When John Andrews was 51, he lost his job. It was the early 1990s, Bob Hawke was prime minister, Paul Keating treasurer, and Australia was in deep recession. Unemployment was close to 11%. Andrews was just one of the many, suddenly out of work after three decades working in IT. “As the saying goes, they let me go.”

Andrews had never been out of work and the experience changed him. He got short-term jobs here and there, but didn’t find a permanent role for five years. For most of that time he survived on unemployment benefits. It wasn’t just the recession; it was his age, a form of discrimination that lingers still.

“I soon found out that it was hard for a 50-year-old to get employment,” he says. “The thing that I remember most is when I was being interviewed by one of these placement organisations and the person interviewing me said something like, ‘well the manager of this area is 35 and my feeling is that he won’t be entirely happy having 50-year-olds working for him’.”

At the same time, Andrews’ son Paul, aged 20, had graduated with an arts degree at the University of Sydney and couldn’t find a job. He, too, went on unemployment benefits. “I walked straight bang into a year’s worth of unemployment; it was not a predicament I ever expected myself to be in.” Recessions hit young people especially hard. Companies cut back apprenticeships and put on fewer trainees. In 1992, the unemployment rate for 20-to-24-year-olds reached 17%.

Behind economic data, inflation reports, consumer confidence measures, interest rates, business investment, there are human beings. Buffeted by international headwinds, Australia’s economic growth is at its lowest since the global financial crisis a decade ago, with stagnant wage growth and limp consumer confidence and business investment. Last week saw another hint of a stumbling economy – with lacklustre retail spending the weakest since the 1990s recession – and this week saw the jobs rate drop for the first time in three years.

But economists such as Stephen Koukoulas don’t believe a recession is likely, taking into account factors such as infrastructure spending and healthy exports. The reserve bank’s interest rate cuts may begin to have an impact on household spending, although they have not done so yet.

A headline from the Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 15 December 1990.

Whether or not a recession is likely, few Australians remember what a recession actually is. Sixty percent of the current workforce was too young to be in work when the last recession hit in 1990, 29 years ago.

The conventional definition of recession – two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product growth – is often considered inadequate, with high unemployment also critical. But in the September quarter of 1990, there had been a 1.8% fall in GDP, which measures the size of the economy in terms of the monetary value of goods and services during a defined period.

The formal recession continued until the September quarter of 1991, although unemployment remained stubbornly high for several years. It was the “jobless recovery”.

The causes of that recession, which were global – and whether the Australian government could have made it less severe – are debated still. But recessions are awful. As Greg Jericho wrote for Guardian Australia recently: “Recessions not only wreck the economy and lives; they utterly change society.” Recovery is slow and uneven, and some people never fully recover. Jobs are lost and relationships fray. Thirty-one out of 38 studies on the impact of recessions found that suicide rates increase during downturns.

Andrews, now 78, says it changed the way he viewed the world.

“A friend that we have had forever and still have, she told me I could get a job if I wanted to. It’s still the case that many people think that unemployed people choose to be unemployed, and many poor people choose to be poor. So these people revealed themselves to me as being basically heartless.”

At one point, he received a letter in the mail recommending increased security against burglary because there were so many unemployed people in the area. He was furious.

He and his wife, Sue, sold their house in Northbridge to buy somewhere cheaper. “We thought we should prepare for never getting a job again.” Five years later, he did get a permanent job working in IT at Macquarie University, on less pay than he had received before. His years of unemployment made him think deeply about what we owe each other.

“The 1990s experience made me angry and made me far stronger in my belief that were all in this together.”

John Andrews, 78, says the 1990s recession changed how he viewed the world. Photograph: Michele Mossop/The Guardian

For son Paul, now media manager at St Vincent’s Health Australia, it meant beginning his working life unable to get work. His family wasn’t desperate, and he was able to live at home, but his confidence in his future wavered.

“It was a classic thing, hitting brick walls for the jobs that you wanted, and suddenly, it’s a bit dire, applying for second-rung or third-rung jobs I had no interest in or no conception of a career in, and getting knockbacks for those, too.

