Everyone knows about Santa Claus, but have you heard of Wangkarnal the Christmas crow?

By Erin Parke

It's a hot night before Christmas and an eerie figure is perched on a hilltop, gazing over Gija country. 

He is tall, feathered and mysterious — and makes a loud screeching noise as the sun begins to set.

Soon, he'll be bringing presents to local children, but he ain't no Santa Claus.

He is Wangkarnal — the strangest and spookiest Christmas tradition you've never heard of — and he's about to make his annual appearance in the small bush community of Warmun.

The remote community of Warmun in the Kimberley.(ABC News: Andy Seabourne)

"We don't have Santa here, he hasn't visited for about 50 years," explains teaching assistant Spencer Morgan.

"Wangkarnal is the Gija word for crow, and every year he visits with presents for the kids.

"Everyone's excited that he'll be rocking up tonight — excited and a little bit scared!"

The Wangkarnal Dreamtime story

Wangkarnal is a uniquely Australian Christmas tradition that plays out each year in this part of northern Western Australia.

Warmun community chairperson Vanessa Thomas says the crow character comes from the creation stories of Gija people.

The Wangkarnal crow has its origins in the creation stories of the Gija people of the East Kimberley region.
(ABC News: Andy Seabourne)

"It's a special thing to celebrate the story from our Ngarrangkarni, or Dreamtime," she says.

"The old people taught us about the crow and the eagle, who lived up on the hill, but the crow was really lazy and never went hunting.

"So they had a fight and the eagle struck the crow with hot coals, and that's how Wangkarnal got the white marks around his eyes.

"Nowadays, we have a football team called the Eagles, and we have the crow come at Christmas time to give presents to the kids."

Community chairperson Vanessa Thomas explains the origins of the Wangkarnal story.
(ABC News: Erin Parke)

It's thought Wangkarnal became entwined with Christian Christmas traditions in the 1970s.

It was a formative time for the Gija families, who — after about 100 years of colonial dispossession — decided to establish their own community where language and customs could be maintained.

They asked the Catholic Church to help them start a school where children could be taught both cultural values and the mainstream curriculum.

Elder Eileen Bray says the result is a special blend of Gija and Christian culture in both classrooms and daily life.

"I think we're doing a good job of keeping our language and culture strong, but trying to make sure young people can find a job as well," she says.

"It's not easy, but my Jangalu [uncle] told me, 'you have to keep the language going, teach the kids, keep it strong', so we do our best."

Eileen Bray is a Gija language teacher and translator in Warmun Community.(ABC News: Andy Seabourne)

The Christmas crow arrives

When the ABC arrives to witness the arrival of Wangkarnal, there's electricity in the air. A tropical storm crackles overhead as excited children gather for the school Christmas concert.

"I feel gooloo gooloo [happy] that he's coming to visit," Tennielle Patrick says.

"Sometimes the kids run away because Wangkarnal can be a bit scary."

Lauren Peters and Tennielle Patrick learn via a two-way education system at the Ngalangangpun
School in Warmun.(ABC News: Erin Parke)

After class awards, the ominous beat of clapping sticks begins, and the handful of remaining elders sing to summon the big black bird.

A white troopie — the troop carrier four-wheel-drive favoured in these parts — tears across the oval and the kids begin to scream.

Spencer Morgan throws open the passenger doors, and two large screeching crows burst out and lunge towards the crowd.

The crows dart and weave among the families, emitting strange bird noises, and scooping up presents to be delivered to each child.

After the excitement, as dinner is packed away and prams are being pushed home, Spencer reflects on the spectacle.

He grew up watching Wangkarnal as a child and, after several years away at boarding school, has returned to Warmun to be a teaching assistant.

"I'm a local boy, so it makes me very happy to be helping out with the younger ones now," he says.

"I guess it's pretty unusual what we have here, the way we mix [cultural influences] together in our stories and our art and the school."

Spencer Morgan watched Wangkarnal's arrival as a child and now helps organise the even.
(ABC News: Erin Parke)

For now, Wangkarnal has folded away his wings and disappeared into the night.

