On Holidays

Sunday 21 December 2008 8:30AM

Many of us have a sense that our time is being encroached upon; by work, family, and financial pressures. It's an anxiety reflected in the unpopularity of the previous government's WorkChoices legislation, and our contemporary obsession with the notion of work/life balance. This program was first broadcast on 11th May 2008

And yet over the last few years, increasing numbers of Australians have been stockpiling their annual leave, and ditching the long family holiday for shorter, more expensive breaks.


Sasha Fegan: Welcome to Rear Vision on ABC Radio National. I'm Sasha Fegan.

Taking a holiday away from home was once a luxury only a privileged few could afford. But by the middle of the 20th century, with the expansion of paid annual leave, holidays away became part of everyday life, punctuating the year, and usually bringing families together for a long summer break.

These days, most of us have a sense that our time is being encroached, by work, family, and financial pressure. It's an anxiety reflected in the unpopularity of the previous government's Work Choices legislation.

And yet over the last few years, increasing numbers of Australians have been stockpiling their annual leave, and ditching the long summer holiday for shorter, and far more expensive breaks.

Today on Rear Vision, we take a look at the changing nature of holidays in Australia, where we go, how long we go for, and what we do.

SONG: 'Summer Holiday'

University of Sydney Historian, Richard White, is the author of 'On Holidays, a History of getting away in Australia', and he says the notion of a right to leisure time goes back to the earliest days of European settlement in Australia.

Richard White: One of the interesting things in Australia is that even among the convicts, they had a very definite sense of what was government time, and what was their time. Part of the sort of Australian attachment to leisure can be seen as being derived form the convict period, when the working day was divided up, as government time, but convicts had these precious few hours at the end of the day and precious time to themselves.

Sasha Fegan: Australia has inherited much of its holiday tradition from Britain, and our modern idea of the holiday probably dates back to the spa towns of the 18th century.

Professor John Walton from the University of Central Lancashire, is the author of a number of books on the history of British holidaymaking.

John Walton: The first holidays away from home that have a kind of economic impact on the places people visited were really I think at the spa towns, where people would go to drink medicinal waters, and a whole social life and a whole consumer culture developed about going to the spas and taking the waters in places like Bath.

The coastal resort towns in England were developing from the 18th century. They've got very deep roots, and they grow out of really a set of popular customs of sea bathing, where people went to the coast at the spring tides, the high tides in August, and this was customary, and it was adopted by orthodox medicine, and 'scientificised', if that's a word.

Sasha Fegan: The contemporary summer holiday has its roots in religious festivals.

John Walton: What happened was that the traditional, customary local wake's holidays, which celebrated the dedication of the parish church, were converted into seaside holidays. Now they survived industrialisation because people just wouldn't go in to work at the time of the customary holidays, and they were adapted to become seaside holiday for many people, and the employers adjusted to that, and made the best of a bad job. And when people started going away for a week by the 1870s, they started closing down the factories for whitewashing and fettling up the machinery. And just expected that their workforce would be away for a week. And it grows in step with the Industrial Revolution, but what's much more important in kick-starting it, is changing attitudes to the sea, where the sea becomes fashionable. And a whole bunch of medical practices become attached to it. So alongside the hordes of poorer people who are going to the coast in certain areas in August, you're getting a fashionable clientele, and it's part of really the consumer revolution of 18th century England which goes hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution. If you're making goods, people have got to consume them.

Sasha Fegan: In England, this led to the development of the British seaside resort town, the most famous of which is Blackpool in Lancashire, the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

John Walton: The working classes start going there in significant numbers from the 1840s onwards. The railway reaches Blackpool, in 1846, but it's not until living standards start to improve, and people get more disposable income and free time from the 1870s; that they start going in really large numbers.

But Blackpool was a working-class resort, developed in the last quarter of the 19th century. It's an open sort of place; it had a lot of small landowners, you couldn't control what was going on, or plan what was going on over a large area. And so it was impossible to exclude the boisterous working classes. The place zoned itself internally, in that the north was quite posh, the south was quite posh, and in between, around the railway stations, you had the development of a really roaring popular fair, but also what were called at the time Pleasure Palaces, really big amusement and entertainment centres, aimed at a working class market. And the classic example of that of course was the Tower. So that Blackpool develops as the world's first working class seaside resort, with perhaps 3-1/2-million visitors per year at the end of Victoria's reign. Because it's convenient for the main working class factory areas, where people had regular incomes and their spending power was increasing in the late 19th century; it's easily accessible, and of the alternatives, it's the one that's most open to working class development.

