Schoolies week: a festival of misrule

Schoolies week: a festival of misrule

The schoolies week phenomenon can be seen as the contemporary Australian equivalent to the European grand tour. No longer a time for further cultural education and the expansion of knowledge, the completion of secondary school is perceived as an important point of transition, according to Hilary Winchester, ‘a rite of passage from youth to adulthood’ wherein teenagers (both boys and girls) engage in a period of ‘intense physical activity’. The precursor to the schoolies event started in the 1970s, but was largely an underground affair. Since the 1980s, Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast has developed into the celebratory destination of students from Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Since the early 1990s, schoolies week celebrations have been appropriated into organised events. They have also diversified to attract the local schoolies crowds up the Queensland coast: Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast, Yeppoon and Great Keppel Island in Central Queensland, Airlie Beach in the Whitsundays, Magnetic Island in North Queensland, as well as Byron Bay in New South Wales and Rottnest in Western Australia. Some schoolies also head overseas to places such as Bali, Fiji and Vanuatu. While the Gold Coast event remains the most popular and most notorious of the schoolies week centres, the landscape of these alternative sites is increasingly becoming ideologically linked within the schoolies tradition.

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