Historical information

Dr Michele Matthews has been a local and social historian for nearly three decades since she first used correspondence held by the then Bendigo City Council for her Honours thesis. She is an ardent advocate for the use of local history records to tell Victorian and Australian history from a grassroots perspective. Michele’s MA thesis, ‘A forgotten “Father” of Federation: Sir John Quick 1852‑1911’ (2003), and her PhD thesis, ‘Survivors, schemes, Samaritans and shareholders: the impact of the Great Depression on Bendigo and District 1925‑1935’ (2007), both drew heavily on Bendigo and district records.

Physical description

Michele Matthews Collection: PHD Research - Relief during the great depression

This item includes the following documents:

8672.80a This document is a letter dated 21 July 1934 from the Bendigo Trades Hall Council and Literary Institute to the Town Clerk of Bendigo. It formally protests the Bendigo City Council's decision to employ men receiving unemployment sustenance relief on the renovation of the City Club Hotel.

The Trades Hall Council argues that using sustenance workers on this project is a breach of the Unemployment Relief Act. It maintains that relief labour should only be used for work specifically permitted under the legislation and considers the City's actions to be unjustifiable. As a result, the Council states its intention to raise the issue with the Minister for Sustenance in an effort to prevent relief workers from being used on projects outside the scope of the Act.

The letter also expresses a broader concern about the impact of employing relief workers on jobs that would normally be performed by workers receiving award wages and conditions. The Council fears that expanding the use of sustenance labour could displace regularly employed workers and undermine established employment standards. It argues that the hotel renovation should have been carried out under ordinary employment arrangements rather than by relief labour.

At the bottom of the page are handwritten archival annotations, likely added later. These notes refer to a carbon copy and appear to summarise a subsequent response from the Town Clerk, indicating that the City Council had adopted a policy that, in future, sustenance workers would not be employed on revenue-producing properties, such as the City Club Hotel. The annotations suggest the protest influenced a change in Council policy.