A Lanyon Christmas

The year is 1864, and in the recently built dining room of Lanyon Homestead a family is seated around a table decorated with wildflowers, a fruit platter centrepiece and jelly that's struggling to keep its shape in the heat. It's Christmas Day and the temperature is soaring. Yet despite the heat, and the flies and discomfort, the family have gathered to share a meal and celebrate.

This is all conjecture of course, as the records don't give us the minutiae of what occurred when Andrew Cunningham and his wife Jane sat down for Christmas lunch in their newly built home in the shadows of the Tidbinbilla Ranges.

In an engraving of the new "home station" published in the Illustrated Australian News in January 1865, Lanyon is promoted for its bucolic existence. The wide sweeping driveway is already planted with exotics which in generations to come will grow to frame a much grander entrance.

With the homestead a good 170 miles from the colonial centre of Sydney, the Cunninghams' Christmas meal, particularly in the early years, was likely to be food they could source from their own property or locally from the newly established township of Queanbeyan.

And given Andrew Cunningham hailed from Scotland where celebrating Christmas had been frowned upon and even officially banned for many years after the Reformation, it is likely that Hogmanay, celebrations to mark the last day of the year, was a far greater tradition.

In this earlier part of the 19^th Century delicacies imported into the colonies would most certainly have been the preserve of the very wealthy or the up and coming. By the time Andrew and Jane Cunningham arrived in Australia in 1844, wealth from agriculture was starting to permeate the colonies, and with the discovery of gold in the 1850s the monied classes would grow exponentially.

Whether the Cunninghams, who reportedly did well due to Andrew's business acumen, had the means in their early years at Lanyon to send away for such luxuries remains something of a mystery.

By the second half of the 19^th Century, however, it is highly probable that Jane Cunningham in particular was devouring the illustrated journals that became one of the greatest influences on the way colonial Australians absorbed Christmas traditions.

As Colin Bannerman writes in The Upside-Down Pudding- A Small Book of Christmas Feasts many of the new readers for these journals were to be found in country areas.

AN AUSTRALIAN CHRISTMAS

Along with the increasing popularity of Christmas cards that celebrated Australian flora and fauna, scenes and motifs, what these illustrated journals were very good at promoting was a particular brand of Australian Christmas.

Titles such as The Town and Country Journal, The Australasian Sketcher and the Illustrated Sydney News celebrated the notion of outdoor picnics in the bush or in lush fern gullies, cricket matches between friends or a day of swimming as being quintessential elements of Christmas in the colonies.

A columnist for Melbourne's The Argus JF Hogan noted in his compendium of works An Australian Christmas Collection in 1886, the difference between those born in Australia “in a sunny land” and their parents where “their recollections of the great social event of the year are associated with bleak winds and wintry storms”:

While we don’t know how the Cunninghams observed Christmas Day in their early years at Lanyon, there is a ring of truth to the sentiment. In a photograph taken decades later during Christmas 1914 and saved in the family album of Mary Dunlop, Andrew and Jane’s granddaughter, a row of children are pictured on their horses - the bright sunlight casting long shadows on the pasture.

It is a scene that celebrates a life outdoors and is a far cry from the snowy landscapes of a British Christmas.

CHRISTMAS TRADITIONS

What is particularly fascinating about this nostalgia for a picture-perfect white Christmas, is that this very English notion of Christmas celebrations was a recent phenomenon even in the home country.

Any yearning colonial Australians felt, was a longing for somewhat concocted traditions.

As Judith Flanders writes in Consuming Passions-Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, it was not until the mid-1830s that Christmas with all the trimmings started to take hold in the popular imagination in Britain:

Flanders explains that the Christmas we think of today was constructed for the most part during Victorian-era England. Previously it was the Twelfth Night, the Feast of Epiphany on January 6, that had been more commonly celebrated as a family feast, when a bean and a pea were baked into the Twelfth Night cake to be found by a lucky two who were crowned the King and Queen of the night.

It was a practice not unlike the hidden sixpence in Christmas puddings that would supersede it.

Even in Abbott's English and Australian Cookery Book the first cake recipe in his list is for a Twelfth Cake. While there is a detailed recipe for Christmas pudding in Abbott's book, it was a relatively recent dessert. The pudding's origin was a rather unappetising sounding plum broth, or plum porridge, which was eaten as a soup during Christmas at St James during the reign of George III in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

With ingredients of veal, beef, sugar, lemon, oranges, hock, sherry, currants and prunes as well as a smattering of spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves it was topped off by a touch of cochineal - no doubt an attempt to hide what was most likely a fairly sludgy colour.

Did Andrew and Jane Cunningham source their decorations from these merry bands of collectors in coastal regions and gullies who were so enthusiastic for their love of the Christmas bush that at one stage it became increasingly difficult to find?

Did they find their foliage more locally, or join the latest fashions spurred on by Queen Victoria and her beloved Albert and decorate their own Christmas tree? What did they have on their Christmas table - or at their picnic outdoors - and how did it change over time?

Andrew Cunningham died in 1887 and his wife Jane in 1895. After Andrew's death, it was their son Andrew Jackson Cunningham who, after a stint abroad, lived at Lanyon in a somewhat bachelor existence before he married 24-year-old Louisa Leeman in 1905.

AJ Cunningham was so intent on making his young bride, who was 34 years his junior, comfortable that he built a new wing at Lanyon with a private bedroom for Louisa resplendent with the latest fashions.

On Christmas Day 1910 a moment in time was captured - AJ, resplendent in white, stands behind his young wife Louisa, enjoying tea with relatives and the household help.

In the eyes of the settler classes, the homestead in the shadows of the Tidbinbilla Ranges had truly arrived.

We acknowledge the Ngunnawal peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the Canberra Region.

The region has always been an important meeting place and significant to other Aboriginal groups who have celebrated culture through the arts and cultural practices for tens of thousands of years.

Writer and digital producer: Cathy Pryor, Curator of Exhibitions and Research, ACT Historic Places

Archival images: National Library of Australia, State Library Victoria, State Library of NSW

Background photographs: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

References:

Abbott E, 1864, The English and Australian Cookery Book: cookery for the many as well as for the 'upper ten thousand', Sampson Low, Son and Marston, London

Bode K (editor) and Whelehan I (introduction), 2018, Christmas Eve in a Gum Tree and Other Lost Australian Christmas Stories, Obiter Publishing, Canberra

Bannerman C, 1999, The Upside-Down Pudding- A Small Book of Christmas Feasts, NLA, Canberra

Flanders J, 2006, Consuming Passions-Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian England, Harper Press, London

Hogan JF, 1886, An Australian Christmas Collection, Alex McKinley and Co, Melbourne

Stapleton M and McDonald P, 1981, Christmas in the Colonies, David Ell Press, Sydney