A festive feast of fish and fruit: the creation of the Australian Christmas dinner

A traditional British meal of roast turkey and plum pudding may have once dominated Australia’s Christmas tables. But as our population has become more diverse, so has our menu.

While some may mark the day with a pepparkakor and others a panettone, it would now be a rare house where prawns and a bowl of cherries did not make an appearance.

But how did this distinctively Australian Christmas spread get its start?

The peculiarity of preparing a roast and pudding in high summer was amusing to colonials. In many ways its absurdity was celebrated, representing the ambiguity of emergent Antipodean identity. But there were soon calls for innovation.

In 1907, Henry Lawson described a “sensible Christmas dinner” in one of his short stories,…