By Quentin Cockburn

Dear readers we present this unique opportunity to examine the influence of Halloween in suburban Australia, and shortly give a comparative commentary from our North American correspondent Dr Cecil Poole who is involved in field work related to the very same matter.

In Australia, Halloween is a recent phenomenon.  We used to have Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes Bonfire

As kiddies, we’d mark off the days in rapt anticipation for November the 5th, and then, converge at the local footy oval and watch as the bonfire was lit, and stand in awe as atop the pyre a newspaper stuffed hand me down garbed ‘Guy’ was burnt to a crisp.  Them was golden days and you’d be in your highly flammable Onkaparinga or brothers worn chords, and run about with your own pile of crackers, blowing things up and chucking them hither and thither.  The Queen was similarly lauded as Queens Birthday offered another opportunity.  Two weeks in the year, to do stuff, earn some change and get crackers.  And of course the currency of choice, not sparklers nor flower pots and roman candles.  Crackers to make cracker guns, blow up milk bottles and annoy the crabby old duck down the road, by regular letter box and drain pipe immersion.

What did Macauley say about the Puritans and bear baiting?  I’ve quoted this ad nauseam. I paraphrase; “that they disapproved, not because of the cruelty to the bears but the entertainment it gave to the public’.  Puritans hate fun.  Inevitably, as the seventies morphed into the eighties, the do-gooders banned fireworks.  Progressively a black veil has been drawn over this country as once Canberra, and now the Northern Territory stands alone as the last place where kids can buy crackers.  And what has it done to us?  Another notch in the infantilisation of Australia.  They don’t ban them anywhere else other than in Australia. I t’s the cultural equivalent of six o clock closing.  Australia is not easygoing, that is myth.  We are insecure, suburban and risk averse.  Our kids are dying of obesity and boredom as a consequence.

So, shock horror, it has been replaced by Halloween, and Halloween’s good for business.  I suppose those same companies who used to export fireworks from China have diversified into shitty plastic Halloween costumes.  In this country there was no tradition of Halloween.  Not so now!  It’s commercial, ‘safe’, and promotes at a sub level the ethos of commercial transaction.  I think the receiving is higher on the list.  And though we cringe in fear at stranger danger we now send, (in the nicer suburbs) the kiddies with a parent in lieu door to door to trick or treat.  I don’t know if there’s much more than that.

You see, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament.  We get that.  Though contemporary Australia would not condone such a thing, even in jest.  But the Halloween thing has got me beat.  Why?…I think I know why.  In this country it is more banal than Fathers Day.  100% ersatz.  It is 100 percent commercial.  We don’t gather round the bonfire anymore or roll newspapers to sell to the butchers to get money for crackers.  And everything else that we use to do for fun, has been banned.  In the vacuum left by Guy Fawkes, Halloween has inserted itself.  It is 100 percent consumer oriented, and it is to my thinking, rightly or wrongly 100% American.  We do Anzac big here, but for a place without a soul anything grafted is infinitely better than celebrating something about ourselves, and shared traditions with the mother country.  And in particular the replacement of the Stuarts with the constitutional monarchy and a truly representative parliament.  The tradition of habeas corpus and a fair trial.  And what happened with the star chamber in light of the anti terror legislation is best forgot.