Sasha Fegan: Historian Richard White says that in Australia similar patterns emerged in the late 19th century, with the holiday away starting out as a middle-class phenomenon.

Richard White: The idea of a middle class holiday is taking off very much in the late 19th century, but it's still quite difficult for working people to actually - I mean certainly to take a week off, a lot of work was casual for working people. In one sense casual workers do have time off, but they have to be available for work. Similarly, working people rented their housing, and it becomes just difficult to have the sense of paying rent, while you're not using the house.

Sasha Fegan: In the 1850s, the introduction of the first 8-hour day in some industries, meant that more people had the time and security to take holidays.

Richard White: What happens is people start working 9 hours during Monday to Friday, which allows them a half-day holiday on Saturday, and because of that, that's when sport really starts to take off, because people had the Saturday afternoon available for things like Australian Football and so on, and then gradually various trade unions argue for a full day off on Saturday, and gradually that comes in sort of in a piecemeal way for various occupations, until eventually it's a established as a weekend.

Sasha Fegan: One of the most striking features of the Australian holiday from the late 19th century until the 1970s, is that it was very cheap.

The emphasis for the typical holiday was on spending as much time away from home as possible. But it had limitations of another kind. Until the 1950s, most people were reliant on public transport, and as in Britain, this tended to create large holiday destinations where part of the attraction and the excitement was the crowd.

Richard White: There are sort of two main areas I suppose that develop. The hills, the Adelaide Hills or the Blue Mountains, or the Dandenongs, our Mount Macedon in Victoria, the Lamington Plateau even in Queensland. They sort of start developing because of the English view that the Australian heat was something that you needed to get away from, and the idea of the hill resort. It's probably to some extent carried over from the British Empire in India, and they always had their hill resorts in Kashmir, where the British were treated to in the heat of an Indian summer. Once the railways started, they turned those hill resorts into quite big areas for holidays, and they really take off as holiday resorts in the late 19th century.

The other area that develops is the seaside. Even earlier in Victoria for example, the places around Port Phillip Bay are served by steamships, places like Sorrento, for example, become big holiday destinations, sometimes just for a day, but gradually the beaches develop as popular holiday destinations, especially if they're within reach of the railway.

Sasha Fegan: Richard White says the other bit shift in the 20th century was in the type of activities people wanted to do while they were on holidays, if anything at all.

Richard White: There's also a major shift in holidays in contrast to the kinds of work that people were doing. I mean the holiday's always a contrast to work. And certainly for working people in the 19th century, work was extremely physical and for much of the 20th century as well. And therefore the holiday was seen as a relaxation from physical work. But work has increasingly become much more intellectual and to some extent was for the middle class in the 19th century as well. And so for their sort of preferred holiday, the holiday itself became an opportunity to indulge in physical activity, and so you get the development of things like ski-ing, mountain climbing, bushwalking and so on, which tend to be very middle-class activities undertaken by people whose work isn't at all physical, who often see themselves as having been cooped up in offices all year, the holiday is an opportunity to actually engage physically with the world, and particularly with Nature.

Sasha Fegan: This desire to commune with nature found an outlet in the newly-established National Parks.

Richard White: Australia's first National Park was declared in 1879, is The National Park, south of Sydney, later called The Royal National Park. But one of the interesting things I think about the Australian traditional of National Parks, because we rapidly get others after that, one of the things that marks that tradition is that they are National Parks, large natural areas, quite close to cities. That makes them very democratic. They're within a few hours' rail travel. So unlike the National Parks that are developing elsewhere, such as Yellowstone or Yosemite in the United States, or Banff in Canada, those ones there are very exclusive, you have to travel for quite a long time and it's really only open to the middle classes. Whereas the Australian tradition of National Parks is that they are very democratic and they're conceived from the start, as being parks for the people and for ordinary people to get away and commune with nature, because that was seen as being a positive thing, especially people cooped up in cities, nature provided the opportunity for some sort of regeneration and uplift of the spirit.

Sasha Fegan: In the 1920s and '30s, middle-class Australians started getting cars, and that helped fuel a newer idea of what being on holidays was all about.

