How they bask in a traditional Australian summer

Press, 24 February 1978, Page 6

How they bask in a traditional Australian summer

SYDNEYSIDE With

Janet Parr

Like giant swarms of moths pursuing some strange and temporary migratory ritual Australians have been spending the summer much as they always have — flitting up and down the , Australian coast before they finally head back home to work and school, brown as berries and well content with the sizes of the ones that got away.

There have been many suggestions to stagger working holidays and school holidays over the year to ease the strain on roads and accommodation and the tourist industries generally. But so far nothing has come of them.

So summer this year has been much the mixture as before. The fishing bait and the fast food have been changing hands, fast, numerous clubs have welcomed numerous “temporary members” to their bars and poker machines and such home like comforts, “Star Wars” and “Carrie” and some Walt Disney classics have been pulling them in for the all-family entertainment at the drive-ins and the memorial hall cinemas alike. As usual it was not all that easy to make sure you have somewhere to go anyway.

“Before we go home.” said a Sydney man, “we work out how many there

will be next year. “Then,” he said, “we find a house we like, the right size and price. And we book it up with the local estate agent before we go for the same time next year.” Often that is the only real way to make sure. If you leave it as late as September there is little left. And if you leave it until November you have a long, hard search ahead of you, particularly if you happen to be choosy.

One new factor adding to the problem of finding somewhere to stay has been that people are tending to move to live permanently in some of the pleasanter resorts near the city. Some houses and flats have been let to permanent tenants, some have been sold and are being lived in bv the owners and not let. And unwillingness to speculate in Australia’s rather stringent economic conditions — which has reduced the amount of new building being done elsewhere — has affected

holiday accommodation too. Still, it has not been all that bad once you were there. The bluebottles have been only patchily troublesome south from the Gold Coast but there have been few sharks or even rumours of sharks, it seems. There have been a few hints that the sharks often have two legs, that the shopkeepers start sending up their prices as soon as the visitors start to arrive. But various surveys have shown that this is not really true, and that prices for food, and drink in particular, vary little from those in the cities. Tn fact, the biggest bite seems to have come from “the Government” which has made a considerable increase in the amount of tax it imposes on sunning preparations designed to block the sun’s destructive rays. Since Australians have, generally speaking and painfully, become rather more aware over the last few years of the danger of skin cancer, the increased tax has dismayed those who saw the new screening preparations as a defence which would let them brown without risk. The extra tax may, say the experts, drive many back to cheaper, less-pro-tective products and undo a lot of the good that has been done.