'Never stand between an Australian and a public holiday'. The strange origin story of Recreation Day

Happy Recreation Day for Monday, to all those who celebrate.

It's a public holiday observed only in the northern part of Tasmania and it's exactly what it sounds like on the packet – a legally mandated day off to do whatever you like.

It's also one of several geographically specific public holidays that have helped Australia live up to its "Land of the Long Weekend" moniker.

With Recreation Day and the Melbourne Cup just around the corner, here's a timely look at some of Australia's most curious public holidays.

The parochial beginnings of Recreation Day

Embracing long weekends — and if need be, creating them out of thin air — is pretty much how the curiously named Recreation Day came to be.

Recreation Day is a holiday that arguably epitomises modern-day Australian values better than any other — a day with no cultural or religious significance on which you do whatever you choose.

"There's a there's a kind of parochialism in Tasmania. If one particular regional city gets a public holiday, other parts of the state feel aggrieved," explains Richard Eccleston, a political scientist at the University of Tasmania.

"My understanding is that's the origin of Recreation Day in northern Tasmania — as a kind of compensation for Hobart having Regatta Day in February.

"If there was a strong view that Launceston and northern Tasmania was missing out, it wouldn't have taken too much politically for the idea of Recreation Day to get traction."

With that in mind, perhaps the most surprising thing about Recreation Day is the fact it took until 1991 for the state to legislate it into being. Still, it's difficult not to admire northern Tasmanians for their ability to manifest a day off into existence.

"At least they're completely transparent," Professor Eccleston says.

"You know, 'we just want another public holiday so that there's some kind of equity across the state'."

Picnic Day goes with the Territory

There is some conjecture over how the Northern Territory came to mark the first Monday in August with this quaintly named day.

Picnic Day events in the Territory date back to the late 19th century; an annual Union Picnic Day was observed in the town of Adelaide River by employees working on the North Australia Railway, which started being built in the 1880s.

However, it was a Central Australian horse race – first run between pastoralists and local police in 1947 in the tiny town of Harts Range (Atitjere), 215 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs – that was responsible for the government gazetting the first Monday in August as Picnic Day. 

The Harts Range Races is still an annual event that attracts a couple of thousand visitors to the tiny community, but Picnic Day is observed throughout the NT and is celebrated by Territorians in much the same spirit as Recreation Day is by northern Tasmanians.

Victoria says 'yup' to the Cup public holiday

In many ways, it's difficult to prosecute the argument that the Melbourne Cup is still the Race That Stops the Nation, with concerns about problem gambling and animal welfare threatening to overshadow the race itself in recent years.

At the height of Victoria's COVID social restrictions in 2020, the Cup went ahead without spectators and the following year, crowds were capped at 10,000.

Last year, fewer than 74,000 spectators turned up at Flemington and Channel Ten's ratings slumped to a record low of just over a million metropolitan viewers last year – a far cry from the more than 2.7 million city viewers who tuned in a decade prior.

But the apparent waning interest for the Cup itself has done little to dampen enthusiasm for the public holiday, which was expanded to include all Victorian regional council areas in 2008.

Do Victorians really need a day off before the grand final?

It's probably no surprise that the self-proclaimed sporting capital of Australia also has a day off to mark the AFL Grand Final. But that's not to suggest Daniel Andrews' move to make the day before the grand final a statewide public holiday in 2015 didn't ruffle some feathers.

Some Melburnians have been calling for the reinstatement of the Royal Melbourne Show holiday ever since it was revoked by Jeff Kennett's government in 1994. 

Some regional Victorians are also still smarting over the Brumby government's 2008 decision to remove public holidays for agricultural shows and country racing cup meetings and instead impose the Melbourne Cup holiday for the whole state. 

The Victorian Employers' Chamber of Commerce also claimed an AFL Grand Final eve holiday would cost businesses up to $600 million, and then-state opposition leader Matthew Guy declared in 2015 that the holiday would be scrapped if the Coalition won the next state poll.

But, as Professor Ecclestone says, "once they're established, governments and politicians are loath to get rid of them".

By the time Mr Guy had hit the hustings in 2018, he didn't want the now-entrenched day off to be used as a political football, declaring: "I don't think Victorians want public holidays to be politicised so we will leave the Grand Final holiday as it is".

It seems the future of AFL Grand Final eve — like many of Australia's other weird and wonderful public holidays — is safe.

As Professor Eccleston succinctly puts it: "Never stand between an Australian and a public holiday."