Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Maintaining, Adapting, and Creating Tradition on the Colonial Australian Christmas Table, 1788 – 1901
Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Madeline Shanahan [+]
Description
In The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, historian Stephen Nissenbaum argues that Christmas rituals ‘reveal something of what we would like to be, what we once were, or what we are becoming despite ourselves’. This paper will explore this concept, examining the evolution of the Australian Christmas feast in the colonial period. It will trace how the maintenance and adaptation of traditional British festive fare played an important role in identity formation from the time of colonization (1788), through to the immediate aftermath of Federation (1901). Drawing on a range of sources such as journals, letters, memoirs, newspapers and illustrations of the period, it will show how through reference back to British culinary rules and rituals – either through faithful adherence or deliberate departures – the Christmas table became a place to annually debate, explore, create and experience the evolution of Australian identities and growing independence. The paper traces this story from the early years post colonization when food was scarce and pragmatic adaptation necessary, with abundance the key non-negotiable in the ritual, rather than a defined menu. It then looks at the evolution of the Australian feast in the first half of the nineteenth century when the growing prosperity allowed the still very ‘British’ colony to revel in traditional culinary norms and Christmas luxuries – however seasonally inappropriate. From the mid-nineteenth century on though, we witness an increasingly confident soon to be federated nation emerge in which experimentation, adaptation and subversion of rituals played a role in forging new Antipodean cultural identities. The paper will ultimately consider what the changing nature of the feast, and commentary surrounding it highlights about the negotiation of emerging identities in this critical period of Australian history in which a small penal colony grew into a prosperous federated nation. This examination of the Christmas feast in colonial Australia demonstrates that far from being static, food rules and rituals are living parts of culture that change and adapt in new contexts. Ritual feasts and dishes bring meaning from the past, but still have the capacity to adapt as part of an ever-changing gastronomy that reflects communities and identities in evolution.