To understand Australian concepts of enjoyment’, Donald Horne wrote in The Lucky Country, ‘one must understand that in Australia there is a battle between puritanism and a kind of paganism.’ Puritanical leisure, Horne felt, was the product of numerous religious sensibilities, yet ‘ordinary’ Australians – who Horne saw as white, middle-class suburbanites – tended to embrace an opposing view of their recreation: a worship of nature and the body for their own sake.

Unlike Melbourne’s nineteenth-century stonemasons, the economic squeeze many feel today is not from overwork but its opposite: underemployment. As costs of living soar and wage growth remains dismally flat, a growing number of people struggle to find enough work to provide a dignified, comfortable existence for themselves or their families. Part-timers want full-time work. Why can’t they get it?

Antidepressants work. For me, they have helped lift me out of a deep slump, but had I been prescribed them alone, I would not have sought – with the help of a fantastic psychologist – a deeper understanding of myself; one that acknowledged that my depression was partly existential anguish at the direction my life had taken. An unpromising job market had made me desperate for work, which compounded my own personal anxieties about pleasing people, making it harder to leave a job I hated.

An increase in leisure time – once a central goal of the labour movement – is sorely needed in western societies. In Australia, working hours for full-time employees increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and have only declined slightly since, despite significant increases in productivity. To add insult to injury, workers’ real wages in Australia are no longer rising in line with increased output.