Richard White: Among the middle-class, it becomes more fashionable to go on a holiday where there isn't a crowd, to get away. In the '50s and '60s, increasingly you've got mass car ownership, working people have their own car too. And so especially by then, the beach is the dominant place for a holiday, and so up and down the New South Wales coast, the Western Australian coast, along the Great Ocean Road, which opened in the 1920s, you've got working people taking their cars and having a long beach holiday. Again usually in a crowd, in a public camping area, tents or caravans or in guest houses or flats, holiday flats and they're usually called 'Florida' or 'San Remo' or places like that.

Sasha Fegan: Richard White calls the period from 1945-1975 when the baby-boomers were growing up, the heyday of the Australian holiday.

Richard White: It's in the '40s, '50s, '60s, that you see the gradual expansion of paid annual leave, and what they do is nothing very much.

Sasha Fegan: John Walton draws a contrast between Blackpool in the UK, with its replica of the Eiffel Tower, its music halls and amusement rides, and lodging houses where even the poorest families paid for accommodation, to the very low cost Australian beach holiday, where there were often no commercial amusements, barring the local fish and chip shop.

Richard White agrees, that in its heyday, the Australian beach holiday may have been quite unique. But things started to change in the 1960s, when air travel became much cheaper.

TAA THEME 'Up, Up & Away'

Richard White: But certainly in the 1960s air travel made a huge difference, and people like Reg Ansett for example, his interests were in transport, air transport, in holiday resorts, and in the media, right? And that combination of advertising holiday resorts, packaged along with an air fare, Ansett air fare, is very much part of the way the industry was sort of booming in the '60s, and actually ironically, that TAA (and that was the government airline at the time) was even more successful in packaging reasonably cheap holidays. But what that means of course is that you only go for a week, or even less. But what you're being encouraged to do is put quite a bit of money into a more intense holiday experience, rather than just taking six weeks where you're spending hardly any money, just lying on the beach. If you're paying for it, you have the sense that because it's a holiday you have to be doing things, right? You know, you have to be getting your value for your money. So sitting around doing nothing is not going to be part of it. You have to find other things to do, so you're constantly active on your holiday.

Sasha Fegan: At the same time that air travel was changing how it got to holiday destinations, feminism and the entry of women into the workforce were also having an impact into the type of holidays that Australians took.

Richard White: Usually it was the mother doing all the work and you often got a lot of complaints from women saying, 'It's not a holiday for me, it's just changing one washing up sink to another.' That sort of thing, and it had a real ring of truth. They were doing all the work. Once they entered the workforce, they argued that they can now pay to have a real holiday, and it's often the second income, the income of the wife, that is directed towards paying for a holiday, and paying for the services that in the 1950s would have been provided free by the housewife. Effectively, holidays from the '70s become increasingly concerned with buying services rather than buying time. And that's when you start to see restaurants, rather than simply the local fish and chip shop which was always part of the holiday resort, now increasingly you start to see restaurants developing in holiday resorts, the expectation being that you'll eat out.

As holidays became more service-oriented and more reliant on other people's labour that you were paying for, what happens is that that labour gets outsourced out of Australia, to areas of cheaper labour, such as Vanuatu, Bali, etc. And so you can get more value for your money. You can get more services, and get the messages in Bali, and cheaper food and all of that. You can get all those services, more of all those services for the same amount of money.

Sasha Fegan: Peter Spearitt is the co-author of Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870, and he says that alongside the development of shorter package holidays in the 1960s, is the development of attractions.

Peter Spearitt: Well alongside this notion of these much shorter packaged holidays where you're staying in a self-contained apartment, you had to develop attractions. So the Gold Coast has developed over the last 50 years, an extraordinary series of attractions. Quite a few of them have closed and new ones have opened. But it's not just the great theme parks of the last ten years or so, like Warner Brothers' Movie World and Dream World, but in the '60s you had much smaller attractions, and it seems to be one of the interesting things is that on a camping holiday, this is a bit of a cliché, but basically you made your own fun; in the stereotypical Australian family, Dad might have been keen on fishing, the kids wandered around the camp ground, made friends, went for a hike in the immediate coastal hinterland or something. But in the built-up kind of holiday, which is what's transformed the way a lot of people have their holidays now, everything was about an array of entertainment for all seasons, you know, if it was wet, it was cold, you could go off to some other kind of activity. So you also got with the apartment blocks, the development of vast sort of shopping malls, the restaurant strips, which is what you find on the Gold Coast today.

