ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a detailed examination and reading of the enmeshment of verse-poetry with a growing movement to disjoint the metanarratives of empire and the celebratory traditions 'fixing' colonial culture to its Imperial centre. Popular and literary Australian poetry throughout the nineteenth century dedicated to revering the Christmas pudding offered visions of the food form's place within Victorian culture. Verse-poetry of the period exposed the Christmas pudding as a fiction about fiction articulating its own fictional identity. "Punch's recipe for his Christmas Pudding" and "The 'Figaro' Christmas Pudding" each redirected the reader's attention back to the storytelling process of the traditional 'English' Christmas and appropriated the Christmas pudding to undermine the feasibility of that narrative within the Australian colonial context. Colonial retailers operating in the mid-1800s commercially appealed to encouraging a sense of colonial "nation-ness" by directly linking the creation of Christmas pudding to the image of settler's "communion" with Australian "English-ness".