the first decade of the twentieth century each of the states established Children’s Courts. These segregated cases in which children were being tried, as either neglected or delinquent, from other court rooms and limited access to these court rooms to only those people directly involved. While many children continued to be boarded out (sometimes to their parents), there still existed a range of institutional residences for children in all the states, some of them licensed to ‘rescue’ children, others approved to accept state wards for whom the government paid an allowance.
In addition, in some states a parallel system of voluntary homes still accepted children who were, in the main, not wards of the state. Though subsidised by the state, these institutions depended on private subscriptions or donations. The Catholic orphanages and industrial schools also relied on the free labour and religious devotion of religious sisters or brothers. Often these were the institutions to which parents turned for temporary help to care for their children in times of family crisis. Most states had adopted a system of boarding out for wards of the state in the late nineteenth century, though some institutions remained, particularly those operated by the Catholic Church, which distrusted the boarding out system’s ability to ensure that children would receive an adequate religious education. By the 1930s the use of boarding out began to wane in some states.143 In Victoria this was due not only to a shortage of suitable foster parents, many of whom could no longer afford to care for children on the meagre allowance they were paid, but also to heightened concerns that children were endangered in some private homes, where foster parents accepted children for the money and cheap labour they brought in, but did not provide adequate care for them.144
Parallel with the broadening interest in ‘rescuing’ children from neglect or moral danger was a burgeoning interest in the welfare of infants. In part this was a response to the despair of authorities over the nation’s falling birth rate during the 1890s. But in Victoria, where the first Infant Life Protection Act was passed in 1890, the renewed interest in the care of infants was spurred by alarming reports of the deaths of infants in the care of ‘baby farmers’. Single mothers of illegitimate children often had little alternative but to pay other women to care for their infants while they worked to earn a living. The widely publicised deaths of some infants in the care of such women in Victoria led the Victorian Parliament to move to require that anyone receiving payment for the care of infants under the age of two be licensed and their premises registered. The legislation gave police the power to inspect these premises and the condition of the babies therein. Infants found to be neglected could be removed to the custody of the Department of Neglected Children. Amendments to this legislation in the following decade required the mothers of these infants to pay for their support through the department. The other Australian colonies followed Victoria’s lead in the first decade of the twentieth century, requiring registration of premises, regular inspections and imposing penalties for breaches of the legislation.
A number of the older women’s refuges that had been established in the mid-nineteenth century began offering longer term care both before and after birth for single mothers and their babies in the 1890s. Others were newly established by religious organisations, such as the Salvation Army or Catholic religious orders. Women could enter the homes during their pregnancy and stay on to nurse their babies for up to twelve months afterwards. Some were initiated by members of the growing middle class of women interested in children’s and women’s welfare who hoped to both save the lives of infants and assist single mothers. The survival of babies in these institutions depended fairly strongly on their mothers being present to breastfeed them in their first year. The alternatives to breast milk, such as cow’s milk, presented huge dangers to infants. After World War I, many new babies’ homes emerged which did not offer accommodation for mothers once the babies had been born.145 Using the new ideology of ‘scientific mothering’, propounded by such people as Dr Frederic Truby King, these homes could artificially feed infants with some success and aimed to have babies adopted out, rather than seeking to assist their mothers to keep them. The Methodist Babies’ Home in Melbourne, established by slum reclamation reformer Oswald Barnett, was an example of such a home. Mothers were not accommodated and Methodist families were actively sought to adopt children and rear the babies. An alternative to this kind of approach to single mothers and their babies was offered by the NSW State Children’s Relief Board in the 1910s and 1920s when it established two ‘working mothers’ hostels’ where single mothers, who were themselves wards of the state, could board with their babies and go out to work each day, leaving the children to be cared for at the hostel.146
From the 1890s groups of philanthropic women began to focus on providing free kindergartens for the children of working class mothers. The kindergartens essentially provided free day care, but also mixed this with the education of working class mothers about appropriate nutrition and education for their pre-school age children. The earliest free kindergartens were based in working class suburbs and, while offering oversight of the children, also freed women up to work without worrying about their children. Feminist Maybanke Anderson established the first free kindergarten in Sydney at Woolloomooloo in 1895.147 The movement spread to the other states in the first decade of the twentieth century. Edith Cowan was instrumental in establishing the first free kindergarten in Western Australia.148 As many of these early free kindergartens provided only limited hours of care, they proved to be of limited social use for working mothers.149 At the beginning of the twentieth century, therefore, day nurseries began to appear in working class suburbs, offering longer daily hours of care and a greater emphasis on the physical health of the children rather than on their education. Gradually kindergartens, with their limited hours, began to be seen as more the province of the middle classes.150
IMAGE: Image shows a black and white photo of a family walking away from the Randwick Military Hospital (later known as the Prince of Wales Hospital). The photos shows a close up of soldier in uniform, a young boy in white shorts, shirt and hat holding the hands of the soldier and women on the other side (presumably his mother and father). The woman is also carrying a young infant. Courtesy of Australian War Memorial, ID Number H18785
Similarly, it was frequently, though not always, women, many of them doctors, who were behind the establishment of infant welfare facilities in each of the Australian states in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. Again, the first infant welfare clinics were often sited in urban working class neighbourhoods. They offered training and advice for mothers on how to best rear their children and, in the 1920s, frequently began to espouse the principles of scientific mothering – involving strict routines for mother and baby – in order to assist mothers in raising healthy children. While some state governments assumed responsibility for their infant welfare systems by the 1920s, South Australia’s Mothers and Babies Health Association remained an independent association until the 1970s. In other states, municipal governments assumed responsibility for providing infant welfare centres and proudly pointed to the establishment of new centres as evidence of municipal progress. Infant welfare or child health centres gradually spread across all municipalities around Australia in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1939 the Commonwealth Government funded the establishment in each capital city of one model infant welfare and kindergarten centre, the Lady Gowrie Centres. These were named after Lady Zara Gowrie, the wife of the then Governor-General.