Really every hour of the day can be occupied with some form of consumption, if that's what you want, whether it's the Casino over the road, the clothing shops, just a never-ending array of potential activities.

Sasha Fegan: John Walton sees this as a worldwide trend.

John Walton: What we've witnessed in the last 30 years or so, is as it were, the global spread, and to some extent the globalisation of the seaside or beach holiday. I suspect there are a lot of similarities between Blackpool and Pattaya, alongside the differences, because this is a British invention that's spread across the world, and mutated as it's transferred itself between cultures. So that you can have something that's got a common stem with lots of different blooms, from almost the same root stock.

Sasha Fegan: Peter Spearitt argues that alongside this trend for shorter and more expensive, action-packed holidays, is a blurring between business and leisure travel.

Peter Spearitt: So you're sort of combining your business interests with your holiday interests. I mean it's not uncommon for instance, to see people on holiday in Hastings Street, Noosa, actually running into business associates, and in effect having business meetings in the local restaurants. So I think there's a sense in which our holidays are certainly less sacrosanct than they were. That of course goes side-by-side with other aspects of technology, of course like mobile phones and blackberries and other assaults on privacy.

Sasha Fegan: The long beach holiday, or at least a shortened version of it, is still alive in many places along the Australian coast. And indeed the popularity of the 'sea-change' is arguably inspired by a kind of nostalgia for the beach holidays of the 1950s and '60s.

But up and down the coast, the trend has been to replace fibro shacks which were once enjoyed for their simple décor and lack of mod cons with contemporary beach palaces, with multiple bathrooms, espresso machines, and plasma TVs.

Peter Spearitt from the University of Queensland says nowhere is this more the case than Queensland's Gold Coast.

Peter Spearitt: There's a 13-storey apartment block on the Gold Coast now, more or less opposite Q1, it's right on the waterfront, right on the beach, 13 floors, one apartment per floor, there's one lap pool per floor, with south-east Queensland in the grip of the worst drought in not only living memory but that's ever recorded; it's a level of conspicuous consumption of scarce resources, in this case water, which is really very worrying.

Richard White: Australia, along with other Western societies is seeing this gradual expansion of leisure from the mid-19th century through to about the 1970s and Australians achieved more and more leisure. You know there was sort of one week's annual leave, and then two weeks, and three weeks, and then four weeks at the end of the '60s, early '70s, and then that process stopped. And that's quite remarkable that there was a sort of great fear of leisure and through the '60s a lot of intellectuals were criticising Australia as being the Lucky Country, unconcerned with excellence and the higher things, and there's a really sort of concerted effort to re-establish in the Australian population a proper work ethic. There was a dramatic shift away from seeing leisure as a good thing, towards seeing leisure as a waste of time, and Australia had to be producing more, and when there were surveys done in the 1950s, 1960s which showed that Australians preferred more time off work to higher pay. And I think one of the things about the strength of trade unionism in the '50s and '60s was it allowed a forum for people to talk about whether they preferred more money or more leisure. As that disappears we stop having those debates; you're not allowed to argue, in a sense, for more time, the only good to come out of the working life was more money to consume more.

Sasha Fegan: Richard White, the author of 'On Holidays - A history of getting away in Australia'.

The other guests on the program today were Peter Spearitt, Professor of History at the University of Queensland, and John Walton, from the University of Central Lancashire. You can find details of their books on the Rear Vision website.

The technical producer for today's Rear Vision is Timothy Nicastri. I'm Sasha Fegan, see you later.

SONG: 'Summer Holiday'


Richard White
Peter Spearitt
John Walton


The British Seaside: Holidays And Resorts In The Twentieth Century
John Walton
Manchester U.P., 2000
The Blackpool Landlady: A Social History
John Walton
Manchester U.P., 1978
The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century
John Walton and Gary Cross
Columbia U.P., 2005
The English Seaside Resort: A Social History 1750-1914
John Walton
Leicester U.P., 1983
On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia
Richard White
Pluto, Melbourne, 2005
Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since l870
Peter Spearitt with Jim Davidson.
MUP, 2000


Sasha Fegan