Tradition has it that the Great Depression of the 1930s swept through Australia like a raging flood, tearing up the garden of the 1920s and imposing terrible suffering on the population at large. David Potts ran a program for his students to interview anyone who remembered the period. After his students interviewed 1,200 Depression survivors, and Potts himself trawled through many first-person accounts, it became evident that adverse impacts of the depression had been over-emphasised - and that good things occurred in the 1930s which the Depression itself did not undermine, and to which it might even have contributed.