The Commonwealth Government contributed its bit towards the health of mothers and babies with the introduction of a maternity allowance in 1912. The £5 offered per birth was intended to reduce both infant and maternal mortality by ensuring that women could afford to have a doctor in attendance for the births of their children.151 The maternity allowance was not means-tested and was payable to both married and unmarried mothers. It was not extended, however, to Indigenous mothers.
Aboriginal Australians
The early twentieth century was marked by ever greater controls and restrictions on the freedom of movement of Aboriginal people and the removal of Aboriginal children from their families in several of the Australian states. Legislation in all the mainland Australian colonies around the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century sought to restrict Aboriginal people to designated reserves and to control their movements and actions within these reserves. Most of the legislation also allowed the Aboriginal Protector greater control over Aboriginal children, including the power to remove them from their families. Though each of the Acts included the word ‘Protection’ and established Boards of Protection or Aboriginal Protectors, each of the Acts attempted to impose rigid control over Aboriginal people’s lives, including, in the cases of the Western Australian, Queensland and South Australian legislation, control over the placement of Aboriginal and ‘half-caste’ children. The Queensland Act of 1897 gave the Queensland Government the right to move children to orphanages and industrial schools, as did the South Australian Aborigines (Training of Children) Act 1923. In Queensland a number of industrial and reformatory schools specifically designed for Aboriginal children were opened from the end of the 1890s. Some were still operating in the 1960s. In addition, from the early years of the twentieth century, some Queensland Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in church-run orphanages and industrial schools.152 Between 1905 and 1920 in Western Australia the Protector of Aborigines established a number of ‘settlements’, some based in existing missions and others, such as Moore River, newly established. Aboriginal people were ‘encouraged’ to move onto these settlements by such means as the refusal of rations if they remained outside the settlement. Children were removed from their families and placed in dormitories and schools elsewhere, while those above the age of fourteen were sent to the missions and settlements to work.153 In 1915 legislation in New South Wales was amended to allow the Aboriginal Protection Board to remove older children – mainly girls – from their families on reserves and place them as apprentices or in children’s homes. Prior to this amendment the board had had to prove to the Children’s Court that Aboriginal children were neglected before removing them from their families. Under the new legislation they did not have to do this.154 By the mid-twentieth century in some states there were extreme restrictions on the freedoms of Aboriginal people within the reserves, though not all Aboriginal people submitted to moving onto reserves and some continued to live outside them. By contrast, though the Tasmanian Government established the Cape Barren Island Reserve by an Act of Parliament in 1907, formalising the long-established settlement of Cape Barren Islanders, there was no formal attempt by the Tasmanian Government to regulate or control the Aboriginal people resident on the reserve.155
Providers of welfare
The depression of the 1890s saw the emergence of a number of new private charitable organisations in the Australian colonies. In Victoria, there were 30 more of these bodies at the end of the decade than there had been at the beginning.156 To the established benevolent and visiting societies and the Catholic orders who had already made their appearance, a number of other groups, most of them originating in Christian denominations, were added. These included the Catholic St Vincent de Paul Society, whose presence in Australia had waxed and waned in the mid-nineteenth century, and City Mission Societies, originating in Protestant congregations, often those of a Wesleyan background. The Salvation Army made its first appearance in Adelaide in 1881 and by 1891 had a presence in all Australian colonies. It has been argued that organisations such as the Wesleyan Mission Societies, the Salvation Army and the St Vincent de Paul Society offered less judgement of those needing assistance than the older benevolent societies and government destitute agencies and that the Christian-based societies discriminated less between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.157
These groups followed the examples set by such independent reformers as Dr John Singleton in Victoria and George Ardill in New South Wales who, as evangelistic Christians, had helped to establish practical forms of assistance such as free medical dispensaries and homes for homeless or unemployed men and women from the 1880s. Groups such as the Salvation Army and Wesleyan City Missions established a range or ‘chain’ of services – to the homeless, the unemployed and prisoners – as well as refuges for pregnant and single women. Some of them also became involved in child rescue work, establishing children’s homes as well as reformatories and industrial schools licensed to accept wards of the state and children who were privately placed in these institutions. The Salvation Army operated a number of girls’ and boys’ reformatories in several Australian states. There is some evidence that these private or religiously run children’s institutions performed the role of temporary carers of children at times of family distress, thus averting the need for parents to surrender their children permanently to state care.158 While women had always served as the volunteers in visiting societies and benevolent societies in nineteenth century, they began to take more active roles as advocates, particularly in the areas of women’s and children’s health at the beginning of the twentieth century.
