Garrie Felsted Wells

Interviewed by Zoe Dobson on 24th July 2003
Subject: The Depression

Zoe Dobson. Were you aware of the Depression in your younger years and did it affect your father’s employment at all?

Garrie Felsted Wells. Yes it did and as a rubber planter there was a rubber slump and that was one of the reasons they didn’t go back to the East. I can remember very vividly when I was only about five sitting in St. Vincent’s outpatients with my mother to see a doctor and the nuns saying to her, ‘you’ll have to go home and come back tomorrow’, and my mother saying, ‘I can’t afford the tram fare tomorrow , I’m going to stay until I see a doctor’.

When we’d seen the doctor we went home through Anzac Parade and there was my father with a gang of men working on the roads and that was a great shock and surprise to me to see him with a pick and shovel with all these men working because he was fairly cultured English gentleman I suppose. According to my mother they did have dole cards but he always managed to get work and so they didn’t have to use the dole cards.