Christmas Passed

2023 ended with our least harmonious family Christmas ever. We were all tired and irritable. Conflict erupted repeatedly then finally at a level that so shook the dynamic that the rest of the celebrations were aborted. Christmas 2023, in all likelihood, marks the end of my attempts to curate a Kodak Christmas experience. I’m sixty seven, my husband is seventy two, and we have two adult children and no grandkids…  There is something a little forced about painstakingly decorating a tree (actually a conifer branch from the garden), preparing a perfectly stuffed and roasted turkey and recreating our mother’s ‘traditional’ ice cream Marsala cheesecake each December.

It is well known that the pressure to create an atmosphere of ‘comfort and joy’ for the festive season is at odds with how many people are actually feeling. There is also the tension between those who want to ‘put the Christ back in Christmas’ and atheists like us who cite Yule or, more appropriately for the Southern Hemisphere, the solstice, as the ‘reason for the season’. I went through a phase of eschewing all ceremony and ritual… that is the reason I didn’t go to my first uni graduation and delayed marriage for so long. I do now see, and have for a long time seen, value in coming together to celebrate, but maybe the cause has to be more personally relevant than the mixture of commercialism and sentiment that marks Christmas.

Until we lost my mother-in-law, and my husband’s family dispersed, our Christmas Day was always marked by trying to please both our families. To do this we would have lunch with my husband’s and dinner with mine and end up exhausted.  Once, before the kids were born, we tried asking both lots of relatives to our place for lunch with catering assistance from a friend who was a chef. He did a glazed ham and a pastry cornucopia with hors d'oeuvres spilling from it presented on an upturned mirror. It was more like a hotel function (the context for his training) than a family Christmas and the two groups didn’t mix readily either. I was so fretful that I got more exhausted than our usual shuttle Christmas had left me.

The Christmas dilemma took on new proportions in 1999 when my mother, declining with terminal cancer, was set to come out of hospital to spend the holiday with the family. Instead we got a call in the early hours of Christmas Eve to say she had died. The kids were little so we went – numbly - through the Christmas Day motions. It felt as if we were all treading water until the funeral could be arranged. Some kind friends invited us to spend New Year’s Eve with them in Newcastle, a welcome escape from the rawness and publicness of processing Mum’s death. My husband took the kids down to see the fireworks heralding the new millennium.  I retreated to bed.

The first Christmas after Mum died none of us could face organising a get together. We accepted an invitation from the same chef friend who’d helped us with that attempt at combining families. Needless to say, his catering was stylish but the whole affair felt hollow, adult-centric and overly steeped in alcohol. I missed my sisters and the children were bored and missed their cousins. After that the younger of my two sisters and her newish husband graciously took on the role of hosting for a few years. We became semi successful in balancing our sadness at the anniversary of Mum’s death with enjoying one another’s company and providing fun for the children.  Then that sister moved away for work eventually settling in Tasmania and generally spent Christmas with friends.

It was around then that we started hosting regularly. We always had a real tree whose decorations included remnants of my  mother-in-law’s collection dating back to the 1960s and our own accumulation of many years featuring felt kangaroos and koalas with little bells, a painted toilet roll and tissue ‘candle’ our daughter made at kindergarten, glass baubles, little wooden figurines and various arty trinkets we’d collected over the years. Some of this collection has succumbed to natural attrition but more recently it has been depleted by successive puppies. My other sister, her husband and kids and my grown up niece and her boyfriend usually joined us. When that sister and her husband separated, her two boys went to live with him and his new partner leaving my sister as a full-time single parent and carer for a daughter with severe disabilities. The first Christmas after their split, either through misunderstanding or bloody mindedness, her ex didn’t deliver the boys to our family gathering. A series of increasingly angry and desperate phone exchanges took place, then, furious and distraught, she took her daughter and went home.