“It was like a big vacuum sucking out of the room all your aspirations.”

Flick through the newspapers of the time and the issues and the politics were different – Maggie Thatcher lost office and Patrick White died, and the first Gulf war dominated headlines for months. Yet there are echoes of today’s debate. There was denial. Two days before the March 1990 election, Keating stated “we won’t let there be a recession”. By November, it was Keating’s famous “recession we had to have”, as the economic reforms that would later usher in strong economic growth continued.

Unemployment jumped very quickly – at times, a full percentage point in a month. “10,000 join the dole in a week,” said one Sydney Morning Herald headline. There were only three jobs for every 100 people unemployed.

Bankruptcies soared – more than 30% higher in the September quarter of 1990 than in the same period of the previous year – spurred by crippling interest rates of 17%. The economic downturn and the Gulf crisis pushed consumer confidence to an all-time low. School leavers at the end of 1990 were advised to delay their post-school holidays and apply for work immediately.

Then there were the unexpected impacts. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in May 1991 that the city’s biggest provider of abortions had recorded a 31% increase in terminations sought by married women compared with the previous year, with some telling counsellors that “there is no way we would be terminating this pregnancy if our business hadn’t failed, if we hadn’t lost our job”.

The economy and the workforce were different then, but there are echoes of the debate now about whether the government should be stimulating the economy more rather than holding to its top priority of achieving a budget surplus to prepare for future shocks.

The 1990-91 recession was not Australia’s first, but Koukoulas believed it was “about as bad as they got since the great depression”. And while he didn’t suffer personally, he said that: “People do suffer greatly … you do whatever it takes, even if it means radical policies, to avoid it.”

Then industry minister John Button described the recession as a time when “misery and despair descended on the country like a yellow fog”. It was particularly harshly felt in the “rust belt” states of Victoria and South Australia, more dependent on manufacturing industries hard hit by tariff cuts. Financial institutions such as the State Bank of Victoria and the State Bank of South Australia collapsed.

By day, Tony Keaney worked as a manager at Telecom, now Telstra. By night, he was a volunteer at St Vincent de Paul visiting people in the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill who were struggling to buy food, clothing and white goods. In those days, Box Hill was more working class than it is now, and the suburb was beginning to attract refugees, who also needed help to establish. Keaney, now 84 and still a volunteer, visited four or five homes a night. “They had given up a bit of hope as far as getting a job because of their lack of skills.”

Cities like Geelong, reeling from the collapse of the Pyramid Building society in 1990, suffered most. St Vincent de Paul reported a 50% increase in appeals for assistance. Car manufacturer Ford, based in Geelong and the city’s biggest employer, announced that 850 local were jobs to go. The local newspaper printed “Put Geelong First” bumper stickers and thousands rallied to save the city.

“If the situation deteriorates further, the City by the Bay runs the risk of becoming the Dole Queue by the Bay,” editorialised the Geelong Advertiser.

Tony Anderson worked at Ford for 33 years, until its demise in 2016. In the early 1990s, he had a mortgage and a young family. He kept his job but knew people who took packages and struggled to find work afterwards.

While the interest rates were high, Anderson, looking back, believes they were affordable if you had work because loans were smaller – he had a mortgage of $30,000. He is now the secretary of the Geelong Trades Hall Council and worries about young people taking out huge mortgages while wages are stagnant and jobs insecure.

“I’m not sure how the next generation is going to be able to cope,” he says. “I say that from my kids’ point of view. The bills, the mortgage, it’s a matter of trying to hold a job that actually pays reasonably. That’s the hard part now.”

Paul Andrews, too, wonders how a new generation would cope with a recession. After a year without work, he got a job. “It was working in a mailroom of a share registry, basically stuffing envelopes, not a great job but at least it got me off the dole.

“Young people today are far more career minded than we were. There’s a lot more interning and schools preparing young people for careers.

“A recession might be a ruder shock to them because they have far more set plans for where they might end up. In a recession, a lot of those plans end up with doors slammed in their faces.”