Introduction

Hello and welcome to this State Library of Victoria audio tour. I’m Clare Williamson, the Library’s Exhibitions Curator, and today I’m going to take you on a trip through Victoria, via our exhibition, Victorians on Vacation. You can take this tour as you make your way around the exhibition. Or you can listen in via the web as you browse a selection of images from the exhibition in our online gallery.

Victorians on Vacation celebrates holidays and leisure in Victoria from the mid 19th century through to today. The exhibition presents a diverse selection of historical and contemporary material from the State Library of Victoria’s rich collections. We’ve included paintings and prints from the colonial era, photographs that range from family albums to images by contemporary artists, travel posters from the golden age of the 1930s, comic postcards, maps, letters and guidebooks.

The Library holds all of this material to help preserve our collective memories. These artefacts and documents enable us to meet some of the people who have gone before us, to hear their stories and to visit some of our favourite places to see what it would have been like to holiday there in times past. This audio tour expands on some of the stories about the people who we meet in the Victorians on Vacation exhibition.

We are also pleased to re-create a lantern slide show from the early 1900s, as well as home movies from the 1940s and 50s, which have been drawn from the collections of the National Film and Sound Archive, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

Victorians on Vacation reveals how our holiday habits have changed over time, reflecting changes in our society, lifestyles and tastes. We’ll take you to the seaside, the mountains, the snow and the rivers that continue to be popular destinations for Victorian holidaymakers. We’ll show you how we’ve travelled over the last 150 years - the changes in transport, such as the growth of the state railways and the rise of the affordable family car. And we’ll also look at the changes in holiday accommodation - from the Grand Hotels and guesthouses of the 19th century to the caravans, holiday houses and motels of the 20th and 21st centuries. But first we will go to the seaside.