Santas of the Southern Cross: Henry Lawson’s ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases’ (1902)

January 5, 2024

By Ge Tang

Santa Claus, young, fresh-faced and eager; Santa Claus, blonde and flaxen; Santa Claus, dark; Santa Claus with a brogue and Santa Claus speaking broken English; Santa Claus as a Chinaman (Sun Tong Lee & Co. storekeepers), with strange, delicious sweets that melted in our mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children.

The portrayals above readily conjure images of a highly commercialised Christmas which is celebrated by diverse ethnicities worldwide. However, this scene is not set in the present, but rather in the nineteenth-century goldfields of Australia, vividly brought to life by Henry Lawson (1867 –1922) in his Christmas prose ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases’, published in a Christmas issue of the Western Mail (Perth, WA: 1885–1954), on 25 December 1902. Born amid the dust and din of a miner’s world in a humble tent on the Grenfell goldfield in the colony of New South Wales (Lawson, Autobiographical and Other Writings, p. 173), Lawson’s upbringing in Pipeclay, another major goldfield in New South Wales, afforded him a keen insight into the miners’ experiences and emotions, which informed his depiction of Australian Christmases. Adapting the form of Christmas tales transported from England, Lawson crafted a narrative imbued with local colour, celebrating Australia’s development (and even modernisation) and its unique Christmas culture.

The structure of Lawson’s narrative is episodic, weaving together a tapestry of stories that depict varied Australian Christmas experiences. The first Christmas memory occurs in the cold embrace of an English village, featuring ‘bare hedges and trees, and leaden skies that lie heavy on our souls as we walk, with overcoat and umbrella, sons of English exiles and exiles in England’. The Christmas depicted is thus the last wintry one for a group of ‘English exiles’ longing to depart for the antipodean lands of luminous days and embracing warmth. Lawson uses the trope of antipodean inversion here, widely deployed by colonial newspapers to depict Christmas and New Year’s festivities in the southern hemisphere as ‘the reverse of the north in climate, mood, and fashion’ (Comyn, 63). English migrants, particularly the first generation, often held a profound nostalgia for the homeland they had left behind, as depicted by Anthony Trollope in his 1873 travelogue Australia and New Zealand.

Lawson’s narrative, however, steers clear of nostalgia for England. The wintry, English Christmas lacks the expected festive joy that would typically compel the ‘English exiles’ to yearn for their former home. Dismissive of the bleak Christmases in London—‘gloom, slush, and soot’—the narrator reflects, ‘It is not the cold that affects us Australians so much, but the horrible gloom. We get heart-sick for the sun’ (my emphasis). The collective ‘we’ unites the diverse memories of Christmas to create a shared remembrance of their Australian identity and their journey from an old world to life in the southern hemisphere. Christmas celebrations recorded in the article vary widely, ranging from Christmases spent at sea and a voyage to New Zealand, to modest celebrations alongside linemen on a new telegraph route. There are intimate gatherings in hessian tents in the goldfields, amid Asian companions, as well as cosy celebrations in pastoral homes; some, however, are solitary, like the lonesome Christmas of an unfortunate bullock-driver isolated by floods. These celebrations capture the diversity of Australian society and their different fortunes.

The author revels in the quintessential Australian Christmas that harmonises with the country’s distinct climate and geography. A ‘sensible Australian Christmas dinner’ should suit the Australian summer: ‘Everything cold except the vegetables, the hose playing on the veranda and vines outside, the men dressed in sensible pyjama-like suits, and the women and girls fresh and cool and jolly’. His memory is of simple, unadorned joy. In contrast, Lawson views with ironic detachment the exertions of ‘many Australian women’ labouring in stifling heat to prepare a traditional English Christmas banquet, ‘a scalding, indigestible dinner’. He wryly describes how they would end up ‘hot and cross and looking like boiled carrots, feeling like boiled rags, and having headaches after dinner’. Even the plum pudding is not spared his wit, deemed ‘one of the most barbarous institutions of the British’ and ‘a childish, silly, savage superstition’.

