The Outcasts of Melbourne by Graeme Davison David Dunstan Chris McConville

Author:Graeme Davison, David Dunstan, Chris McConville [Graeme Davison, David Dunstan, Chris McConville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367719869
Google: udI6zgEACAAJ
Amazon: B00GRK3L1C
Goodreads: 23998985
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 1985-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Consider the effort required to meet this emergency, the long list of separate agencies who were called upon to give help: the local church, the MLA, the town clerk of Prahran, the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, the Charity Organisation Society, the Premier of Victoria, the railway authorities, the carter, two private benefactors and the Austins’ country friends. Hall was at the centre, indefatigable in his efforts to promote and coordinate aid to the family. In some ways his task was simpler than that of the modern social worker: Hall apparently had personal and immediate access to competent officials from the Premier down; but mobilising and coordinating ten separate bodies, as well as Mr and Mrs Austin themselves, was a complex undertaking requiring all the powers of persistence, persuasion and patience at his command.

The view of Prahran’s poor which comes to us through Hall’s journals is inevitably coloured by his theological outlook and evangelistic purpose; yet between the lines of his reports there are also many clues to the way in which his mission was interpreted by its subjects. The dominant mood of the poor appears to have been one of resignation and acceptance. To those who had known nothing else, the charity system must have seemed an immutable part of the social system. The households of Prahran were reservoirs of grief, struggle and endurance; some cried against their hard fate, but most seemed to accept and expect it. The most troublesome cases of melancholy and resentment that Hall came across were those of middle-class people who had come down in the world. Mrs Beaumont, of Davis St, when Hall first met her, in 1891, was ‘passing through a severe loss through the failure of a financial institution’.25 She fell into a profound depression, and loss of religious faith. Hall’s entry for 29 June 1894 — ‘Mrs Beaumont is still in the same sad condition’ — is typical of his almost weekly references to her for the next ten years.

Hall’s own view was that bereavements, illnesses, and poverty were part of life’s discipline, put upon us to show our frailty and need for God. This was the attitude he brought to his own troubles — the loss of two sons in infancy, and the breadline wage the mission reduced him to throughout the depression, on which he had to support a wife and four small daughters. He held the common view that the depression of the 1890s was God’s punishment on an arrogant, frivolous and godless people. On 17 May 1893 he notes: ‘Continued visitation in Andrew St, keeping the claims of the Lord before the people, and making special allusion to the cause of the great depression — our national sin … Attending mtg for national humiliation and prayer, in the Prahran Town Hall, at 3 p.m.’

Most of the families Hall visited would probably not have disagreed with this grim verdict. Those with some notion of Christianity gained perhaps from Sunday school in their youth, and even those with no knowledge of the faith at all, had no thought that the world was other than as Christians portrayed it.

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