A trip back to the 50s, 60s & 70s

“Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

Such was the incessant chant a little Will Yeoman tormented his father with on just about every road trip our family took back in the early 1970s.

Dad always got his revenge with the interminable slide nights that followed such Nullarbor car crossings, fishing expeditions up the coast and outback caravan camping trips.

Ian Collis’s Retro Holidays Australia (New Holland, $50) will no doubt bring back memories of those happy days for many, while introducing younger audiences to a part of Australian social history familiar on one level, on another, utterly foreign.

Retro Holidays Australia is the latest in New Holland’s Retro series. Collis has gathered more than 500 photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s. He sorts them by how we got there (Holden, Ghan, TAA), where we slept (Viscount caravans, ex-army tents, pubs with a basin in the corner) and what we did when we arrived.

I like Collis’s variation of a question which generations of drivers no doubt uttered from behind the wheel prior to setting off: “Have you all been to the toilet? Cause we’re not stopping!” Collis’ father is doing the asking. It’s suburban Ryde, early 60s. The key’s under the mat. The neighbours been asked to mind the chooks. The petrol tank has been filled — an extravagant $2! Three or four hours later, the family hits Pearl Beach, 96km north of Sydney. Today, the same drive takes around an hour.

Collis’ text throughout reads like a pleasantly rambling inventory of the era, with its Tilley lanterns, Tom Piper Camp Pie, a rubber static strap dragging behind the car and a motel breakfast hatch delivering cold toast without waking up guests.

But the photographs are the main game. Hayman Island’s candy-striped guest train. The El Dorado at Broadbeach, the first motel in the country with a parking bay outside every room. Tourists gazing up at Uluru in the years when the campsites sat near its base and nearly everyone climbed it. Safari launches on Katherine Gorge, Bells Beach and the Twelve Apostles, a Chair-O-Plane ride in Darwin in 1956.

WA is well represented. There’s a lovely 1960 shot of Cottesloe and a 1970s picture of holidaymakers hand-feeding quokkas on Rottnest. Wave Rock gets a spread, with nods to Hippo’s Yawn and Mulka’s Cave. Albany appears in the 1970s, with Middleton Beach and the Cheynes Beach whaling station in the text.

Perth turns up via the Federal Hotel in 1967, kids in the Araluen pool, sailing on the Swan and City Beach hosting the 1971 national surf lifesaving championships. Then there are Kalgoorlie’s Exchange Hotel, Broome’s Sun Pictures and Roebuck Hotel, wildflower season and houseboats on the Blackwood and at Mandurah.

I can imagine grandparents settling down to leaf through this entertainingly nostalgic journey with incredulous grandkids asking questions like “What’s a Torana?”