Slide Night: The strange ritual that used to take place in Australian lounge rooms

The Slide Night was a social occasion involving nibbles and drink and people gathered in a darkened room to look at “touristic” pictures projected onto a wall. Picture: istock

Back in the land before time, before the internet, back when the baby boomers were young, a strange ritual took place from time to time in lounge rooms (for the kitchen-family room had yet to be invented) across Australia. The ritual was a joyous familial or neighbourly event. It was known as the Slide Night.

The Slide Night was a social occasion involving nibbles and drink and people gathered in a darkened room to look at “touristic” pictures projected onto a wall. It involved technology and extension leads. It required extra chairs. It was hosted by middle-aged couples on behalf of offspring who’d returned from the wilds of world travel, which meant London and other “foreign” places.

I suspect that the Slide Night was a strictly colonial affair. I am not sure that British visitors to Australia in the 1960s and earlier would have organised similar gatherings back in, say, suburban Manchester.

Slide Night invitees invariably included all members of the immediate and extended family, as well as family friends and sometimes even the odd neighbour, every one of whom was surely looking for some kind of connection with wondrous places afar.

Slides of course were translucent images framed in cardboard squares and housed sequentially in a cassette or, more daringly, in a carousel. Slides comfortingly clicked as they moved through the cassette; each image showed our intrepid travellers in different situations requiring curated commentary. The wag uncle might pipe up occasionally with dad-joke-type observations to help with this.

I have slides of a (backpacker) trip to New Zealand in 1977, when I was 20, that showed oleander bushes in flower outside Auckland airport. “They have oleander too,” I thought upon seeing it. You will be pleased to know that that slide didn’t make it to my Slide Night. Indeed my airport oleander slide sits unloved and underappreciated in a box in my garage.

To today’s worldly Australians, well used to travel, the concept of the Slide Night might appear a tad twee, but at the time it was genuinely riveting to people who had rarely if ever travelled outside their district. Someone we knew had been to all these places! If they can go maybe I can go too in due course?

I think Australia’s tyranny of distance has created a kind of colonial yearning to be connected to a wider world. And yet there is a paradox that comes with our isolation. At some point towards the end of the Slide Night, after all the ooohs and ahhhs, the intrepid travellers would deliver a solemn declaration, almost prayerfully powerful, about their experience of returning to Australian soil. It would involve a statement along the lines of, “We have travelled the world and our informed assessment is that there is no place like Australia… we’re so pleased to be home.”

And at that point, the assembled throng would nod and mumble in unison in a way that was akin to a congregation’s Amen. The technology may have since changed. Our worldliness may be more common. Our naivete may have disappeared (or diminished). But the overall effect of the Slide Night was gratitude that we live in this wondrous, this safe, this glorious place we all call home.