IMAGE: Image shows the front view of the Kew Lunatic Asylum building. Courtesy of Heritage Victoria.
Private and religious charities continued to provide not only immediate and longer term assistance but also ideas for reform, particularly in response to needs they perceived during the depression of the 1930s. The Brotherhood of St Lawrence was initiated by Anglican Minister Gerard Tucker, the son of Horace Tucker, in 1930 and instigated schemes for the homeless and elderly, as well as advocating for slum abolition. Methodist Frederic Oswald Barnett also campaigned for slum abolition, convincing the Victorian state government to establish a Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board in 1936. Eventually this would lead to the establishment of the Housing Commission of Victoria in 1938. In 1932 in New South Wales, Canon R B S Hammond responded to the challenges of unemployment and forced evictions in inner Sydney by purchasing land at Liverpool and offering easy terms for families to build their own homes on an acre each of land, paying it off slowly. To qualify for a home at Hammondville, the families had to have at least three children, have an unemployed breadwinner and be facing eviction. By 1937, 110 homes had been built at Hammondville.159 In Western Australia during the Depression, a wealthy businessman, Charles McNess, donated money to the Workers’ Home Board for the establishment of a trust to provide homes for the aged, ill and permanently incapacitated. The McNess Trust Scheme, as it was called, continued until 1968.160
The First World War stimulated the growth of a number of volunteer patriotic societies across Australia, notable amongst them the Australian Red Cross Society. After the war ex-servicemen came together to form self-help and advocacy groups such as the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (later shortened to the Returned Servicemen’s League) which would become a strong advocate for the rights and interests of returned service people in the twentieth century. Legacy, formed initially by an ex-serviceman to help other ex-servicemen in business, turned its focus to assisting the children of deceased servicemen in 1925.
State governments strengthened their roles as guardians of an ever-widening circle of children in the early twentieth century and, in some instances, extended their obligations to assist people even further. In the 1920s, for example, the Labor Government in New South Wales introduced both widows’ pensions and child endowment. Some state governments also introduced housing schemes to improve access to decent housing. In Queensland in 1909 the Workers’ Dwelling Act aimed to provide cheap housing for workers. The New South Wales Government began building workers’ homes in Daceyville in 1912.161 The Western Australian Government passed legislation establishing the Workers’ Home Board in the same year.
The Commonwealth Government had gone a small way to introducing universal benefits for citizens early in its development with the introduction of aged and invalid pensions, a maternity allowance for mothers and a repatriation scheme for those who had served in World War I and their dependants. But the government’s role in alleviating unemployment and the consequent widespread distress during the 1930s had been limited and it would not be until the conditions of World War II had engulfed Australia that the Commonwealth Government would assume a greater role in the provision of welfare to a much broader sweep of Australians.
Period summary 1890–1940
After Federation, the responsibility for the provision of welfare services continued to be administered within the states and was increasingly the work of voluntary, charitable or religious organisations.
The economic depressions of the 1890s and again in the 1920s saw a change in people’s attitudes to
the poor. The weight and impact of economic and social change outside of an individual’s control meant that idea of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor no longer seemed reasonable to apply. The inability of existing charity infrastructure to cope with the number of people in need during the depressions paved the way for a national welfare system.
The concept of direct payments to those in need developed. Aged and invalid pensions were established by the Commonwealth in 1909 and 1910. By 1911 each state had established a government department for the care, management and protection of children. These departments had the authority to rescue children from physical and moral harm and take them into the care of the state. Throughout the early twentieth century, state governments strengthened their roles as guardians of an ever widening group of children.
Religious and charitable organisations continued to assert their influence and control through the establishment of a range of services and institutions for the homeless, the unemployed, prisoners, single mothers, orphans and women. Institutions included children's homes, reformatories, orphanages and industrial schools licensed to accept wards of the state.
IMAGE: Image shows black and white photo taken in 1836 during the depression in Australia. The photo shows the poor standard of housing in an older inner city suburb of Melbourne. Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria. Oswald Barnett Collection.
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