How Christmas was celebrated between about 1830 and 1851 in the Port Phillip District seems to have depended on one’s status in the new colony. If you were a convict, you probably came across from Van Dieman’s Land and might have had Irish or English roots. If you were Irish and a free settler, you had come from a land where there was simplicity of lifestyle but also the constant and recent spectre of hunger. Either way, there were few signs of affluence. Many young Irish females were in this group, escaping the Irish famine, looking for work and for a husband. Christmas was not something to be excited about with the absence also of Catholic pastoral care adding to their woes along with a longing for home. For some, rum might have provided comfort.
If you were a free settler from England, Christmas Day was about religious observances as for many, the celebration of the season was usually on New Years’ Day. For some English people from rural areas where the village centre at Christmas was a place of games or where tradition required trapesing up to the local manor house where the Lord of the Manor provided food and drink, the colony had little to encourage Christmas celebration. The English climate was cold and often wet, all of which lent itself to warm food, minced pies and mulled wine. Far away in the Port Phillip District, there was no manor house, no lord to provide for the village and there were no geese, ducks or green peas available for a hot Christmas dinner. There were some provisions locally grown and others “imported” from Van Dieman’s Land. Contrary to the dark and snowy landscape of the Northern Hemisphere, the weather here was hot and dry. From the start of the colony, the average colonist’s staple diet had been saltbeef or mutton along with flour. Rural people found that cockatoos and kangaroos were fine to add to meat pies and not just for Christmas. Tea was the main drink but on occasions such as Christmas, it was flavoured with rum. For many in the district, Christmas went on as if the day was not different.
But there were enterprising groups. By the middle of the 1840’s settlers of German background had moved to Doncaster and were growing fruit and crops such as wheat and barley to sustain themselves. The German migrants brought their traditions from Europe and replicated them. For these migrants, Christmas was celebrated as it was in Europe with religious observances on the Eve of Christmas and the end of Christmas Day and the church provided a place for a large community tree adorned with presents and candles.
For most of the colony, Christmas in those early decades was a day of rest and not much more. As a contrast, by December 1850, Sydneysiders were more advanced with the Sydney Morning Herald advertising that “Mrs Gill” was able to supply her customers with “Christmas pies and cakes” and “very superior mince meats in one or two pound jars”.
In the Port Phillip District, the population by 1850 was only about 77,000 of whom 3,000 lived in the affluent suburb of Fitzroy but down the road in Collingwood, many people lived in crowded accommodation. As the Colony headed towards statehood, people had already started to move out to Richmond, Kew and Heidelberg and the celebration of Christmas varied according to financial status. Only 10 years before in 1840, the area east of the top of Bourke Street was bushland with emus wandering about Eastern Hill and corroborees still being held by the Indigenous people along the banks of the Yarra River. In that same area east of the town towards 1850, as the summer hit, those of some affluence picnicked along the river to evade the heat, competing with the bushflies. Bottled drink was string-tied by the neck and placed in the river to keep it cool, and children were prevented from swimming until the bottles were removed.
The one tradition that did not change for most in the district was the Christmas Plum Pudding. Despite the heat, it appeared on many dinner tables where traditions of Europe were followed. On the “diggings”, where there were few plates and little cutlery, Robert Shortfried Anderson wrote:
“We had an enormous plum pudding which weighed nearly fifty pounds; as rich as could possibly be made, and each of us had a good sweat in mixing the same. Mr Hood made us a present of six nuggets of different sizes, the whole of us agreed to mix them in the monster pudding- and take our chance as to the gold when dispatching our Xmas dinner”. (certainly beats a sixpence or a threepence?)
(Sources: Christmas in the Colonies- Maisy Stapleton and Patricia McDonald 1981; Petticoats in the Orchard- Irvine Green 1987; Australia as once we were- John Ritchie 1975.)
Paul Cronin