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NLA News - home October 2005 Volume XVI Number 1

Getting Away

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Frank Hurley (1885–1962)
Caravan at Lake St Clair [with car and three figures] 1950s
plastic negative; 11.7 x 16.2 cm
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23504488

Mass car ownership made independent travel a possibility for millions of Australians in the post-war period

 

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John Eldershaw (1892–1973)
Historic Tasmania, Port Arthur
Hobart: Tasmanian Government Tourist Bureau, 1940s
col. poster; 101.0 x 63.0 cm
Pictures Collection
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Port Arthur was promoted as an ideal destination for new world tourists hankering after the old, a substitute Europe complete with English landscapes, an historic aura and ivy-clad ruins 

Meredith Lake considers Australia’s inter-war holidaying phenomenon

The young Donald Horne, growing up in Maitland during the 1920s, found many things perplexing—not least the holidaying habits of the ‘Old Families’ of the area. ‘They could enjoy luxuries and indulge in eccentricities that were then rare indeed,’ he later recalled in The Education of Young Donald (1967): ‘Trips to Europe, for example. Or even trips to Tasmania.’ In the mid-1920s, Tasmania was indeed coming into its own as a holiday destination for affluent Australians. The National Library’s collections help explain, among many other aspects of the inter-war Australian holiday, why the island state was such an attraction for wealthy mainlanders of the time.

‘Hobart and holidays go well together,’ declared the Mercury in a special issue of 9 September 1926, because the city possessed ‘an interest and a charm ... that is entirely lacking in Australia’s other cities’. The particular advantage of Tasmania, as the organisers of the 1926 Come to Tasmania campaign were quick to point out, was its European character. ‘Historic Port Arthur’ was the perfect place to wander among ‘sweet old English flowers’ and ‘beautiful avenues of oaks and other English trees’. There was even opportunity to indulge in the same ritual of ruin-appreciation that had been so important to aristocratic Grand Tours of 18th-century Europe: ‘The Model Prison, beautiful in decay, stands on the hillside … Several of the [church’s] spires are still intact, and the whole is held together by the clinging ivy, which sets off aptly the old stone walls.’

While sightseeing on the Tasman Peninsular, the Mercury was quick to point out, visitors could also view the Tasman’s Arch rock formation: ‘a wonderful natural arch larger than the Arc de Triomphe’. And back in Hobart, they could travel in ‘grand old landaus, of the type which graced the streets of Paris before the advent of the taxi-cab’. Implicitly, a visit to Tasmania matched the experience of sightseeing in the French capital. As a substitute Europe, Tasmania presented the social elite with more than an opportunity to appreciate ruins and celebrate ‘old England’ in the antipodes: it was a chance to display their refined tastes and aristocratic sensibilities. It was a holiday experience that marked them out as socially and culturally superior.

During the inter-war period, the upper and middle classes were as committed to preserving their health as to flaunting their social status. And just as they sought social capital in Tasmania during the 1920s, they fused holiday-making with health-seeking by flocking to the spa towns of Victoria and South Australia during the 1930s and 1940s. This aspect of the inter-war holiday is well documented by the National Library’s substantial collection of health resort brochures—including ‘Daylesford and Hepburn Springs, Victoria: Australia’s Leading Spas’, and ‘The Dandenongs: A Guide to Melbourne’s Great Playground’.

The famous Hepburn Springs was perhaps the most popular destination for people eager to preserve their health. Like every other spa town, it claimed to produce ‘the finest mineral water in the world’, and boasted that ‘leading medical men’ highly recommended its waters—for ‘Anaemia, Impurity of Blood, Dyspepsia, Torpidity of the Liver, Constipation, Lumbago, Diseases of the Kidneys, Diabetes, Obesity, Rheumatism, Scrofula, Rickets in Children, St Vitus’ Dance, Skin Diseases, Nervous and General Debility and Loss of Appetite’! At a time when penicillin had not yet been invented, a holiday at a health resort was a popular prescription.

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[Mount Feathertop, Vic., 1929/30]
b&w photograph;
10.6 x 15.6 cm
Part of: Second organised trail ride to the Bogong High Plains and Australian Alps, 21 December 1929 to 1 January 1930
Photograph by Victorian Government Tourist Bureau
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23596847

This group at Mount Feathertop revelled in the natural environment, playing the role of modern-day explorers and spending New Year’s Eve in the bush 

The medicalisation of the holiday prompted some resort proprietors to create their own health attractions. At Hepburn Springs, artificial baths were developed to complement the natural spring. These baths, infused with Radium Ray, offered ‘further curative effects’ to those guests willing to pay the ‘small cost’ of taking a dip. Other tourism promoters had to be more creative. They declared certain destinations to be ‘healthful’ simply by virtue of their location. At Wombat Hill for example, 2000 feet (610 m) above sea level, the Victorian air had ‘a tonic quality that does wonders to the constitution’. On the south-eastern slopes of the Dandenong Ranges, the Belgrave Hotel catered ‘to the health seeker, the holiday maker and the lover of nature’. Nearby Fairy Dell was an ‘ideal weekend resort’ with a capacity to provide a ‘healthful retreat’. By the 1940s, health and holidaying had become so intertwined in the middle-class mind that some places were considered ‘healthful’ simply because they were holiday destinations.

