Northern Territory Picnic Day — 3 August

There aren’t a lot of people, relatively speaking, in Australia’s Northern Territory. But those who live there look forward to the first Monday in August when they celebrate the territory’s Picnic Day. Northern Territory Aussies — not to mention folks from the other parts of the continent — have been celebrating Picnic Day since at least the late 1800s, although the date of the first picnic is unknown. Railroad workers and public works employees started the tradition when they held an annual “Union Picnic Day” or “Trade Picnic Day” by the Adelaide River. And after a few lean, picnic-free years, the tradition was restarted in earnest in the 1930s and continues to this day.