On Holidays: A history of getting away in Australia

By Richard White, North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2005, 234 pages, paperback, $32.95. Reviewed by Catie Gilchrist in the October 2005 issue.

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I read On Holidays whilst enjoying a holiday myself in sunny Port Douglas. In the introduction it is suggested that, 'guilt has dogged the holiday throughout its history'. (p xv) There was not much guilt racing through my mind as I sat by the sea, 'warm sand between the toes' (p xvi) reading this lively and engaging history of the Australian holiday. In charting the history of the holiday from its late eighteenth century beginnings and through to today's extensive travel industry, On Holidays documents a fascinating story. What was once a common luxury of the privileged few had become, by the mid twentieth century available to all. The central proposition of this book is that the Australian holiday is in danger of regressing back to the privileged few. Since the 1970s, changes in employment practises have slowly encroached upon the legal rights and realities of 'getting away'. It is a depressing thought but one that is both timely and convincingly argued.

Chapter one opens with the idea that modern Australia 'was the result of a rich man's holiday' (p 1) which is certainly an original take on the foundation debate. We meet Joseph Banks and Captain Cook as they explored the Pacific in the late 1760s and learn that this was Banks' experience of the Grand Tour. This cultural rite of passage was long taken by English gentlemen (and as recent scholarship has identified some ladies toured too) on the nearer shores of the Continent. The experience of different cultures, the gaining of new knowledge and the sensual pleasures of food, wine and foreign flesh lay at the heart of the tour. The book playfully suggests it was 'a kind of schoolies week extended to a year or two'. (p 2) For many people today these pursuits remain germane to the experience of 'getting away'. Beyond culture the desire for escapism closely followed. Eighteenth century accounts of Tahiti and the Pacific Islands represented them as places of beauty, of simple living, freedom from work and the clutter of all the material trappings of civilisation. It is argued that it was 'in the absence of these things' that 'the attraction of the modern holiday' (p 8) would lie. Indeed the South Pacific has endured as a place of paradise in the European imagination and this chapter skilfully weaves the utopian fascination of eighteenth century observations with longings that still exist today. When Banks later returned to England he was asked for his advice on the founding of New South Wales as a British colony and 'the optimism of the tourist, looking back through rose-coloured glasses at the great adventure of his life, took hold'. (p 14)

Chapter two explores colonial Australia up to 1850 and it charts the stratified elite, convict and indigenous experiences of work, leisure and ways of 'getting away'. Colonial elites delighted in expeditions, picnics, society balls and dinners. They also continued the tradition of the Grand Tour by sending their children to be schooled in England and participating in 'old-world' European culture and civilisation through regular excursions to the Continent. It was this that distinguished them as 'elite'. By mid-century the emerging colonial middle class had embraced a work ethic that went hand in hand with 'rational recreation'. Leisure was to broaden the mind, strengthen the body and nourish the soul. Assigned convicts worked hard but they also played hard. Their recreation was not particularly rational or improving but more often involved wine, women and song. They fiercely guarded old working customs and traditions in their right to holidays, leisure and time off. The idea that many convicts demanded (and received) these 'rights' reflects recent advances in convict historiography that have uncovered the 'convict experience' and renegotiated traditional assumptions of power relations in convict Australia. Aboriginal people have always had a deep cultural investment in travelling the land. This book offers a finely nuanced analysis of the attempts that were made (both brutal and benign) to indoctrinate the indigenous people into European work and leisure patterns.

The third chapter demonstrates that it was in the second half of the nineteenth century that the concept of the modern annual holiday -- a regular stretch of time spent away from home -- was born. Between 1850 and 1914 the 'the holiday destination' had emerged out of the innovations of the steamboat and the railway, the camera, the postcard and the culture of the beach resort. Bush walking and camping became popular weekend activities. Equally important were legislative developments, which place this history of the holiday within the broader political arena of the labour movement; the regularising of work and the eight-hour day, the emergence of work-free Saturday afternoons, the long weekend holidays of the Queens Birthday and Labour Day, and the religious holidays of Christmas and Easter. It was during this time that Australia became known as the 'land of the long weekend' although the bank holidays that Britain (and other colonial outposts) began treating themselves to at this time suggests that this was not idiosyncratic to Australia alone. Education acts also helped to institutionalise 'clear-cut holiday seasons throughout the year by fixing school holidays'. (p 65) By the early twentieth century, the demand for a family wage included 'amusements and holidays' as a basic need.

The Australian holiday was becoming more democratic and available to a wider audience yet 'holidaying patterns and performances remained firmly based on social stratification'. (p 109) This book is a social history of how leisure, which on the one hand promised a democratic egalitarianism, also helped to define class relations. The fourth chapter suggests that between the wars the exclusive holiday catering to a middle class clientele emerged; elite bush walking clubs, ski resorts, cruises to the Great Barrier Reef and remote Tasmania were consciously marketed towards the affluent. The growing popularity of owning a holiday shack or a 'weekender' together with the arrival of the motorcar also reshaped how people holidayed and enabled the affluent to maintain their exclusivity away from the hoi polloi. It was only during the second world war that the masses were given a 'glimpse of a future in which they possessed a greater share of the benefits of prosperity, especially in the form of more access to leisure time and increased opportunities for holidays'. (p 118)

