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Empty places, distant voices: the land of Christmas away
By JOHN WELLS
Friday 22 December 2000

Australia is a land of vast spaces and great distances. At Christmas, some of those spaces will be in our hearts, for this is the land of Christmas away.

This Christmas there will be gaps in many Melbourne hearts. There will be empty seats around the table.

There will be telephone calls that will bring happiness but leave a sadness behind them. Telephones will ring in Frankfurt and Frankston, Phnom Penh and Port Melbourne. Everything else will stop. Everyone will listen, shouting greetings across each other, across the world. There will be smiles and tears. There will be sadness at the distances between us, and happiness that the gulfs were bridged for a few precious moments. Often, it will be the sadness that will linger.

But for some there will be no calls. There will be no place left to call, and no one left to call. Some of us will have left our people behind in places without telephones.

The world is a smaller place but the tyranny of distance still looms. You can't embrace in an e-mail and a card is not a kiss. There is no eye contact, no touching of hands, on a telephone. In Australia, more than in most places, there will be many of us who will be longing for one more chair to be filled, one more face, one more voice. This is the land of Christmas away.

When Henry Lawson wrote "Our Andy's gone with cattle now - Our hearts are out of order" and when Banjo Paterson wrote "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, And we don't know where he are", the lines passed into our folklore because this is, and has always been, a land where goodbyes are often for a long time, sometimes forever.

The First Fleet convicts and their masters were doomed to many Christmases away. The shepherds on the runs had no way to contact anyone. The prospectors and the fossickers were long slow miles into the bush, and far away.

The troopships sailed away so many times and the boys were gone so long. We went "on the wallaby" to find work between the two great wars. We went to work at Dampier and in the Antarctic. We looked for gold and iron in our deserts and oil in our seas. We could not always stop for Christmas, and if we did we were still away.

Mail was slow but at least a letter could usually keep following until it caught up. The telegraph and the telephone were better, if you knew exactly where to call.

My father's generation all met at grandma's for Christmas dinner back when the roads were dirt and there were jinkers among the cars. No one stayed away if there was any way at all to get there, but there were always one or two who were away, and there were some who would never be with us again.

As the generations flow into one another, and even as we give them labels such as Generation X and the Me Generation, even as we say the world is growing smaller, there are things that never change. The world has not grown smaller. We can move around it faster but it is big as it ever was. On Christmas Day an empty place in our hearts seems emptier still.

These antipodean once-colonies are a long way from the places many of us grew up, untold miles from the landscapes of our childhoods. Many of our legends and our dreamings are in places we will never walk. Many of us still feel we will somehow always be away even when we're home. Celt or Khmer, Indian or Iranian, there will always be a little of somewhere else and other people in our hearts.

Christmas means many things but to nearly all of us the togetherness of friends and family is at the heart of it, and so the absences are more deeply felt on this other one day of the year.

There will be children whose fathers are somewhere in this country but forever away. There will be parents whose children sleep in doorways, they are away. There will be children whose only presents will come through the Smith Family or the Salvation Army, and in another sense they, too, will be away.

For the second year, my son will be in Brazil for Christmas. The little boy who woke us up to say that Santa had come, who left out port for the old man and carrots for his reindeer, has now become a man. In this smaller world of ours he met and fell in love in London, with a girl from Fortaleza, Brazil. He has his own life to lead now, and only part of that life is in Australia. On Christmas Day, like Andy's folk, we will live with hearts that "are out of order".

We e-mail regularly and John will call at Christmas. It isn't the same and it saddens us, but we know our son is safe and well.

How much more sad, how terribly lonely, if our son was simply missing, or we could not contact our daughter. How terrible it would be to wonder whether all those dear to us were safe, to wonder even where they were.

On Christmas Day spare a moment to think of those Australians who have come from Afghanistan, from Serbia and Croatia, from all the troubled places people have fled to come here and be Australians. For them the tyranny of distance must be compounded beyond our knowing. For them, Australia will be many things, but it will always be the land of Christmas away.

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comment:
As a long distance long-time migrant this time of year brings poignant reminders of so many things and thoughts from another life that are best forgotten. You never forget though, even on the outer edge down here where we swelter this day shopping to piped muzac of 'I'm dreaming of a white christmas'.

Regardz - seasonal greetz from OZ

-- Pieter (zaadz@icisp.net.au), December 21, 2000