NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/k12/chat/teacher/5666

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-24 | 8.5 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!psgrain!puddle!p0.f508.n711.z3.fidonet.org!Peter.Macinnis
From: [e-mail] (Peter Macinnis)
Sender: [e-mail] (newsout1.26)
Newsgroups: k12.chat.teacher
Subject: Australian Christmas  1/2
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 92 14:00:00 PDT
Organization: FidoNet node 3:711/508.0 - The Bay, Neutral Bay NSW
Lines: 154

;rep:111,4220
G'day everybody.  I've just about had it after three days as a barker
for a display of two "savages" in a cage at the museum: I'll tell you
all about that some other time, after I've digested the public reactions
a little better.  I am certainly very attuned to cultural differences
and people's reactions to them at the moment, but I'm also a bit
culture-shocked from keeping a straight face for three days.  Even
experienced leg-pullers can have trouble!

Anyhow, I sat down this morning to relax a bit, and this sort of poured
forth.  Hope it may help the Nortamericanos to relate to a similar but
subtly different culture.  Here is one view of an Australian Christmas:

                        ************

An Australian Christmas carol, my favourite, goes like this:

     The north wind is tossing the leaves,
     The red dust is over the town;
     The sparrows are under the eaves,
     And the grass in the paddock is brown,
     As we lift up our voices and sing
     To the Christ child, the heavenly King.

To me, that song typifies Christmas in Australia.  My family have lived
here since the 1820s, and while there are still traces of our Celtic
inheritance and culture, we are a part of this land.  When the Koori
(aboriginal) people who were here long before us claim this sort of
relationship, most whites scoff, but there IS a way in which you become
a part of the land.  It happens to us all, with time.

Much of this belongingness can be acquired in a single generation: my
parents' generation looked to Europe, my generation, and even more my
children's generation, look to Australia.  This is not the cheap
imitation of patriotism favoured by politicians, but a deeply ingrained
sense of belonging.

I am reminded of my 1986 European trip, where we visited Kew just
before we cam home.  While my wife and children explored some of the
more exotic displays, I just sat in the "Australian house" and took in
the more muted browny-greens of our vegetation.  It was time, I knew
then, to go home where I belonged.

As an eight-year-old, I discovered the carol I have quoted.  It seemed
perfect to me then, and it does now, for it referred to things I knew,
but my parents never knew it.  The song described (and describes) the
Christmas times I had experienced.  As an only child, I always took off
after lunch on Christmas Day for the local beach, with one of my new
books from an uncle to read (they always seemed to have a Scots or
Jacobite theme when they came from the uncles) while my parents had a
sleep to recover from the 4.30 am start that we kids in the street
always demanded, plus the rounds of drinks in each others' houses, from
8 through to 12, and a heavy if cold Christmas lunch.  Every year, my
father would slip and cut himself, opening the tinned ham.  It was one
of the givens in life.

They started playing that carol on the radio, and a number of other
carols written by the same South Australian composer, just as I sat
down to put finger to keyboard.  Now I have heard it, I know that
Christmas is here.  I can put the bah humbugs behind me.

As a child, though, down at the beach in the late afternoon of
Christmas Day, with my new book and my towel, there would be sun and
sand, seagulls scavenging for discarded sandwiches, worn-out adults
improving their sun-tans, and usually a warm westerly breeze (the
equivalent of South Australia's north wind), at least as I recall it.
That was before we learned all about skin cancers, but that is how I
still think of Christmas.

It is Sunday morning here.  I have just spent the last two hours at the
beach, where my youngest son is a "nipper", a trainee lifesaver ("life
guards" are paid, lifesavers are voluntary but highly organised).
Several hundred boys and girls (the lifesavers reached the twentieth
century some years ago) have spent the morning in beach sprints, flag
races, swimming races out past the breakers and back, and board races.
Now four of them are in the back yard, competing with the birds, as my
wife plasters them with factor 15 sunscreen.

All of a sudden, the day spent on the beach, soaking in the sun to get a
healthy tan is a thing of the past.  Christmas presents this year will
feature hats, UV-proof shirts, sunscreen in designer bottles, and the
buses have an ad for long-lasting sunscreen "If you could last eight
hours, you'd advertise too!"   There is indeed a ghost of Christmas
past, a ghost which is close to us right now, as my wife found a red
patch on my back this morning.  She was putting screen on my back before
I went out as one of the safety patrol for the youngsters during the
swimming race.

Probably the mark is no more than an allergy patch or an insect bite,
but tomorrow I will go and have a medical check, and if necessary, a
biopsy.  We may belong to this land, but our Celtic inheritance hangs
over us, and Australia has the highest incidence of skin cancer in the
world: we take no chances any more.  There is no sense of worry, and it
won't make it a gloomy Christmas, but we will play safe.  We have to.
One good thing: if it is serious, we found it early, and we will
photograph it so we can use the photos in the museum, where we are
setting up an ozone display to begin next month.  Who knows, we may
even put me on display!  (No, not as a "savage"!)

The politicians of the northern hemisphere muddle around about banning
CFCs, and say the ozone hole is only in the south.  It has taken our
public consciousness only two years to recognise what a few of us were
reading and talking about twenty years ago.  Soon the Northerners will
have to change too, when the ozone holes start to appear over the
Arctic.  But hopefully it will not affect their Christmas habits, just
their summer habits.

The habits of Christmas seem to change slowly, even here, but few
people will sit down to a hot Christmas dinner in Australia this year.
Some will take picnics to the beach and sit under umbrellas, eating
sun-screen flavoured Colonel Sanders, or ham sandwiches, and they will
lick at fast-melting ice cream cones, others will be out on boats on
the harbour, others will wait till Boxing Day (December 26) when a
fleet of up to 200 yachts will sail off to race to Hobart, 600 nautical
miles away.  A few will go to the cricket or the tennis, many will just
sit in their gardens, brushing away the flies.

The well-off may decide to go to a restaurant (if they booked in months
ago), where they will eat too much, and drink too much good Australian
wine.  The better-informed will grin in a wry way at the recent French
outrage at our use of their regional names like burgundy and champagne
to describe our wines.  The French have recently used blackmail to stop
us doing so, threatening trade sanctions on a wide range of products.
That shows just how good our wines have become, in their opinion.

I, too, will drink some Hunter red, and some South Australian Cabernet
Sauvignon, from an area where the dust is red, and the grass brown, or
will be when the floods of last night subside: red wine is not good for
me, I know, but I shall indulge in a small way.  And I shall try not to
cut myself, opening the ham.

My family will sit for their lunch in the enclosed and screened
conservatory that I have built over the last couple of months, a sort
of extension of the family/lounge/dining room.  My oldest son and I
will place a panel of shade-cloth on the clear fibre-glass roof today,
tough black fibre-glass cloth which will block out some of the sun's
heat, and we will drink cold drinks, and maybe even sleep there at
night when it is hot.  With luck, I will finish the shelf where the
frog and tadpole tanks will go, before Christmas Day.  I only have one
frog at the moment, as the rest were big enough to fend for themselves,
and have been released.
Right now it is noisy.  My study windows are open, and four ten-year-
olds are in the pool, playing cricket or something similar.  The gum
tree that hangs over the pool is in flower, and we have scooped maybe 2
kg of stamens from the pool surface.  Later, my daughter Catriona will
set the filter going, and attach a small machine which will crawl around
>>> Continued to next message




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