MARIBYRNONG’S May White and Joyce Turner know a thing or two about saving their pennies.

May, 100, and her daughter Joyce, 81, have no reason to fear the big R word, recession.

They still remember a much tougher time – the Great Depression. “You just had to be very careful,” Joyce, who was a child at the time, said.

The White family, who were living in Flemington when the Depression started in the early 1930s, considered themselves fairly lucky. They moved to Hocking St, where they rented for a couple of years before buying their first house in Barkly St for 685 pounds.

May’s husband Gordon joined hundreds of retrenched workers to work on the railway lines in an early take on the work-for-the-dole scheme. Gordon later found work at the Newport Quarry in 1939. May started work at Angliss in the mid-1930s to boost the family budget. She said it was harder for men than women to find work in those times.

The White family was not as dependent on energy-guzzling whitegoods and household appliances as families today are. They had an open fireplace to heat their home, and had to hand wash all the clothes.

May always made the most of the groceries in the pantry and would make daily trips to the cornershop for bread and milk. She would only buy meat and vegetables on an as-needs basis.

“There was no McDonald’s, no supermarkets. You would go to the Victoria Market. It’s still a great place,” she said. “As kids, we always got first preference. Mum and Dad might have got less to eat, but we were never hungry,” Joyce added.

“You wouldn’t be buying takeaway, you would use any leftovers for dinner the next day. You wouldn’t waste anything. Mum was a good housekeeper. She can make up food out of anything.”

The family would make weekly treks to the Kensington Town Hall for food and clothing coupons, but May, a keen seamstress, was also chief clothes maker and mender. The pair said the old habits were hard to break.

“If you’ve been through that (the Depression), the habits carry through.”