TheBanyanTree: Christmas, Australian style

[Laura]

(This bounced for some reason, so I'm forwarding it on for Peter. - Wolfie)

I had to do some digging the other day, to see when John Wheeler wrote the
Christmas carol I learned in 1952.  William G. James wrote the music, and
it appears they completed their set of Australian carols in 1948.

To me, Christmas doesn't arrive until I hear one particular one on the
radio. I have it on CD, but to play that would be cheating.  It has to be
on air.

It is high summer here: we had midsummer two days back, and songs about
dashing through the snow and winter wonderlands do not exactly compute,
not in Oz.  My Christmas mornings as a boy were all about running barefoot
over we grass, going to the beach where there seemed always to be a king
tide (I think that must have been based on a sample of two), cicadas and
seeking the shade.

Some years, there would have been bushfires, but I was too young to 
really be aware of them back then.  All the same, I knew that we were
different, so these lines always worked for me.  Somebody in the
background of our education was very well tuned-in to get them before the
children of New South Wales, just four years after they were penned.

Christmas Day

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.

The tree ferns in green gullies sway
the cool stream flows silently by
the joy bells are greeting the day
And the chimes are adrift in the sky
As we lift up our voices and sing
To the Christ child the heavenly king.

I took that carol as the text for a radio talk that I did 14 years ago. 
  It actually began when somebody asked me on FidoNet to explain 
Christmas in Australia for her students in a more northerly clime.  I pick
up pin money doing scripted chats, and quite often, something started as a
simple email ends up paying for a couple of dozen quaffable wines.

The talk has long evaporated from the air waves, but the text lingers on,
and every second year or so, some community group or other asks for
permission to use it, which I encourage.  This year, it was a
print-handicapped radio station in another state,so I said yes, and
started wondering when I would hear the trigger song. And wondered, and
wondered.

Finally, they played my carol yesterday.  I am flat out working on a
couple of deadlines at the moment, but there is a radio at my desk with
good speakers, so I can turn the volume up when the Right Stuff comes on. 
I did.

It set my thinking of Christmases past, and then I thought of where the
moon was and checked the tides.  As a family, we always head for a quiet
beach for Christ,as breakfast, and this year will be no different.  We
have had good tides once or twice, but this year, the second-highest tide
of all summer is delivered in Sydney Harbour at 8.52 am on Christmas
morning, a lovely 1.99 metres of clear swirling water.

All three of our children will meet us, so will our grand-daughter, now
approaching nine months and due to get her first swim on Christmas Day. 
  She is just mastering the various components of crawling. Actually, she
has mastered the components, but has yet to work out how to combine them. 
It can only be weeks away.

Tonight, Chris and I will drop down to mass with the Jesuits at North
Sydney.  They do a pleasant and relaxed outdoor service, and no doubt some
of the people acting as sheepdogs on the shepherds, angels and such will
have once been shepherds and angels themselves -- the years roll on.  I am
afraid we are once-a-year people, but if we went more often, it would be
there, because I have never yet met a Jesuit I didn't like.

The time to make Pascal's wager is not yet ripe, not while I am still
young enough to find some dew-wet grass on Christmas morning and run
barefoot over it.  Actually, this year it may be rain-wet, and we don't
care.  There are floods out west and they don't care, because we are
emerging from a drought.

The red dust will still be over many a town as whirlwinds blow, but in
Coonamble and Tullibigeal and places between, there may be rather more red
mud.  The dams will fill, the rivers will run, the pastures will be green,
and all will be well.  Unless you are at one with Hanrahan, but that's
another story.

the tides
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/oceanography/tides/tide_predications.cgi

the talk
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis@ozemail.com.au/ockhams/xmas93.htm

more of the carols
http://heathhill.blogspot.com/2007/12/australian-christmas-carols.html

Hanrahan (from a PP who retired the year I was born)
http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/authors/obrienj/poetry/hanrahan.html

-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral wordsmith, & science gossip,
/     \  friend of flatworms, pseudoscorpions and onychophorans;
\.--._*  confidence advisor, Australian skydiving trampoline relay team
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm