History
Schoolies week first began on the Gold Coast, Queensland in 1979, in the week after final exams for private single sex schools. The Broadbeach Hotel was the main meeting place. Schoolies Week events began to be organised, and the Gold Coast attracted schoolies from all over Australia for celebrations. Since then, the tradition has spread, and Australian high-school graduates celebrate their graduation with a week-long party at many popular tourist destinations around the country.
Schoolies week is considered by many teenagers in Australia as a cultural rite of passage. Schoolies week is seen as transitional period from youth to adulthood, marking a change of state from the imposition of school discipline to the chosen freedom to have a body which is out of control. The most-enduring Schoolies-week tradition is the first run down the beach and dive into the ocean after school is finished forever. That plunge of freedom is the essence of freedom which Schoolies symbolises.
Read more about this topic: Schoolies Week
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)