'The heyday of the holiday: 1945-1975' argues that it was during these years that the holiday 'entered a new national mythology about the Australian way of life'. (p 120) It is a rich and balanced chapter yet there is a whiff of longing for the halcyon days of 'never had it so good', post-war economic boom, widespread home-ownership, sentimental domesticity and endless summer days. Certainly the Annual Holidays Act of 1944 ensured that all workers in New South Wales got two weeks paid leave as a statutory right and the 'justification lay not only in the usual benefits of industry and the health of the nation, but in the fact that holidays were a human right'. (p 122) By 1945 the full two-day weekend was a reality, and the 40 hour week and long service leave would continue to make workers 'leisure time' rich and 'getting away' a regular feature of post-war life. Increased car ownership, the emergence of hire-car companies and coach tours impacted on the development of the Australian holiday as tourist roads were mapped and built and motels began to make a mark on the landscape. The car ensured that camping and caravanning would become more sophisticated and domesticated. If the desire was to get away from home, often home would come too in the way of all sorts of necessary paraphernalia; eskies, deck chairs, picnic utensils and portable bbq's. For many people, the annual holiday -- often to the same place year after year became a familiar and familial feature of post-war life. Intellectual critics scoffed at 'the conformity, monotony and apathy' of this 'Australian way of life'. (p 147) Forty years on, Donald Horne's observation that Australia's lack of cultural ambition and intellectual drive beyond the desire for 'lifestyle' still rings true for many social critics. But On Holidays takes issue with Ronald Conway's related criticism of 1971 that there was a 'great Australian stupor' in the desire for 'mindless materialism' and the 'avid hedonism' of consumerism. (p 149) Leisure and the annual holiday, was, in this account, an alternative to consumerism. Rather than wealth and material possessions, most Australians desired a relaxed lifestyle in which holidays and time with the family were 'indispensable'. (p 149) By 1974 four weeks annual leave had become the norm thus ensuring that for many the long family holiday was indeed possible. The impact and importance of labour laws to people's non-working lives are cleanly analysed in this account. Yet the onward march of progressive employment legislation came to an abrupt halt in 1974 and the idea that Australians preferred leisure to moneymaking 'came to an end'. (p 129) The book argues that 'the next twenty years would see the destruction of a way of life that had been the product of more than a century of struggle'. (p 152)

Are holidays and their centrality to perceptions of an 'Australian way of life' history? Chapter six suggests that since the 1970s, the increase of casual, part time and freelance work has meant that job security and rights to paid holidays, sick pay and long-service leave have disappeared for many workers. On the other hand, full-time employees have seen their hours of work extended and their likelihood of taking holidays diminish. What the majority of Australians once enjoyed as a reasonable balance of work and leisure has been lost. At the same time the nature of the holiday for those that can take them has also changed. The typical self-made holiday of four weeks camping, fishing and bush tramps, of living the simple life, has largely disappeared. It has been replaced with the expensively bought experience of the short break, at best a week or two at the exotic resort where someone else will entertain and feed the kids and mum and dad can relax in their own fulfilling ways be it at the bar or in the spa. Moreover, the tourist industry has now become a complex machine catering to every whim from backpacking to food, wine and cooking holidays, out-back adventure tours, eco-tourism, cultural tourism, heritage holidays, the list is endless. Rather than the annual holiday demonstrating what Australians have in common, On Holidays suggests that it now marks out their differences. However, on reflection it might be argued that difference and social stratification has always characterised the Australian holiday and ideas of leisure. What convicts got up to in their spare time was not what the colonial elites or the emerging middle class regarded as leisure. Moreover, as earlier chapters suggest, at the moment the holiday became more available and more democratic, exclusive resorts and different ways of holidaying reflected the desire of the affluent to define and mark out their particular social status.

Four weeks of idleness and 'really getting away' has certainly passed since the heyday of the 1950s and 60s. But it has to be asked is this something we should necessarily lament? How 'typical' a holiday was it really or was it part of an imaginary 'Australian way of life'? Did post-war European migrants ever embrace the four-week outdoor family holiday? How did Australians living outside of the domestic nuclear family -- orphans, singles, widows, and homosexuals spend their holidays? In what ways did Aboriginal families 'get away' in the 1950s and 1960s?

The importance of this chapter lies in its relevance to many of the most pressing social, cultural and political issues confronting us all today. The impact of the Howard government's attempts to 'reform' industrial relations legislation, tax, family law, pa/maternity benefits and the funding of childcare centres have implications for the future of our professional and personal lives. Finding that precarious balance between career and family, work and leisure, stress and relaxation has become a new national obsession. Down-shifters and sea-changers aside, work dominates our present lives and will effect our superannuation funded futures. For the un and underemployed ideas of leisure and 'getting away' are perhaps elusive concepts. For the over-employed, work seeps into home life at the weekend and even into holidays themselves through the laptop and the mobile. It is the importance and urgency of these issues that makes On Holidays a welcome and colourful contribution to our history, a relevant and timely comment on the present, and perhaps a warning for the future. Alan Jones scolded the contributors on national television for studying holidays rather than the history of Cold War diplomacy. For Jones it was the sign of the decline of the university. For the more intelligent reader, projects such as On Holidays reveals the vital public role that historians and the academy must continue to play in the broader political sphere.

Citation

• Catie Gilchrist. 'Review: On Holidays: A history of getting away in Australia by Richard White' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• This book is really about the future of something Australians have taken for granted -- 'the holiday'.
  
  In his lively history of the Australian experience of 'the holiday', Richard White traces just what has happened to holidays in Australia. Is the Australian holiday we have known for more than a century in danger of slipping away without anyone noticing?
  
  On Holidays explores these issues but also is a fascinating exploration of various holiday traditions and behaviours from the early Australian colonies to the sophisticated consumerism of today's travel industry.

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