Long service leave is uniquely Australian. After working with the same employer for an extended period of time – it used to be twenty years but has fallen to ten in some places – an employee would receive three months paid leave. It was a nineteenth century innovation and the idea was that it would allow someone the time to visit home, home of course being the UK. The calibration was one month travelling back, one month to visit and then one month to return.
Moving home truly meant something in those days. A lifetime of separation and often having left never to see one’s parents or relations or friends ever again.
The schedule above was for travel from England-to-Australia in 1929 via India. Only eight days it by then took but no one went steerage although by today’s standards no one anywhere would have any kind of an experience similar to what was the best there was back then. This is from a fascinating article, What International Air Travel Was Like in the 1930s picked up at Instapundit. The story is of a different world not all that long ago but immensely remote. The pictures are even more incredible. How quaint we will no doubt look to those peering back at us from the twenty-second century.
