Unemployment hit Northcote as hard as the rest of the state, where in 1931 the figures for those who were out of work were around 26 per cent.¹² Andrew Lemon writes in his history of Northcote, The Northcote side of the river, that more than 1500 people in the municipality were registered as receiving sustenance. Taking their families into account, Lemon estimates that around 5000 of Northcote's 42,000 residents were reliant on sustenance handouts. But, he adds, many more were affected than the bare figures suggest. Even for those in work, average full-time weekly wages dropped from £5 to £3/17/10 in 1931. 'Thousands more were in insecure or rationed employment, had received pay cuts, were not eligible for assistance or did not take the dole.'¹³

Things were clearly already bad in early 1931 when the secretary of Northcote High School, Mr HF Tulloch, wrote several letters to the Education Minister to inform him of the enormous hardship the fees were causing to the school community. He recommended that 'in the present state of finance all pupils receive free tuition at least until things become somewhere near normal'. The next day he wrote again, asking that 'serious consideration be given to the question of lightening the burden of parents anxious to provide for the future well-being of their children'.

Mr Tulloch and the anxious parents were smartly put in their place by a reply from the Minister's office a week later. The request could not be agreed to, the Minister pointed out, 'because the government will have great difficulty ... finding the necessary money for the work of the department'. The amount it would lose out on by eliminating fees would be about £25 000, he estimated, 'and this is too serious an item to forgo'. Mr Tulloch made one more attempt in February, adding that 'I am only asking for assistance owing to the present state of depression'.¹⁴

Northcote High School, 1930. Courtesy Northcote High School

In fact, by 1931 the government was under increasing pressure over its expenditure on state education. The previous year, Sir Otto Niemeyer, a representative of the Bank of England to which the Australian Government was heavily indebted, had visited the Premier's Conference in Melbourne to give guidance on how the country's leaders could steer the country out of the Depression. His advice was clear-cut: the states would have to cut their public expenditure by around 25 per cent.¹⁵

State education was an obvious target for the spending cuts. After the railways, it was the biggest single item in the government's budget - representing 10 per cent of expenditure. And, unlike the railways, it didn't produce any direct returns or revenue.¹⁶ In the light of the financial crisis, the ever-present, but until now distant, grumblings against state secondary education became a din.

In November 1932, Dr Clive Shields of the United Australia Party wrote an opinion piece in The Age, declaring that free (sic) secondary education had caused 'grave economic harm' to the state. Over-educated children expected jobs in the public service, he pointed out, where they would further drain the public purse.¹⁷