In preserving the promotional materials by which certain destinations were advertised, the National Library’s Collection provides a window into the mind of the upper and middle classes. From the holidays they read about and actually took during the inter-war period, members of these classes showed themselves to be preoccupied with both health and status issues. However, other items in the Library’s Collection suggest that not everyone was content to organise their holidays along these lines.

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E.H. Turnor
Wilson’s Promontory, Victoria, Australia 1930s
col. poster; 101.0 x 63.0 cm
Pictures Collection
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Between the wars, the middle classes were enthusiastic about healthy holidays and increasingly made sure to ‘take a Kodak’ 

During the mid-1920s, Sydney school principal William Saunderson and several of his friends had a habit of making New Year expeditions to Mount Kosciuszko. These trail-riding holidays always involved escaping the beaten track and finding new routes to the summit. Along the way, as Saunderson’s personal papers reveal, the men composed poems about their adventures and developed a program for a spectacular New Year’s Eve concert featuring ‘instrumental music’ made with ‘tin plates, knifes and forks’. The men then celebrated their exploits in the pages of ‘The Dingo Track’, a home-made magazine ‘incorporating all the advertisers, standards, tribunes, heralds and telegraphs of the Alps’—as well as weather forecasts they had written themselves. It was a tongue-in-cheek affair, so meteorologically inaccurate that, on their 1924 trip, they twice got lost in the mist.

In some respects, Saunderson’s treks amounted to a rejection of typical middle-class holidaying. ‘Some talk of “going away for a change” and carry with them their usual golf clubs, their visiting cards and what not—all the signs of daily conforming to … [what] is done by everyone else,’ Saunderson snorted in the pages of ‘The Dingo Track’. To really get away, he declared, ‘compulsory manners [must be] cast off’. Only ‘here amidst the rocks and trees, beside the rippling trout streams’ was it possible to really ‘live free, act free [and] think free’. He and his friends saw themselves as challenging the conventions of middle-class holiday-making by roughing it in the bush— however, their mode of holidaying was as much a matter of asserting their superiority as a tour of Tasmania. They still valued their leisure time in terms of healthfulness, even if they spent it more actively than those who frequented the springs. Saunderson and his friends still cherished many of the values important to the bourgeois world they attempted to escape.

Annie Pollard’s private diary reveals that she was a very different holiday-maker to Saunderson. Where he rejected the trappings of modernity, she embraced them. In 1920, she and her family drove from Trekelano, in the mining region of north-western Queensland, to Brisbane. Along the way, she enthusiastically recorded her journey with the quintessential 20th-century holiday accessory: a camera. At one river crossing on Annie’s trip, she saw the car ‘throwing the water and foam everywhere around,’ and determined it ‘a fine snapshot to take’, dearly hoping that her photography on this occasion would produce ‘a very pretty picture’. She was never to find out, though, because disaster struck the next day. Heavy rains had swollen Skeleton Creek at its crossing point, making it difficult to pass over: ‘the water had no mercy on our things and had run over the top of the footboard, through a tin trunk and food box, spoiling a few things and all our photographing materials’. As a consequence, Annie missed ‘very many lovely pictures’, a loss which she mourned as ‘a calamity’.

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Surfers Paradise, Queensland
b&w photograph;
16.7 x 21.6 cm
Photograph by Australian News and Information Bureau
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-vn3361088

Surfers Paradise was a glamorous destination for post-war holiday-makers

As well as adding drama to some people’s holidays, the spreading popularity of photography was important because the camera, in a subtle way, refocused the holiday gaze. ‘Am I getting the best viewpoint? … Are the figures suitably arranged? ’, photographers were encouraged to ask themselves. Attention to such details was important to ensure a ‘good photograph’, according to an article in Bushwalking and Camping: Paddy Pallin’s Handbook of Australian Bushcraft (1939). A.L.G. McDonald, who during the 1930s spent his Christmas holidays bushwalking with friends, was enthusiastic in taking up this advice. His album, held in the Library’s Manuscript Collection, contains several well-considered shots of solitary figures standing atop mountain peaks or contemplating dramatic drops off the edge of cliffs. Sometimes, though, holiday photographers were so obsessed with taking interesting shots that others felt obliged to make witticisms at their expense. William Saunderson thus described his frustration with ‘the photographic fiend, Ray’, who caused a delay at one billabong: ‘and his ghost may be heard as you go down that billabong—who’ll come a-photographing Matilda with me’.

By the mid-1960s, when Donald Horne reflected on the strange holidaying habits of the upper classes of his youth, much of the inter-war world had faded away. Australia had emerged from the Second World War into a prolonged period of economic growth and prosperity. Workers had won significantly more leisure time than their early 20th-century counterparts: a 40-hour week and four weeks’ annual leave with holiday loading. Middle-class anxieties about health and status gradually receded as more and more families acquired cars, cameras and caravans, and packed themselves off to the beach for weeks of summer idleness.

But although the nature of holidaying changed considerably, those earlier holiday experiences remain accessible—in written and visual forms—through the National Library’s Collection.

MEREDITH LAKE was one of the Library’s Norman McCann Summer Scholars for 2004. A Ph.D candidate in the Department of History, University of Sydney, she was a contributor to Richard White et al., On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia (Pluto Press, 2005)

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