There were possiby thousands of youngers in the same boat as jim westcott in 1931, but that doesn't help much when the decks are awash and the water rising about your knees. Jims father had thought to spare him the vicious cycle of slack work periods by giving him an education that lifted him above the mass of manual worker turned adrift at the frist breath of adverse trade conditions. It had meant a scrape to keep him on at high school and fit him for a business career, but it had seemed worth it, to visualize young Jim as one of the staff in some big concern, staying on in the organization while mere 'hands' were put off. Now, however whole works were shut down throughout the country. People were saying it was the collapse of the entire economic order.
The lad couldn't make head or tail of it. He wondered how those heros of the industrial world would have fared if they had found such conditions about them at the outset of their careers. Some of the endowers of libraries and universities held up to the youth of the country as shining examples of what any young man with push could do had started life selling papers, cleaning windows any of the lowlier tasks. But how would they have fared in a world too poor to buy papers, too bankrupt to pay for Windows being cleaned? He would have blacked boots if there was subsistence to be made at it, for his education had not been of the kind that engender a contempt for work as such. It all seemed a dark conspiracy aimed directly at him and his cherished ambitions. All his sturdy independence revolted at the idea of going down to register as unemployed and getting on the dole. His fathers words of contempt for those who accepted the dole still rang in his ears though to-day his whole attitude had changed. The state said old westcott now simply owed it to the citizens to see that they had sustenance if it couldn't order things any better than to see them thrown idle in millions.
Perhaps it did. Young Jim couldn't contradict it, but neither could he stifle the rage against his own feeling of futility. Depression or no depression there still were men in jobs. Why should he stand out? Even the food bought by folk on the dole had to be raised by some one, had to be shipped and railed packed and unpacked and sold acrosd the counter. At seventeen abstraction fail to satisfy; theory cut no ice. He went about clenching his teeth on the cry that rose to his lips: Let me do something- Do SOMETHING!
For the umpteenth time he walked on past the ministry of Labour bureau, as he had walked past again and again on the previous day, finding it impossible to drag his feet over the threshold and join that line of dejected people shuffling forward to sign forms and obtain cards. Cards! Who wanted rubbishing cards? Why must you humiliate yourself by putting on record above your signature that you couldn't find yourself a niche? It was a good signature, too. He had imagined it on elaborately printed company cheques over the small printed line: managing director- no, he couldn't do it.
Avid reading told him that things were the same all over the world, yet he felt that if he could only get away somewhere he could force his way into something. The Commonwealth government of Australia, he read, were subsizing mining prospectors to go out and look for gold. If he could only get out there and dig in some lost gorge in the desert mountain who know but he might strike gold? It became an obsession which him. Stories of Ballarat and bendigo came back to him vivldy from school history.
