4. Homegrown Outback Exploration
Australia has always had a DIY caravaning culture. Christmas holidaytime can often involve getting outside with your tent.
The first caravan park opened in Victoria in 1924.
The Great Depression left many Australians out of work and somewhat itinerant. The Victorian and New South Wales governments funded the construction of tourist roads as a jobs program for people needing work. These got used in earnest once the prosperity of the post-war era and two weeks of paid annual leave became more commonplace in a movement that Caravan World calls the Great Holiday Boom.
The State Library of Queensland has assembled photographs of caravans from many eras from the homemade to the high style.
Looking closely at Australian camping and caravan culture can be one lens through which Australian culture can be understood and appreciated.
“…themes like freedom, mobility, escape, utopia; images of domesticity on wheels, décor and design, materials, technology, DIY production and Fordism; caravan parks as homes and as itinerant and long-term accommodation. These themes and images are also necessarily interwoven with class, gender, sex and age. We are interested in the possibilities of using the caravan as a carrier for making sense of postwar Australia.”
We’ve also got stories about Irish folktales, UFO Desks, epic kayaking, Washington DC oddities and history, decorated war pigeons, community-based photo id-ing, meeting some photographers, prisoners-turned-artists, tattooing in the 1930s, turkish street photography, aviatrices, books in motion, a cool bell, surprise celebrities, and, of course, cat pictures. All part of Flickr Commons’ sixteenth birthday.