We have tried a few times to dispense with all the Christmas palaver. In 2012 we booked a holiday at a farm stay place in Bemboka on the state’s south coast. Our eldest elected not to come so that cast a bit of a pall from the start. We did however have the company of our beloved family dog, whose cautious encounter with a billy goat provided one of the trip’s high points. Others were catching up with old friends in Tanja and visiting Potoroo Palace, a native animal reserve later threatened by and temporarily evacuated during the south coast bushfires. Christmas lunch was to be at a seafood restaurant in Merimbula a short drive from our accommodation. Despite confirming our reservation twice in the preceding months, we arrived to find the place closed. With the local club booked out, we ended up eating at a Malaysian restaurant, one of the few businesses open. The proprietors created a festive mood by draping a potted Dracaena with tinsel and impaling our desserts with little Aussie flags.  Afterwards we walked under sullen skies around the lake along a path of terracotta pavers many incised with decorative designs, some commemorating local identities and businesses. Merimbula followers (if I have any), who is Bernie ‘Poostain’?  His name is forever etched in my memory.

For our next attempt the following year we chose an Italian restaurant in Lugarno that did honour its Christmas lunch reservations. My sister and her daughter joined us and things were a little hairy on our arrival when my niece let out a series of excited shrieks. However, the family-oriented Italian restaurateurs were good natured and reassuring and she soon settled down.  I remember it being a reasonably successful if not overtly festive occasion. That may have been wishful thinking on my part as my sister has since told me she remained tense throughout and I see, looking at photos from the day, that our son was face down on the table at one point, not from inebriation but to avoid his father’s camera.

The first Christmas after our tree change to Wagga Wagga, when to my delight both my sisters came, sans spouse and offspring but with dogs, to our new home, should have gone swimmingly. In fact the swimming pool was a godsend both as respite from the heat and because it proved a useful way to wear out the largest dog. However the mix of four dogs and three cats, most of which were not used to sharing their domiciles, caused chaos. We had to erect a kiddy gate to stop the biggest dog stealing from the kitchen and dining table and all the visiting dogs chased our cats. It was an ambitious experiment that worked best only when we decamped to the Botanical Gardens to give the mutts some exercise and the cats a break. Everyone’s mental health was challenged and the visit was cut short, albeit not as acrimoniously as happened this Christmas just passed.

It is tempting to think we were just all emotionally wrung out. During 2023 my best friend died, my husband’s middle brother died, followed just 5 months later by his wife, our artist friend of over 50 years died, and our 12 month old kelpie pup was fatally hit by a car.  Our first Christmas both as retirees, the time pressure imposed on us to prepare and host was lessened. However our kids were under their own strains, one arrived from Sydney fighting off a virus and spent a lot of time sleeping and the other was preoccupied with work and rental issues. One of my sisters now lives locally but only had two hours between work shifts to spend with us on Christmas Day. This constellation of factors perhaps didn’t provide the best backdrop for tree decorating, turkey preparation and commemorative cheesecake production or for civilized human interaction, but it would be disingenuous to tell myself we hadn’t been here before.

Time to change course.

Not Properly Introduced?

Losing our two rabbits and a beloved cat in a single week (to the heat and a brown snake) in our first few weeks in Wagga has led me to reflect on my naivety about the risks our new environment poses and to ponder the strange accidents of history that have put this fairly Anglo family, with its predilection for William Morris arts and crafts and Beatrix Potter-style anthropomorphised pets, in the middle of the Australian bush.

I have been piecing together what Australian history I already knew and what I am learning about the Riverina region specifically to help make sense of my feelings – feelings of loss and displacement side by side with those of exhilaration and rapidly growing love of this landscape and town.

Such sudden evidence of the vulnerability of our urban pets has driven home to me with brutal intensity how paper bark thin is the veneer of suburban decorum here.  Kooringal’s winding streets sport bright green sprinkler-fed lawns,  garden beds of foxgloves and heliotrope and faux classical embellishments adorn the houses, yet many of those houses, like ours,  back onto  rugged, rocky terrain where heatstroke, snakebite and god knows what other perils await. When the sun is relentless and the air is humming I can’t avoid visions of Miranda and her school friends vanishing!

Disappearing into the impenetrable mysteries of the bush, Picnic At Hanging Rock.

