Story 9 of 12 · Australia · 1902
The Ghosts of Many Christmases
Who it suits: Readers of twelve and over, and adults.
Christmas in the southern hemisphere falls in the heat of summer, and Henry Lawson spent his Christmases on goldfields, on ships and in cheap city restaurants. Lawson was born in 1867 on a goldfield near Grenfell, in New South Wales, Australia. His mother, Louisa Lawson, was a writer and publisher who founded The Dawn, a journal for women’s rights, and his father, Niels Larsen, was a miner from Norway. Lawson became the best-known short-story writer of the Australian bush, the dry country inland from the cities.
“The Ghosts of Many Christmases” closes Children of the Bush, a book of stories published in London in 1902. In it Lawson looks back over the Christmases of his life: as a child on the goldfields at Gulgong, at sea on the way to the Western Australian gold rush in the 1890s, on the diggings with old mates in a tent, back at sea with no money, and in a cheap Sydney restaurant. The “ghosts” are those memories, and the people he shared them with.
The story is warm, funny and sad at once, in the plain and dry voice Lawson’s readers knew from his stories and sketches.
In the book, The Ghosts of Many Christmases is printed in full with eight notes beside the words they explain, its map, its city view and its illustration.
