Tis the season, and while our screens both big and small are being filled with celluloid celebrations of all things Christmassy, very few are Australian.
Did you ever notice that? While the UK and US have strong and decades-long traditions of Yuletide films, encompassing everything from White Christmas and It’s a Wonderful Life to Elf and Scrooged and Lethal Weapon, here on the bottom half of the planet we don’t much go for Christmas movies.
To be sure, we’ll watch the seasonal products of other cultures and even argue about them vigorously (as demonstrated by the ongoing debate over whether Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie), but the historical roster of Australian Christmas movies is thinly populated.
The big players are 1947’s Bush Christmas, starring Australian screen stalwart Chips Rafferty, and its 1983 remake, which saw Nicole Kidman take to the big screen for the first time.
Throughout the 70s and 80s there is a scattering of animated features: Silent Night, Holy Night (1976); Yoram Gross’ 1981 offering Around the World with Dot, which sees his heroic little Aussie travel with a swagman who turns out to be Father Christmas; and A Christmas Carol (1982), which was the first of a long-running series of literary adaptations by Australian animation house Burbank Films.
In Bushfire Moon (1987), a tiny tyke mistakes Charles “Bud” Tingwell’s curmudgeonly swagman for Father Christmas. From there, though, it’s another 11 years until family comedy Crackers (1998), in which comedian Peter Rowsthorn’s hapless dad of a suburban tribe had to negotiate Christmas with the extended family.
After that? Nothing of note, unless you count seasonal horror movies like Red Christmas and Better Watch Out (both 2016), or even John Hillcoat’s apocalyptic 2005 meat pie western, The Proposition, which sets its bloody apotheosis on Christmas Day. I’d argue they don’t really get into the spirit of the season but, like Die Hard, they’re Christmas movies if you want them to be.
Why only six films embracing Christmas cheer in more than 112 years of Australian feature film production? Meanwhile, the Americans are churning them out in industrial quantities; a quick browse of Netflix’s seasonal offerings will reveal a plethora of options, up to and including The Christmas Chronicles, which sees tough guy Kurt Russell as a silver-fox Santa.
Part of it is down to simple visual iconography, I think. We celebrate Christmas in Australia, for sure, but we’re a desert island that experiences a seemingly endless summer, and the traditional trappings of the northern hemisphere holiday look a bit ludicrous against the bright, cloudless skies and blistering heat of an Australian December.
Film is a visual medium, and Christmastime’s visual cues – sleigh bells and fur trim, snowmen and reindeer and all that – are a poor fit in these parts. We don’t need to roast chestnuts on an open fire – we can just leave them on a footpath and wait. Our own adaptations don’t resonate in quite the same way – a seafood platter or a backyard barbie simply lacks the je ne sais quoi of glazed ham or roast turkey.
Australia is also increasingly secular and multicultural. Christmas is rooted in religion but it has certainly grown beyond that. The season has become a secular celebration, and unarguably a pandenominational one – which is all well and good, but it does mean we tend to approach Christmas with somewhat less fervour. Perhaps we don’t make Christmas movies because we’re just not that fussed?
Or perhaps the genre-defining, beloved-by-all, great Australian Christmas film is right around the corner – we just haven’t made it yet.
• Travis Johnson is a film critic and cultural commentator
