The first Christmas card depicting Illawarra scenery featured a reproduction of surveyor James A. C. Willis’ 1857 watercolour of Rixon’s Pass, published in 1888 by John Sands & Co. Photos: Supplied.
This rare Christmas card is a faithful reproduction of the original artwork that I was able to buy many years ago and which is now part of the Wollongong Art Gallery’s fabulous collection of Illawarra’s colonial art.
John Sands, however, could not help making the addition of the two kangaroos or wallabies seen to the left of the verse in order to make the card ideal for sending back to relatives still living in the British Isles and elsewhere.
Incredibly, at Christmas in 1857, Rixon’s Pass – then still pretty much a rough track itself – was the main road into Wollongong because it was marginally better than Bulli Pass, which regularly washed out in heavy weather.
Even in 1888, the fad for commercially available Australian Christmas cards was still new. However, Christmas, as today, was actually still more about food than sending cards.
Roast beef and plum pudding were even doled out by Governor Macquarie to some Indigenous people at Christmas way back in 1818.
But in 1826, when Governor Darling hosted the now annual tradition, few Indigenous people turned up for, according to The Sydney Gazette, there had been a “recent declaration of hostilities between the Cowpasture tribes and those of Liverpool and Illawarra districts”.
By 1845, for many European refugees now settled in Illawarra, nostalgic “Christmas feasting” was still the order of the day and “the Illawarra Lodge of Masons gave a very splendid dinner at Dapto, and afterwards a ball, at which the Mayor and Mayoress of Sydney were present, being in the district on a tour in search of the picturesque”.
But, for a long while, the weather made it hard for Christmas in Illawarra to make much sense to displaced Europeans: “Most things in Australia, are very unnatural … There’s the air, to begin with, It’s so piping hot at Christmas time, that a fellow needs to be over drinking like a fish.”
And for those still domiciled in an Illawarra bark hut with no refrigeration, Christmas dinner often consisted of “bad meat” (which was tainted beef) owing to the state of the weather.
In lieu of mistletoe and holly, the early white invaders took to using luxuriant branches of Illawarra’s sub-tropical rainforest foliage – tree ferns, palm fronds, Christmas bush and eucalyptus boughs taken from the escarpment.
On the heathland on Maddens Plains above Thirroul, Christmas bells and orchids were also sought after as holiday decorations.
The original 1857 painting of Rixon’s Pass by the surveyor James A. C. Willis.
Money was always a problem and things were so grim during the major 1840s economic depression that by 1842, “nothing active was being done” to publicly commemorate either Christmas or the new year.
By Yuletide in 1850, things were a bit better: “Never before, midst all her plenty, did the district exhibit such fields of promise, barley and hay are being cut and housed, and the wheat will soon be fit for the sickle, so that before Christmas Day the whole will be saved.”
Horse racing took place on the Wollongong Race Course on Boxing Day 1857 and quickly became something of an annual tradition.
Christmas holidays back then, however, were alarmingly short for most and, to combat slow trade, the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company advertised “Christmas Excursions”, offering return tickets up to Sydney and down to Eden at single fares for cabin and steerage passages by their steamers during the Christmas period.
A year before the first Illawarra Christmas card was produced, Boxing Day 1887 proved a complete washout and it rained almost incessantly for 48 hours, throwing into chaos all the holiday arrangements.
The newly completed Illawarra railway’s excursion trains between Kiama and Clifton were going and coming all day, according to the special timetable, but with few passengers either way.
There was a wintry chilliness in the atmosphere and the roads and streets were in a sloppy condition: “altogether Christmas here has been a most unenjoyable time”.
And with Australian carols still mostly unknown, in 1893 at the Wollongong Primitive Methodist Christmas social, While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night was sung as a Christmas hymn.
Fortunately, in 1896 the weather was warm, the railway trade booming on Christmas Day and Wollongong railway station was “decorated and festooned by Illawarra evergreens”.
As today, however, if the harvest has been brought home and families have some money and were blessed with both some holiday leisure and nice weather, Illawarra Christmases could be good.
And, as the John Sands 1888 Illawarra Christmas card clearly shows, a beautiful Illawarra bushwalk up Rixon’s Pass way might just have been the thing to bring peace and goodwill to all people.
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