The Big Issue

Edition 298

The gap year – time out between education and work – is becoming increasingly popular among young people. Anna Krien reports on what has become a viable personal and career option, and finds out what it means to different people. And Brianna Summers shares her experience as a cleaning lady, souvenir ‘intern’ and telemarketer on a working holiday in Berlin.

Also in this issue:

In ‘Kong Quest’, Anthony Morris talks to film producer Ed Cunningham about The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters – a documentary about two grown men fighting over who’s the best at Donkey Kong. Steve Toltz’s 700-page debut novel brings a new version of Australia to the world, and this issue’s ‘Roving Eye’ photographs are arresting images from the 51st annual World Press Photo Contest.

Our ‘Vendor Profile’ for this edition is Craig from Melbourne. We also have ‘Streetsheet’ contributions from Port Adelaide’s George S and Sydney vendors Daniel W and John Mc.

Alan introduces current edition: Mind The Gap

Time Out - And Time For a Healing

I didn’t see Kevin Rudd when he made his historic apology recently. I heard him, but I didn’t see him. I arrived at Melbourne’s Federation Square when the Prime Minister’s speech had just begun. The square was packed. The only way I might have managed to see the big screen was to push in and stand on many toes. But I didn’t bother. I knew what Kevin Rudd looks like; the only uncertainty was the colour of his tie (red, I later discovered). I could hear the speech perfectly well, so I stood to one side listening to the invisible PM while scanning faces in the crowd.

This was a fascinating exercise: on display was a vast range of ages and backgrounds and interests and professions – all brought together, if only for a while, by a sense that something significant (and overdue) was taking place. Photographers were everywhere – at events like this all over Australia and, particularly, in Canberra. It was a gift for them: the conjunction of a major news event with great theatre. Perhaps, in a year’s time, some of the images from what is already being called ‘Sorry Day’ will feature among winners of the next World Press Photo contest, which we feature in this edition.

Meanwhile, back in Fed Square, I was left with a feeling that the politics of division and exclusion that we’d become used to has been replaced by something more inclusive. Betty Birskys thinks so, too. One of our contributors – most recently in our Election 07 issue (Ed#291) – Betty recently wrote to me describing her optimism in the wake of John Howard’s defeat. “I do believe a sense of decency will revive in the land,” she concluded.
Betty has had quite a life. Born in Toowoomba in the 1920s, she served in World War II with the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service. Later she attended Queensland University and was married to Anton, an immigrant from Lithuania, for 51 years.

She has done much of her writing (including two books) since his death in 2002. In her pieces for us, and also her occasional updates, there is a vibrant personality and a keen interest in the world. I suspect she’s exactly the sort of person who would have been attracted to the idea of a ‘gap year’, had it been an option in her own time. The subject of our cover story in this edition, the gap year is the all-inclusive term now being given to time out taken – mostly by young people – between secondary or tertiary education and a career. In less enlightened times this was called ‘dropping out’. Now the benefits of travel, working holidays and simply pausing to consider things are widely acknowledged. A gap year can be highly structured (there are companies organising them) or improvised.

Some people travel extensively, others don’t get too far from home. They’re not for everybody: my own daughter took one after completing secondary schooling; my older son didn’t. A generation earlier, I did – but probably a couple of years late…
My story is a familiar one, especially to those of a similar vintage. Nobody talked about gap years or taking time off. The period between secondary school finishing and tertiary education starting was deemed long enough to sort yourself out. Besides, there was work to be done. So I started a course that, even then, felt like a mistake. It took me two years to wriggle free, by which time I’d stumbled into something that other people called a career. A couple of years later I had my first real job. Then, after just two years of that, I jumped. Talked my way into a year’s leave and headed overseas with not much money and fewer plans. It was one of the best moves I ever made: I travelled a lot, met some terrific people and did some serious thinking about who I was and what I wanted to do.

By the time I returned I was much more settled: gone was the relentless need to be going somewhere. The value of that year has really only become apparent in retrospect. Life has a way of getting, well, complicated. One day you wake up and you have a family and a job and all kinds of commitments. That year away, that gap year before anyone called it that, has now receded way back in the rear-view mirror. Ah yes, but it’s still there.