A paper for ‘Cooking and Eating in Adversity’ New Zealand Symposium of Gastronomy and Food History. November 2020
For dole bread is bitter bread
Bitter bread and sour
There’s grief in the taste of it
There’s weevils in the flour
So wrote Australian poet and playwright Dorothy Hewitt in her poem Where I Grew to Be A Man based on the experiences of her friend Vera Deacon who lived on Kooragang Island in the Hunter River at Newcastle. But dole bread is not the whole picture. This paper draws on interviews by Wendy Lowenstein in her 1978 book Weevils in The Flour. An oral record of the 1930s depression in Australia, and the Australian Women’s Mirror magazine during the Depression years, to draw a fuller picture of what Australians ate during those years.
