About

If you’ve ever tried to plan around the school holidays, you’ll know the routine. Your state’s website gives you term dates, so you do the maths on the gaps yourself. Public holidays live on a different page, so you look those up separately. And when a public holiday does land, there’s still the question nobody answers: is everything actually open that day? None of it is hard, exactly. It’s just harder than it should be, and the pages don’t help.

onhollies started because I wanted that to be easier: school and public holidays together, worked out for you, presented the way you actually think about them. And once I began, I got excited by what happens when every state and territory sits in one place, because the dates stop being a chore to look up and start being a plan you can make.

Because the real question was never when the holidays are. It’s what you’re going to do with them. Where you might go. What’s on nearby that’s fun to do together if you’re staying home. How the care will work across the weeks you can’t take off, whether that’s family, a holiday program or something in between. That’s the job onhollies is really for: helping you feel organised about the break, and making the planning part of the fun. It’s the part I’m deep in building now, starting with a researched guide to family destinations, what each place is genuinely good for, what things really cost, and when the seasons actually work.

It’s also why notifications are coming. School holiday activities fill fast, and being first to know when they launch means you get in, or simply have a great time exploring the possibilities together before you choose.

How I build it

My rule is to do the searching the way I’d do it for my own family, so you don’t have to: heaps of sources, brought into one place, with the reading already done. Every fact is traced back to an official or operator page before it ships, and when a source doesn’t say something, neither do we. Free means you can turn up and pay nothing, and where a park pass or permit stands between you and a free walk, we say exactly that. For the things that change day to day, we tell you the pattern that makes or breaks a trip and point you at the page that’s live today. And where an experience belongs to the people whose culture it shares, naming them is part of the story, and when I’m not sure how to get that right, I ask.

The dream is simple to say and big to do: improve the lives of millions of people, by saving them time planning, making the experience genuinely enjoyable, and helping them get the most from their time away from work. More out of the holidays, and more out of life.

Where the dates come from

Every date on onhollies is taken from official state and territory government sources. Holiday periods are calculated from the official school term dates, and public holidays and show days are recorded directly from the relevant government department for each state. You can see the full list of sources, with the dates they were captured, on our Sources page.

If you spot something that looks wrong, please tell me. Accuracy matters more than anything else here.