Having grown up in New Zealand and lived for the last twenty years in Australia, I have known nothing except a summer Christmas. Shorts, sunhats, trips to the beach, barbecues, and icy cold drinks on the 25th of December have been the norm for me all my life. I’m yet to experience a ‘white Christmas’, except in traditional Christmas Carols.
Unlike me, immigrants to the Australian goldfields were much more accustomed to the traditional ‘white Christmas’, as many of them came from Britain, Ireland and North America. Arriving in Australia, they were confronted with something many of them found “eccentric and unintelligible” – Christmas in summer!
So how did they cope?
Many didn’t.
It wasn’t uncommon for those who could afford it to leave the colony after their first summer, finding the climate did not agree with them. This I can relate to. When I first arrived in Australia in 2004, I had never been in heat above 25 degrees Celsius, and my second day in the country it was 42 degrees! Despite the modern benefit of air conditioning (thank God for it!) I remember lying on the tiles in my kitchen, trying desperately to keep cool. If I had been an immigrant in the 1850s, I think I would have high-tailed it home too if I could. I can’t imagine living through the Australian summer without air con!
But for those who couldn’t go home, they had to make do. Perhaps in an attempt to maintain their connections to their homes, many held onto various Christmas traditions that made more sense in the snow-blanketed Northern Hemisphere than the baking heat of Australia, such as heavy roast for dinner, but some deeply cherished traditions simply had to go.
1. The Yule Log
A cherished tradition in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Britain. There are many traditions associated with the yule log, but all of them involve burning it. In the freezing darkness of a European winter, this might have been rather cozy, but in the sickening heat of an Australian summer, nobody with any sense was burning anything!
Not only would it have been shockingly uncomfortable, it would have been dangerous too. Most houses in the early days of colonial Australia were made of wood or, especially on the goldfields, canvas. In the tinder dry summers, the risk of your house burning down around you was already real enough due to bushfires. In 1851, the so-called “Black Thursday” bushfires broke out in Victoria, burning around 5 million hectares, or a quarter of the colony. Despite the widespread damage, only twelve deaths were recorded, most likely due to the low European population in 1851; the fires broke out in February, and the payable gold which sparked the massive influx of immigration would not be officially discovered until June.
However, while there were few deaths, many settlers lost literally everything and would have been terrified at the sight of a wall of fire roaring towards them, devouring everything in its path. Bushfires can travel at up to 100km per hour, are known to “jump” rivers or other obstacles and ember attacks can cause further fires up to 30kms away from the fire front. They’re not to be trifled with!
Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851. William Strutt, 1864.
All of these factors meant that the Yule Log remained a nostalgic memory during Christmas in Australia. It’s never caught on in this country (for the same reasons the settlers put it to one side) and as The Argus newspaper so bluntly put in in 1854: “We must doubt if our friends sixteen thousand miles away would attach much value to the superstition if they had to chop them as we have at one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.” As we have seen, the discomfort of chopping the logs would have been the least of a colonial settlers worries.
2. Ice Skating
As I was going through newspapers from the 1850s regarding Christmas in colonial Victoria, something that constantly struck me was the number of references to ice skating. In summer time in Australia this would have been impossible, but it was such a common motif that it clearly had a lot of nostalgic value for the European immigrant. Even in winter, such a thing would have been difficult as Australia does not get cold enough for lakes to freeze over and it wouldn’t be until 1906 that the first indoor ice skating rink opened in Victoria.4 Until then, the colonists simply had to cling to their memories.
3. Family Dinners
If you are fortunate enough to be close to your family (whether blended, biological, chosen or otherwise) you will probably sympathise greatly with the colonists of Victoria, many of whom were apart from their families on Christmas Day. The tradition of gathering together around Christmas time was so baked into European culture that even those who really didn’t like their family were likely to turn up for Christmas dinner, no matter how unpleasant such a thing would be. It’s also worth remembering that people were much more religious back in the nineteenth century, so Christmas would have been a time of church-going, as well as present-giving and feast-having.
However, many immigrants in Australia were thousands of miles away from their extended families (and some of them from their immediate family too) and so large, family-based celebrations were not common. What did become common in Australia was Christmas lunch at the pub, where people would gather and chase away the loneliness with a traditional Christmas fears and (probably) more alcohol than was good for them. While religious leaders and the Temperance Society frowned on such things and campaigned hard for pubs to be closed on Christmas Day, they never succeeded in passing these laws. Even today, it’s common for pubs to be open on Christmas Day, and completely booked out for Christmas lunch. Despite the mild absurdity of having turkey, ham and heavy roast meat in the middle of summer, food was one tradition that European immigrants managed to cling on to.
Christmas Today
Like many countries where the majority of the white settler population were Christians, Christmas Day grew into a nationwide public holiday. As time went on, and more of the population were born in the colonies, the yearning for Yule Logs, frozen lakes and white Christmases began to disappear, as fewer people had ever experienced such things. The yearning for Christmas dinner with family also began to fade; people were either able to send for their families, or they built families of their own in Australia. So, while the colonial yearning may have vanished, some things never change. Every year, like clockwork, we sing carols dreaming of a white Christmas that few of us have ever experienced, and I’m not sure many of us Southern hemisphere babies would like it either.
It sounds a bit like colonial Christmas in reverse!