Childhood holidays: Memories are made of this

Returning year after year to the same summer holiday spots was a rite of passage for many Australians.

‘My parents dispatched me for three years running to stay with Uncle A in central-west NSW.’

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, made rosy with time, grimmer realities relegated to a blur. And so it is with Australian childhood holidays of, say, the 1950s to 80s, when ritual was everything.

You could accuse parents of a lack of imagination but returning year after year to the same summer holiday spots was a rite of passage. It would likely be a road trip, kids shoving and bickering and at least one grandma on board to keep order and dispense secret sweets. Only posh people took aeroplanes or went OS, as that amorphous place called overseas was known.

Other school-term breaks were too cold or too short, although that didn’t stop my parents from dispatching me in the cruel depths of winter to stay for three years running with Uncle A in central-west NSW.

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“He could use the company,” said Dad, obliquely. Uncle A was a sad-eyed man of the cloth but nutty as a fruitcake and he let me stay up late, especially if we were doing a jigsaw. I deliberately made mistakes with each puzzle to delay us til midnight. Oh, the illicit thrill of those chimes.

Uncle A was a French scholar and some days that’s all we spoke, which meant I had to look up every other word in his enormous dictionary.

Local ladies had their eye on him as marriage material for their daughters. Even at age 11, I knew he was not that kind of chap. We’d sit side-by-side at the parsonage by a bay-window with a view of the driveway. Think of the parochial house in Father Ted as a clue to decrepitude. As mothers approached bearing baked offerings, daughters in tow, I had to answer the door and explain Uncle A was indisposed.

“C’est un mensonge!” I’d protest. “It’s no lie. I am simply not disposed to cakes and idle chatter,” he would reply, reaching for Albert Camus.

Then Uncle A upped and passed away. Thereafter it was one annual summer holiday by car from Sydney to the Gold Coast. Dad at the wheel. Mother smoking filter-tips. Me gagging for breath. Fish and chips, zinc-creamed nose, Pipeline Petes.

But I took the spirit of Uncle A with me. A copy of L’Etranger was always buried in my bag and I’d read aloud from the Ford Falcon’s back seat, with elongated emphasis on words that ended with an acute accent. This theatricality, I knew, would have pleased Uncle A no end.

Aussie childhood holidays and road trip rituals, P4.