Fighting Back

Work for the Dole is not a new idea. It was introduced in Victoria in 1932 and became one of the battlegrounds of unemployed politics. The provision and administration of sustenance, relief work, eviction of tenants from their homes, the issue of free speech-these were the major issues confronting unemployed workers and their families and organisations, and they fought successive governments over each one. Written in a pleasingly clear and accessible style, this absorbing work shows how complex unemployed politics was, and situates it in the long history of agitation by unemployed workers. It takes issue with the prevailing historical orthodoxy that unemployed workers in Australia during the Great Depression were introspective, politically apathetic and concerned only with survival. It shows that, to the contrary, they were active, organised and remarkably successful in their aims. It also shows that government unemployment relief was as much a product of this agitation as it was of government policies and preferences. Yet the movement was always pulled in other direction; by the hunger and poverty of its members, by their need simply to survive, by the diseng