Schoolies week is the week after the
year twelve exams are finished in Australia. Since exams are around the same time every year in every state schoolies week is the around same time across all the states, and tends to be around the 21st or 22nd to the 29 or 30th of November.
New South Wales bucks the trend with a "15th onwards" promise, and
South Australia likes to last a weekend plus maybe one or two days, instead of the five or six days other places have.
Places that schoolies gather at include the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, the Whitsundays and Magnetic Island in Queensland. New South Wales has Byron Bay, Coffs Harbor and Port Macquarie. Victorians go to Lorne and Torquay. Southerners go to Victor Harbor and Perth people go to Perth, I suppose. People in other places have their own ideas of fun, or join us in ours. Other common places include Bali, though fears of bombs keep some teenagers at home.
The idea of schoolies is to party, and party hard with lots of other people your age and with your level of excitement. And what better way to spend the first few days out of 13 years of education than with thousands of teenagers on a beach, with no parents in sight?
Schoolies week is a massive week of work for police and various other people involved with safety and the youth. Fights break out amongst those that take their drink badly, drug sellers like to convince the young to start being drug users, and, well, you know the issues that can arise when a bunch of kids get together. Many organizations like to get "youth workers" to gather together to help schoolies "party safely". These are the people that tell us that alcohol and sex is not needed to have fun.
Other people, nerds, safe people or people who don't really care about partying with randoms, gather a selection of friends and leave their homes for a week or so to a safe place. This place could be a capital city, which, being free of most teenagers, is safer and probably a little quieter than normal. Beach houses can also be acquired for a few days on a beach that is unlikely to be full of wild school leavers.
Another option is, of course, to simply stay at home and enjoy a quiet city, though, based on my group of friends, about 9 in every 10 people plan to have some sort of away-from-home celebration, so if you decide to stay home you'll probably be very lonely.
It takes a while for plans about schoolies to settle. Teenagers tend to give in to peer pressure rather easily and people hell bent on going to the Sunshine Coast may end up spending lots of money to go to Bali. My friends, some days, want to go to the Gold Coast. Others want a beach house somewhere closer to home, but nowhere near other schoolies. I like to throw in the idea of robbing a bank or stealing a jet airplane as a way to party, but they tend to ignore my much better ideas.