Our spring, their spooks: the great Aussie Halloween heist
But don’t worry, you too can dress up as decapitated zombie. Or you may like to dial it down a little with a headband for only $2.80 that looks as if you have been stabbed fatally. Ah, Halloween and the great mystery of why here in Australia we increasingly are choosing to spend the first month of spring dwelling on death.
The new baby animals and dazzling flowers of every colour really are ruining the gory aesthetic we are carefully building in the streets.
The lure of early onset diabetes apparently is too strong for those of us hellbent on burying our own great Aussie culture in American tradition. Of course, it’s not really a mystery. Think of the money that is made from adding one more thoroughly commercialised holiday to the calendar. At the very least we could have started dancing around some maypoles. Who could be mad about that? But I guess there ain’t much money in maypoles. Plastic pumpkin lanterns, however, that’s another story.
Last year, according to the Australian Retailers Association, we spent $450m on Halloween.
And, anyway, we rapidly have been losing our Aussie identity for quite some time now so it seems natural that we simply try anything on these days. Cheap thrills like scaring children with scenes from Silence of the Lambs. Seems fun. Bake sales. Twinkies. I know, let’s start spelling analyse with a Z. Analyze looks better, don’t you think? What’s next, s’mores around the campfire? Fry-ups? Stopping at the gas station?
I want Dunkaroos and Yowies. I want Skippy. Blinky Bill. Mateship. A fair suck of the sauce bottle. A home among the gum trees. The screechiest birds on the planet. I want pink slugs at Mount Kaputar. The smell of gidgee out at Longreach and animals that will kill you at every turn. I want to stop at the servo and get a meat pie. I want Clancy of the Overflow.
Yes, I am the Grinch of Halloween. And proud of it. My kids will ask me again this year, “Will we go trick or treating?” and my answer is always the same. “Sweetheart, we are Australian. We eat biscuits and have barbecues. We run cake stalls. We play cricket. We like Vegemite.” I’ll spare you the full-length edition but after my speech about Australian culture, I will then go on to gently highlight the sheer stupidity of the celebration.
“October is spring in the southern hemisphere, which is where we live, so we won’t be able to herald in the ‘darker months’, I’m afraid. I’ve only got tricks at my door and you won’t like them.
“Now run along and find a nest of baby birds in the yard. Lie in wait for hours until you see the mother come back and feed them a worm. Witness the miracle of life.”
My issue doesn’t even really lie with the true origins of Halloween, the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The Celts believed it was a day when the dead could cross over into the land of the living. It was spiritual, deeply rooted in their culture and beliefs. Maybe if I am ever in Ireland on October 31 I will partake. Where it all went wrong is when Irish immigrants practised their rich tradition in their new homeland and the Americans co-opted it.
Australia is a free country, I s’pose. Whatever blows your hair back. But at the very least we need to keep it out of educational settings. In 2023, St Michael’s Grammar School in Melbourne informed parents that, regarding Halloween, they were “welcome to observe celebrations and festivals of their choosing outside school”. I, too, draw the line at Halloween Find-A-Words and treats that have well and truly infiltrated most schools.
I accept the freedom of others. I struggle to understand why they exercise their personal freedoms to expose and potentially desensitise children to extreme representations of violence and horror. I tend to think it’s a problem when kids don’t even flinch at stab wounds. When the most popular children’s movie on Netflix of all time is a movie about demons. Creepy, scary demons. We are culturing them with a predilection for the macabre. And priming them for a life of consumerism and the financial struggle that comes with it.
Children aside, do I need to be having flashbacks of The Exorcist while I’m trying to get my groceries? I don’t need any more horror in my life. After a trip to town in October I’m ready to catch the next train to Toowoomba for the Flower Festival. The Man from Snowy River Festival cannot come soon enough.
I’ll be honest. My issue with Halloween is deeply personal. My birthday is in October and it used to be quite a nice time of year. To celebrate, I’ll be on the tallies, dressed up as Mick Dundee and playing John Williamson on full blare. Haunting the trick or treaters with symbols of a dying culture.
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It’s October, which means the storefronts are going to be displaying MA15+ material for toddlers on their way to the library. Single-use plastic junk and processed sugar consumption will hit record highs. And social media everywhere will be dedicated to the most morbid and macabre content you can possibly (or can’t even) imagine.