Witches’ hats are in the shops, my friend is making graveyard cakes, the local party invitations have arrived, festooned with skulls and cobwebs. Halloween has won, and the 31 October event has fixed itself in Australia’s retail and social calendar.
The kids are excited, yet there remain locals whom the imported rituals annoy.
Eight years ago this column discussed this parallel, popular tradition of Australian anti-Halloweenism.
My mother’s generation did not grow up with Halloween. For them, its creeping adoption has represented the imposition of culturally imperialist American tastes over Australia’s own.
For me, the late-autumn pagan death ceremonies of the cold northern hemisphere symbolised dangerous environmental disconnectedness in our springtime southern continent. In Australia, October isn’t a month for pickling and slaughter; it blossoms with new life and flowers.
And so, back in 2014, this pious climate killjoy wrote: “If any children approach my building, I’m just going to silently admire them from the intercom screen and pretend that I’m not home.”
There was international media reaction to this quote, and the unique humiliation of being pooh-poohed for my puritanism … dear God, by Americans.
It’s become an annual personal event to see the quote reappear in Halloween commentary, or to face media enquiries demanding I defend my view. This year, I fielded the inevitable journalist’s query to Twitter; you can observe for yourself that opposition to the ritual stays proud and loud.
My environmentalist concerns around the carbon costs of FIFO pumpkins and a seasonal festival out-of-season also persist, but a lot has happened to transform all of us in the past eight years.
Growing numbers of Australian friends and neighbours have taught themselves the art of icing spooky biscuits, cobwebbing doorways and doing pumpkin-carvy things to carbon-responsible supplies of local fruit. Communities are organising their local trick-or-treat routes, ambitiously over-decorated Halloween party-planning is in full sway – and I am now a happy apostate to the Australian anti-Halloweenist cause, cheerfully recanting my opposition and joining the burgeoning pro-Halloween throng.
In recent years, I’ve ensured we have lollies/candy/sweets at home for when the neighbours’ children make their yearly pilgrimage to our house in their fabulous outfits. This year I’ve invested time – oh, so much time – on the delicate construction of a zero-waste, found-object costume for a very-looked-forward-to Halloween party, my mother passing the masking tape and watching on. I’d show you the hat, but I don’t want to destroy the surprise.
What caused the conversion?
Firstly, the Washington Post’s Max Fisher helpfully reframed Australian Halloween as an anti-imperialist exercise. His research revealed that the same Great Britain who’d exported their Halloween ritual to its American and Canadian colonies chose to drop it before it spread to their Australian and New Zealander ones in the later, deliberate dullness of the Victorian period. Affirming the fun America defiantly maintained against the British thus becomes a cultural up-yours to the oppressive old colonial overlords and a festive embrace of republican spirit. Arguably. Look, it’s enough, so I’m going with it.
Secondly, 2022 Van looks with some envy on 2014 Van and her privileged smorgasbord of distractions from ongoing existential fear. In the last eight years, the cumulative terror of Trumpism, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, nuclear sabre-rattling and omni-directional climate disasters has been overwhelming and unavoidable. The point of Halloween is the acknowledgment that life is fragile and danger is everywhere, its traditions providing both cultural reminder and shared permission to change out of our regular clothes and laugh at our inescapable mortality.
Yes, Halloween is an imported custom, but so is the traditionally deep-winter festival of Yule/Christmas. Unexcised from the Australian calendar by the otherwise fun-free Victorians, repetition, practice and the passage of time has allowed modern, multicultural Australia to adapt its events, family-to-family, into summertime traditions of powerful, meaningful local significance.
There’s no zealot like a convert; I encourage all Australians to give Halloween the same chance. Bring your critiques to it, your local tastes, your adaptations – because adult realisation that one can sustain simultaneous love and criticism for the same thing is a liberation.
I’ll laugh aloud and dance on Halloween this year. However my party costume turns out, I’ll be joyously unrecognisable from the scared and scary creature, clad in false piety, who once sat in a silent house waiting for the sounds of happy children to pass her by.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
