As work became scarce, and unemployment numbers rose, even the most careful of savers found themselves hovering on and sinking below the bread line.
At one point, the number of unemployed reached 900, a large number for the town’s size — in 1934-35 the population was 6000, in 1935-36, 6200, and 1936-37, 6500.
The Argus reported in June, 1930 that a group of 100 unemployed men had mustered at the railway station to air their grievances.
An upsurge in resentment was aired against numbers of Melbourne’s workless being sent to Shepparton to find work, when there were already 300 locals out of work.
The newspaper also reported that a soup kitchen set up by the Ladies Benevolent Society to provide weekly sustenance benefits was a “failure”, with the single men declining soup, but asking instead for meat and other goods that were earmarked for married men and their families.
Despite the hardships, development continued on various fronts with the town’s fire station remodelled, and a Shepparton Symphony Orchestra formed.
Welcome distraction from the privations of the Depression came in the form of the beloved thoroughbred Phar Lap, the odds-on favourite, winning the Melbourne Cup, and the emergence during the Test series in England of the young gun batsman, Donald Bradman, who would write himself into the international cricket pantheon for years to come.
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