The radical history of Australia’s property market.

Skyrocketing property prices and an impossible rental market have seen growing numbers of Australians struggling to find a place to live.

Recent images of families pitching tents or living out of cars evoke some of the more enduring scenes from the Great Depression. Australia was among the hardest hit countries when global wool and wheat prices plummeted in 1929.

By 1931, many were feeling the effects of long-term unemployment, including widespread evictions from their homes. The evidence was soon seen and felt as shanty towns – known as dole camps – mushroomed in and around urban centres across the country.

How we responded to that housing crisis, and how we talk about those events today, show how our attitudes about poverty, homelessness and welfare are entwined with questions of national identity.

Shanty towns and eviction riots

Sydney’s Domain, Melbourne’s Dudley Flats and the banks of the River Torrens in Adelaide were just a few places where communities of people experiencing homelessness sprung up in the early 1930s.

Some lived in tents, others in makeshift shelters of iron, sacking, wood and other scavenged materials. Wooden crates, newspapers and flour and wheat sacks were put to numerous inventive domestic uses, such as for furniture and blankets. Camps were rife with lice, fevers and dysentery, all treated with home remedies.

But many Australians fought eviction from their homes in a widespread series of protests and interventions known as the anti-eviction movement.

As writer Iain McIntyre outlines in his work Lock Out The Landlords: Australian Anti-Eviction Resistance 1929-1936, these protests were an initiative of members of the Unemployed Workers Movement – a kind of trade union of the jobless.

As explained by writers Nadia Wheatley and Drew Cottle,