I found an unattributed poem* published in the Wagga Wagga  Daily Advertiser of 25^th November, 1941 (65 years  to the day that I am writing this). It expresses the solace provided by quiet reflection on the banks of Wollundry Lagoon, on how the ‘things of Nature, God's kind forgiving smile’ help to heal both the soldier’s mind still full of the ‘frenzy of Tobruk’ and the troubled soul of  ‘some forlorn, weak sister’ who has morally transgressed. Then the poet suddenly conjures up images from the distant past:

(When) in Wollundry's garden a vision strange appears

Of native children playing among the ancient trees,

And camp smoke slowly rising upon the languid breeze.

No trim lawns then and willows, or fragrant scent of rose;

Long reeds and waving grasses, and calling of the crows.

Here dark-skinned men and women; God's creatures yet untamed

Lived innocently happy, untutored and unashamed.

They heard the kookaburra with cheery laughter greet

The sunglow, overspreading the morning, dewy sweet.

They saw the wild duck leaving their night-enchanted haunts

And took what Nature offered to satisfy their wants.

The kangaroos leaped lightly, the emu loitered near

Sufficient for the hunting, the boomerang and spear.

The native life was simple. Its savagery was mild.

And heart, however cultured, still leaneth to the wild.

There is something very pleasing in unspoilt forest still.

Ere man with axe and fire has worked his ruthless will

There heaven-assisted Nature moulds in unrivalled way

Her monumental splendour from elemental clay.

Despite its romantic paternalism (and inaccuracy about who first used fire to manage the land), the poet is attempting some 100 years after Wagga’s genesis as a European town, to grapple with the same paradoxes I am.  To reconcile what consoles her of contemporary values and taste with an imagined past she admires  as elemental, innocent and unspoilt.  She quickly excuses herself from judgement with the line “And who shall say the old thing was better than the new?”

The willows of Wollundry Lagoon in the 1930s (NSW State Records)

But we all do, constantly, declare an old thing better than a new or a new thing better than an old. When land was cleared for grazing in the early-mid 19thC the practice was supported by progressive,  benevolent natural scientist and  pioneer authority on Aboriginal culture, Alfred William Howitt, as ridding the land of miasma producing toxins. Also, as Wagga poet and memoirist, Mary Gilmore relates, sheep and cattle station owners saw the plants and birds which had flourished in  sanctuaries preserved by the local Wiradjuri  people for centuries on the Murrumbidgee as hazards and impositions. They eradicated the river oaks completely and drove the black swans from their nests smashing their eggs. They believed they were cleansing the landscape to better provide for their families, they had no inkling of the salinity that was to affect the soil so soon afterwards.  Regeneration of bush and wetlands decades later shows the old reasserting itself against the new!

We didn’t see  the brown snake get our cat. My son had seen it  earlier in the day winding away from the fishpond, and I had not thought anything of it when he told me. Her symptoms however, back legs giving way with ascending paralysis, venom affecting her breathing muscles and her mouth frothing up, were textbook. I realised that when I did some reading later. We don’t know for sure that the rabbits succumbed to heat exhaustion. They may have dehydrated, rabbits in the city don’t need drinking water you just dampen their veggies. As with the death of any loved one my mind raced with questions about what I could have done to keep my pets from harm.

Backyard grave for two of our perished pets - memorial mound of local rock.

As classes,  cats and rabbits are rightly considered destructive introduced  pests in Australia yet this particular cat and these particular rabbits did no damage, they just proved fragile in the face of the perennial dangers of the bush. Should we have introduced them at all? Done so differently? Or, like our sprinkler-addicted neighbours, should we defy the environment because we enjoy the company of our effete European pets?


These questions can’t be answered. All human society is rife with contradiction and compromise. This land is the brown snake’s home and it is also home to Maltese terriers, McDonalds drive thru,  alyssum borders, fancy garden statuary from Bunning’s and now also home to our 'rescue' new cats. We hope that,  like currency lads and lasses, being Wagga born, they may be prove more robust in this environment.   

Whatever comes there will be sadness and there will always be consolation amongst the willows and the now reintroduced river oaks of Wollundry Lagoon.

River Oaks (Casuarina cunninghamiana) back beside Wollundry Lagoon.

*Have contacted Editor of the Daily Advertiser to try to trace author with no success.