Alison Mau

You’re on your own and you know what you know. And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go! – Dr Seuss

Before coronavirus there were 42 possible choices for (mainly young) Kiwis planning their Big OE. So many places to go, from Denmark, Israel, Uruguay or Slovenia, to Canada, Peru, Thailand and Malta.

But back in the mists of time there was only one place you went if you were Antipodean, and that was London.

OE is a Kiwi term for holidaying or working overseas – and we Australians have always called it that too.

And it meant the exact same thing, namely, dossing on a biscuit-thin mattress under the dining room table of a 16-person flat in Camden Town by night, and trudging the streets of west London looking for a job pulling pints of warm beer by day. Trying not to sink your meagre savings into lager and chips as you thumbed through someone’s cast-off Frommer’s Guide to plan as much travel as you could.

There’s always been a peculiar thing about an OE that few admit to anyone but themselves: there are good OEs and not so good ones, and if you had the latter, yours will always have a faint whiff of inferiority.

The requirements for a good one, as researcher Dr Jude Wilson explains, have changed. In the 1960s it was all about a hand-me-down VW Kombi and the budget life on the road. By the 1980s you had missed that boat, but were still too early for the Anzac Day Gallipoli pilgrimage, or the Waitangi Day pub crawl in London.

That was me – stuck in the middle of two OE zeitgeist moments. Having picked 1990 to escape from Melbourne – still a grim, boring place hunkered in Sydney’s glittering shadow – I worked way too much in my three years in London and travelled too little: I’ve still never been to Ireland or Scotland.

Back in the mists of time there was only one place you went if you were Antipodean, and that was London.