English Christmas Pudding 'transported' to Australia

"The Duality of the Australian Christmas Pudding 1850-1950"
by Rhiannon Donaldson.
NOTE 2011 - Her web site seems to have been taken down. I had saved this copy in 2004 in case the web page disappeared.

An extract from
The Duality of the Australian Christmas Pudding 1850-1950
by Rhiannon Donaldson.

Before Federation (1901) there were doubts expressed about whether the transfer of the Christmas festival from the winter of the northern hemisphere to the summer of the southern could possibly produce a successful or 'real' celebration.

In 1868, Marcus Clarke wrote with scorn of those people who felt constrained to keep up the traditions of England and stated 'it may be rank heresy, but I deliberately affirm that Christmas in Australia is a gigantic mistake.

Twenty years later, a newspaper editorial acknowledged that in this colony, 'Christmas' has been often stigmatised as a complete failure by people who have shifted their sky, but not their line of thought. Although the majority of the Australian population did not share Clarke's ideas, the continued celebrations existed within a public discourse which aired doubts well into the 1930s and 1940s. These doubts related to the ability of the English Christmas to survive in the Australian climate and environment.

The subject on which doubts were most often expressed was the hot Christmas dinner, particularly the Christmas pudding. This article will examine the transportation and acclimatisation of the English Christmas to the Australian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the study of this one particular element of Christmas: the plum pudding.

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