‘Call of the Beaches’

A key era in the democratization of holiday making has been identified in New Zealand, as in many other countries, in the 1920s and 1930s. Historians have typically linked this phenomenon to the advent of paid annual leave and to the rise of the motor car, although there has been little research into the origins of domestic tourism in New Zealand. It is the contention of this article that the inter-war growth of family holidays was driven not so much by the novelty of private motoring but by an existing form of mass public transport, the railways. By both fostering and capitalizing on rising demand for domestic holiday travel, the state-owned New Zealand Railways (NZR) responded to the challenge of motor competition.