The gold rush emerges in the story as the impetus for community building; traditional virtues of kindness, generosity, and camaraderie flourished among the throngs of the goldfields. The diggers, in a display of communal spirit, lavished guineas on toys for children who reminded them of their own at home, inviting kids to pick out their desired gifts. Most touching is the depiction of diggers who fit poor children with the best boots available, ‘with great care and anxiety,’ and eagerly ensuring their comfort in the new boots. The goldfield community depicted is one of inclusivity, transcending ethnic boundaries to establish a shared identity and collective support. Lawson tells of a Scottish miner whose newfound wealth was overshadowed by the unexpected news that his beloved girl in Scotland ‘had grown tired of waiting and was married.’ Lamenting how the poor man ‘drank, and drink and luck went together’,  the narrator extends sympathy to this Scottish miner and, by extension, to white, if not all, communities living on the goldfields, regardless of their origins. Returning to the opening quotation of this blog post, a Chinese storekeeper assumes the role of Santa Claus. His shop is a treasure of exotic sweets consumed by the community and toys that bring joy to children’s hearts. The Chinese migrants seem favoured in Lawson’s memory and literary imagination of Christmas celebrations. However, this positive portrayal raises questions about the author’s sincerity, given—as William Harrison Pearson has noted—the prevalent anti-Chinese sentiment Lawson exhibits in his many other writings (1-3). In 1901, one year before the publication of ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases’, the newly established Commonwealth of Australia enacted the White Australia policy to formalise attempts to construct an Australian identity strictly based on skin colour, systematically excluding ethnicities of other colours. This policy particularly impacted Chinese migrants, among others. Including the Chinese in his festive perception of Australia as a country for all men, Lawson registers, consciously or not, their contribution to the goldfields community, celebrating virtues crucial to the Christmas spirit, such as friendship and happiness. But his portrayals of multi-ethnic Santas of the Southern Cross gloss over the marginalisation and alienation faced by the non-white Chinese immigrants and Indigenous Australians in a ‘white’ Australia.

Lawson mourns the decline of once-thriving mining towns, but the narrative evolves past mere nostalgia about Australia’s mining history to depict the country’s continuous growth beyond its mining and relatedly, colonial roots. Through the portrait of the lively metropolis of Sydney, the author transcends traditional Christmas stories’ emphasis on personal success or domestic joy, opting instead for a grander vantage point to laud the achievements of the newly federated country. Notably, much like a painting relies on a sturdy framework before the details can flourish, Lawson’s portrayal of Sydney relied on a structural backbone formed by the city’s sophisticated transportation system. He writes,

Christmas in Sydney…in the Queen city of the South. Buses, electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water’s edge with harbour picnic-parties. ‘A trip round the harbour and to the head of Middle Harbour one shilling return!’ Strings of tourist trains running over the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to Gosford and Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful Illawarra, until after New Year.

Roads, railways, and coastlines delineate the landscape’s boundaries and guide the reader’s gaze, connecting the urban bustle with the surrounding natural beauty. While the transport systems owe their existence to the mining industry to some degree, their representation explicitly ties them to this past—they are the conduits that allow people to visit and embrace the wilderness associated with the rugged lifestyle of their pioneering forebears. Perhaps passengers from the countryside seeking urban comforts are absent from Lawson’s descriptions of Sydney. Instead, he depicts young people venturing out ‘with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough it properly like bushmen’. This desire for authentic bushman experiences, ingrained in Australia’s mining legacy and pioneering spirit, makes Lawson’s Christmas lore distinctly Australian.  Casting a sweeping gaze over the festive and prosperous visage of Sydney, Lawson’s celebratory narrative of the nation’s progress glosses over the environmental toll of this development and the systematic dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

 

Works Cited

Comyn, Sarah. ‘Southern doubles: Antipodean life as a comparative exercise.’ Worlding the South. Manchester University Press, 2021. 58-77.

Lawson, Henry. Autobiographical and Other Writings, 1887-1922. Angus and Robertson, 1972.

—. ‘The Ghosts of Many Christmases.’ Western Mail (Perth, WA: 1885 – 1954) 25 December 1902: 8 (Special Edition). Web. 21 Dec 2023 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37544542

Pearson, William Harrison. Henry Lawson Among Maoris. Australian National University Press, 1968.