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onhollies

About

Sources

Where everything on onhollies comes from, how we check it, and how we keep it current.

We check our sources on a schedule and correct what we find. It’s provided in good faith, and a page can change before we see it, so check with the source before you book. More in our Terms.

Last checked: holiday dates 12 October 2026, places September to November 2026, venues September and October 2026.

01Our rules

  • Every fact comes from a page we can point to: a government page for dates, and the people who run a place for what’s on there.
  • We keep the source’s own words for every fact, and check each line against them before it goes on the site.
  • When a source doesn’t say something, neither do we.
  • Free means you can turn up and pay nothing. Where a park pass or permit stands in the way, we say so.
  • Where an experience belongs to a First Nations community, we use the knowledge-holders’ own words, quoted and credited.
  • We use AI tools to help find and check sources; every fact on the site traces to its official or operator page.

02Holiday dates

School terms, public holidays, show days and shop trading come from each state and territory government’s own pages, never from a third-party list. Holiday periods are worked out from the term dates. A date a government hasn’t confirmed yet is marked as unconfirmed.

Every week we check the government pages for newly published years, and we watch for pages that move. The main pages we use are listed below, state by state.

03Places and things to do

Each place’s guide is researched from official and operator sources: national parks and councils, tourism bodies, and the people who run each experience. Prices, seasons and opening times come from those pages, and we check them again on the dates they’re due to change.

Where something changes by the day, like the weather or a closure, we link to the page that has it live rather than guess.

Words we quote belong to the people and organisations who wrote them, and are credited where they appear. Words from government pages are used under those pages’ licences, most of them Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

04Photos

Every photo of a place is licensed for us to use, and we check it shows the place it names. These ask to be credited:

05Cellar doors and taprooms

Every venue’s hours, booking rules and address come from its own website or, where it has none, its official tourism listing. Where a website leaves a question open, we write to the venue and use its answer; its newest word wins.

Hours are as we last checked them, and the venue’s website has the final word. A venue that says it’s closed for now stays listed as “Closed for now” until it reopens. We list venues families can walk into. We haven’t visited them and we don’t rank them: the list runs by area, then A to Z.

06Weather and seasons

A place’s seasonal averages are worked out from the Bureau of Meteorology’s station records (© Commonwealth of Australia, Bureau of Meteorology), and each card names its years. Overseas, they come from the weather services of Japan, Fiji and Indonesia, through Germany’s DWD archive, and from New Zealand’s NIWA, each named on its card.

Today’s weather is a live forecast: Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (opens in a new tab), licensed under CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab).

07Maps and directions

Where a place sits comes from OpenStreetMap, from Australia’s official place names and address file, or from the operator’s own published location. Directions open Google Maps at that location. Our maps are drawn from OpenStreetMap data, in OpenMapTiles’ tiles served by OpenFreeMap.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (opens in a new tab), available under the Open Database Licence.

Place names © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2025, from the Composite Gazetteer of Australia, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab).

Incorporates or developed using G-NAF © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under the Open Geo-coded National Address File (G-NAF) End User Licence Agreement.

08Getting there

Drive times, and the roads drawn on our maps, are worked out by road routing on OpenStreetMap’s roads (© OpenStreetMap contributors). They are estimates, with no allowance for traffic, roadworks or closures.

Flight times come from the airlines’ and airports’ own pages or, where those can’t be read, from flight searches, as we last read them. They are typical times for each route, not a timetable.

09What the words on a venue mean

  • Booking recommended: the venue suggests booking, but you can still turn up.
  • By appointment only: the venue opens only by arrangement.
  • By appointment, Mon–Thu: on those days, only by arrangement.
  • Other times by appointment: outside the hours shown, only by arrangement.
  • Restaurant: booking required, and the same for a café or a tour: that part of the visit needs a booking; the rest doesn’t.
  • Hours not published: the venue doesn’t publish its hours. “Days not published” and “Times not published” mean it gives one but not the other.
  • Closed for now: the venue says it is closed for the time being.
  • No hours at all: we don’t hold them yet.

10Software

onhollies is built with open-source software, including MapLibre GL JS (opens in a new tab) for the maps (BSD 3-Clause licence) and Lucide (opens in a new tab) icons (ISC licence), each used under its licence.

11Sources, state by state

NSW

New South Wales

VIC

Victoria

QLD

Queensland

WA

Western Australia

SA

South Australia

TAS

Tasmania

ACT

Australian Capital Territory

Shop trading hours are deregulated in the ACT: there is no trading-hours law, so holiday closures are each retailer's choice.

NT

Northern Territory

General shop trading hours are deregulated in the NT; only takeaway alcohol has closing rules (bottle shops shut on Good Friday and Christmas Day).

Spotted something out of date? Tell us at jesse@onhollies.com.au.