‘Clean and Comfortable and Respectable’: Working-class Aspirations and the Australian 1920 Royal Commission on the Basic Wage

Abstract

In 1920 the Australian government established a Royal Commission on the Basic Wage with a brief to enquire into and report on the living standards of the working population. Many women and men testified before it. Their evidence provides not only extraordinarily detailed and intimate portraits of the everyday lives of working-class households but more important reveals a process of struggle around competing interpretations of the situation and needs of the 'normal' Australian family of the early interwar period.' By listening to the voices of the working people who testified to the Commission, it is possible to trace something of the way in which they 'made history' through their determination to maintain what they saw as appropriate conditions and standards of behaviour on the part of household members. The opening decades of the century were years of relative economic prosperity in Australia with further expansion of the major urban centres; the Australian predilection for suburban family living was already evident.2 Following Federation in 1901, the contours of the twentieth century's political system were established: at both state and federal levels, liberalism and labour concurred on the desirability of an interventionist state. Amongst the many legislative measures of this period were pensions for the