Christmas at Christmas Creek: we celebrate with a tiny Queensland community
A 100-year-old matriarch, five generations of one family and the new Nigerian priest will all celebrate Christmas this year in the tiny Queensland community of Christmas Creek, writes Samantha Trenoweth.
The road from the Arthy family’s property down to Christmas Creek meanders, much like the creek itself, between towering, thickly wooded hills. When she was younger, Josie Arthy came this way on horseback. At Christmas time, though, she mostly rode with her husband, Bob, in his old Dodge pick-up, which was packed to overflowing with kids and food, and perhaps a musical instrument or two.
Josie turned 100 in February this year and is celebrating 80 Christmases at Christmas Creek. She carries herself with the wiry strength and the quick wit of a woman a fraction her age. The secret to living a long and happy life, she says, is to breathe fresh air, look out onto the hills and see cows, not houses, and to keep moving. The day The Weekly comes to call, she’s been in the kitchen much of the morning, whipping up a tray of lamingtons, a banana cake and a batch of pumpkin scones. For the family’s annual Christmas picnic, she says, she would usually prepare “a baked chook, bread and butter, fruit and a Christmas cake and pudding. And we’d take the picnic kettle that Bob made. We still have it and it still makes a really good cup of tea.”
Bob Arthy was a dairy farmer and self-taught musician. He started out on the piano accordion and graduated to clarinet and saxophone. “He’d have a go at anything,” says Josie. “The musical saw, the violin, anything.”
He was part of a band of musician farmers who played Saturday night dances in town halls between Beaudesert in south-eastern Queensland and the NSW border. He and Josie met in 1936 when he was visiting a dairy farm where she worked on the Gold Coast. “He took me out about three times,” Josie says, laughing. “He wasn’t very good with that. We went to a dance or two and nine months later we were married.” The newlyweds moved into the family home, an old Queenslander with wide verandas that Bob’s father had built from local timber.
Legend has it that the first Europeans to celebrate Christmas at Christmas Creek were a pair of explorers. Some say it was the surveyor, John Oxley and his party, others the botanist, Allan Cunningham. Both passed by in the late 1820s and might have been the subject of a glorified retelling of their journey by the bush poet Henry Kendall:
On the sacred day of Christmas, after seven months of grief, Rested three of six who started, on a bank of moss and leaf. Rested by a running river, in a hushed, a holy week;
And they named the stream that saved them – named it fitly –“Christmas Creek”.
Before the explorers arrived, this was Yugambeh country, a land of towering mountains, temperate rainforests, dark volcanic soils and abundant wildlife in which Aboriginal people had thrived for more than 24,000 years. They were followed by timber cutters looking for cedar and then dairy farmers. At Christmas Creek, it’s said that Chinese shepherds also grazed flocks in the hills.
Bob’s father and his grandfather arrived not long after, in 1882, and started out living in a humpy by the creek. After a fire burnt their house to the ground, they moved up the hill, cleared the land, planted grasses, introduced dairy cattle and built the grand and weathered old Queenslander in which Josie and Bob would eventually raise three children, Percy, Ken and Gayle.
There were some lean times. Sometimes, there was only rice to eat and whatever they could grow in the yard. Other times, Bob would supplement that with a bush turkey. And it took three days to get to town and back to do the shopping. Yet there were times of plenty, too, and there was always music and the chance of a barbecue by the creek, where the kids would play in the water after lunch. According to Percy, they “all learnt to swim in the Cave Rock water hole. If somebody came to visit on a Sunday and we weren’t at home, they just went up to Christmas Creek. They knew where we’d be.”
Christmas has mostly been a picnic by the creek for the Arthys, but there have been memorable exceptions. Percy’s wife, Maureen, another cattle farmer and multi-instrumentalist (clarinet and saxophone), remembers one year when Percy was driving a
milk tanker and he was rostered on for Christmas Day. “We had our family celebration on Boxing Day that year, but on Christmas Day, I took some cherries and plums, and lollies and peanuts, and Percy and I had Christmas in the truck. The children were grown up by then, so it wasn’t as if we were leaving them behind.”
Bob Arthy died 21 years ago and Josie now lives in that rambling old house alone, but she’s not lonely. Percy and Maureen live a stone’s throw away and the whole family knows that at 10 in the morning and four in the afternoon, it’s “smoko at Gran’s” and there’s sure to be a spread.
While Josie bakes up a storm for her 80th Christmas here, across the valley, Father Kevin Njoku is preparing for his first. The Nigerian-born priest has nine churches in his parish and has a mighty Christmas celebration planned for the tiny community at Christmas Creek’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
“There used to be three priests looking after this parish, but now there is just me,” says Father Kevin.
“It is not easy for me to cover nine churches and I can’t touch base with all of them over Christmas, but I have decided that we will have a vigil Mass at Christmas Creek on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. I have made it in the afternoon because the older people may not be able to drive at night and I am expecting a good turn-out as families come home for the holiday.”
A good turn-out is important in these days of dwindling congregations. “Because we no longer have so many people coming regularly to these small country churches,” says Father Kevin, “it is not so easy to pay the bills and to keep them open.” The Uniting Church at Christmas Creek was sold not long ago as a residential property. Could Sacred Heart follow suit?
“Not on my watch,” he insists.
Father Kevin is tall and thoughtful, and exudes an immense enthusiasm for life. The most rewarding aspect of his work, he says, “is when I observe that my parishioners feel happy. Each time I celebrate Mass and see that my parishioners are happy, I feel happy.”
Since he arrived in Australia, he has tried to reintroduce practices that had been forgotten in many of the churches he visited – things like the ringing of bells and the singing of homilies. Father Kevin is big on singing generally and stresses that there will be carol singing at Mass on Christmas Eve. Joy To The World is his favourite, he says, and hums a couple of bars.
Father Kevin imagines that Christmas at Christmas Creek will be different from the festivities he was used to in Nigeria.
“Back in my country,” he explains, “Christmas is a period when you experience the noisiest celebrations. People play music so loud, people sing, rejoice, shout at the top of their voices. Also, in Nigeria, we lead a community life, so on Christmas Day, if you are passing by a celebration, you can just walk into someone’s house and join them. I remember my first Christmas in Australia. I was in Brisbane and my parishioners asked what I would be doing. I said that, after celebrating Mass, I would just join a nearby gathering and they said, ‘Oh no, Father Kevin, please come and join our families. We don’t want to have to look for you in the police station.’”
This year, there is no risk Father Kevin will end up on the wrong side of the law. After
Mass at Christmas Creek, there will be a Christmas dinner. Members of the congregation will decorate the church and bring food to share. For the following day, he has received a deluge of invitations.
“After morning Mass,” he says, “I will be visiting a different family every two hours.
I’m fully booked.”
For Josie, Christmas will be a little different this year, too. Maureen has offered to help out with the pudding. “Josie has always made the Christmas cake and the plum pudding,” she says. “She makes the pudding in a cloth.
It’s a boiled one and it fills a dinner plate when she tips it out. Just last year, I realised it was getting a bit big and heavy for her to get out of the pot. So, this year, Josie will guide me and we’ll make it together.”
There will be three new members of the family for the festivities at Christmas Creek this year – five generations of Arthys, including eight great-great-grandchildren, sharing Josie’s home cooking and tea from Bob’s old kettle under a canopy of eucalypts and hoop pine. Then more young Arthys will skim stones and learn to swim at the water hole.
“Christmas is about family for us,” says Josie. “If we can get all the family home for Christmas, we’re happy.”
Each time I celebrate Mass and see that my parishioners are happy, I feel happy.