Christmas in the outback

For Bruce Beresford, Christmas in the Outback meant spiders, snakes and his aunt stripping naked in the intense heat

My Oz trials

When I was a teenager in the 1950s, my parents always took my sister and me, in December, to a relative’s farm about 300 miles from Sydney.

The journey took most of the day, chiefly on unsealed roads. The farm was over 3,000 acres, and around 20 miles from the nearest town.

There was no power to the house, which meant no fans to alleviate the intense heat. Flies and mosquitoes were abundant, and thousands of them were unattractively embedded in the sheets of sticky paper that hung from the ceilings of every room.

There were spiders and snakes – both of deadly varieties – and so many rabbits that I learned to shoot them with a .22 rifle while sitting in a chair on the veranda. Kangaroos and emus ambled around the property in considerable numbers, with the former shot regularly by my uncle to provide food for his pack of hungry and unfriendly dogs.

The ‘dunny’ (loo) was in a tiny outhouse a short distance from the house. A pit was dug to a considerable depth, the contents of which were unedifying.

Before sitting, you had to examine the precarious wooden seat for signs of the numerous, celebrated and lethal redback spiders. Gaps in the wooden walls meant the occupant was devoid of privacy.

At Christmas, the house was decorated with fake snow and a pine tree with a big image of a warmly-clad, jolly Santa Claus.

No allowance was made for the fact that we were in an intensely hot Outback area. At night, by the light of a couple of oil lamps, turkey was served along with Yorkshire pudding, baked potatoes and treacle tart. There was plenty of beer stored in the kerosene-run icebox, along with numerous bottles of Scotch whisky – a great favourite of my uncle, the son of a Scottish immigrant.

A Christmas tree in the Outback

The attempt at a refined English Christmas was marred to some extent by my aunt – my mother’s sister – who spent the days wandering around the house naked. She explained that dispensing with clothes enabled her to deal better with the heat. Nobody in the family, nor any of the visitors from sheep stations in the area, seemed to regard her behaviour as eccentric or even unusual.

Her eccentricity was matched by that of my uncle’s elderly father. He lived in a ramshackle tin shed a few hundred yards from the main house – it must have been like living in an oven. He did odd jobs around the farm: mostly burning off (ie destroying forest) and ploughing.

I spent the most tedious days of my life sitting on the back of a tractor meandering around in slowly decreasing circles as the decrepit and deafening machine ploughed up hundreds of acres.

He and I couldn’t speak because of the noise. He was almost as uncommunicative when we stopped for lunch. Looking like a derelict in ragged old clothes, he made a fire and boiled the billy for tea. Sometimes he made damper – a recipe known to all the old bushmen: a kind of pudding that consisted of flour and water. I loved it.

At night, though, when he came to the house, as he did at Christmas, he wore an impeccable, full formal outfit complete with monocle. His face glowed, his stubble was gone and his ragged hair was slicked down. His manner remained, as always, stiff and monosyllabic. All visitors and relatives, except for his son, addressed him respectfully as ‘Mr Gulliver’.

In the early 1960s, after graduating from Sydney University, I left Australia for England. Up until then, I was still visiting the farm for Christmas. By now, the road was paved nearly all the way, electricity meant there were lights and fans in the house and it was rumoured that TV would soon be available. Even the dunny had been replaced by a more hygienic device.

Sadly, my aunt had died with a chronic heart condition and old Mr Gulliver was gone, along with his tin ‘humpy’ (shelter). I found some documents among a few papers he left which showed that he had lived in Chile for many years. He was engaged there as an engineer, building a railway line over the Andes.

I vividly remember arriving in London in a cold November. I’d seen enough English films to form ideas of what the inhabitants would be like. A mixture, I expected, of the stiff-upper-lip types of The Dam Busters and the working-class bunch of Passport to Pimlico. This oversimplified pre-conception turned out to be fairly accurate.

With a couple of university friends, one of them being Clive James, we rented a flat in Kensington, then not such an expensive area. We mixed mostly with wandering Australians, who would sit around drinking warm beer and complaining about it and the darkness that descended at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Everyone was optimistic about the opportunities – acting, directing, the academic world – they envisaged in Britain. But we all missed the Sydney beaches at Christmas.

Bruce Beresford was the director of Driving Miss Daisy (1989)