But locals know he will be back next Christmas; a ritual held tight, even as everything else in the world is changing.

First published at ABC News, December 21, 2024

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu casts a clawed hand over 100 years of vampire cinema

by Velvet Winter

The dark, clawed shadow of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror has stretched out over 100 years of vampiric storytelling.

While unofficially ripped from Bram Stoker's Dracula, F. W. Murnau's transfiguring film has coloured the way we think about those who drink blood to stay alive. As the first flick to feature a vampire dying by sunlight, Nosferatu has seeped into horror lore.

Max Schreck's 1920s Nosferatu is updated for 21st century tastes in Eggers's remake. (Getty)

But after years of vampire superheroes, vampire villains and vampires that sparkle, director Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, The Witch) is making bloodsuckers scary again.

The original Nosferatu centres on Thomas Hutter, a gormless real estate agent sent to a Transylvanian castle to obtain the binding signature of the mysterious Count Orlok. Of course, the Count has little interest in property but has a lot of interest in the occupation of Thomas's soul — along with the soul of his wife Ellen, who is writhing with possession while under the care of their friends, the Hardings.

For Eggers, the classic tale has held his obsession since he was a child. His degraded 16-millimetre copy erased the bald cap lines and greasepaint on original actor Max Schreck's face, transfixing the young Eggers with the illusion that Orlok was real.

"I could have seen it 100 times. I've woken up in the middle of the night, can't go back to bed, and I'll just throw it on in the background," he tells ABC Entertainment

"There's a reason why people still talk about this movie. There were others before it but in many ways, he invented the horror film."

Renowned for his unique take on the darkest of stories, Eggers ripped Nosferatu into the present by shifting the perspective. Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is no longer the centre of attention; instead Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is the object of Orlok's main obsession.

"In my version, it's [Ellen's] story from the very beginning. When you look at the Murnau film, you see that there was this demon-lover relationship that I got to explore much further," Eggers says.

"In many ways, my adaptation of Nosferatu is my most personal film," says director Robert Eggers. (Supplied: Universal)

Unlike Murnau's Ellen, who only encounters the titular vampire in the film's third act, Eggers's film opens with Orlok visiting Ellen as a child, kicking off a nightmarish connection between the two. When Thomas visits Orlok's isolated castle, the intimidating lord catches a glimpse of Ellen in Thomas's locket, reigniting his obsession.

"They're together, he disappears, and then he returns to destroy her, but it is also a love triangle. She has this loving relationship with her husband, but it doesn't have the passion that she has with this demon," Eggers says.

A battle for body and soul

Orlok and Ellen's connection isn't just mental, it physically manifests within Ellen as explosive fits that cause her hands to curl and eyes to roll back in her head.

Stuck under the care of the well-meaning but traditional Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), her best friend's husband, Ellen's outbursts are dismissed as hysteria. A doctor advises them to tie her to the bed and tighten her corset (to keep her organs in place).

"I think that this is an internal battle for Ellen as much as an external one," Lily-Rose Depp tells ABC Entertainment.

"She's been struggling her whole life with trying to accept the darkness within and that there is much more to her than just the kind of well-behaved, perfect wife that everybody seems to want to see.

    "I think that all of the characters are like a victim of the             time period. [Thomas] thinks that going out and making         some money and getting them a big house solved the             problem."

It's not until Harding begrudgingly seeks out the advice of a disgraced doctor, Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an entirely new character of Eggers's creation, that Ellen has a voice on her side.

It's his otherness from society that makes Von Franz such a good ally for Ellen, Depp says.

"He's the only person, because he is connected to that world, that's able to see her," she says.

"I think she's plagued with this shame and this feeling like she's bringing darkness all around her, and he gives her the opportunity to do something good with it, which I think is beautiful."

Surrounding abounds

Ellen isn't the only character benefiting from enrichment in Eggers's transformation. The Hardings — who are almost set-dressing in the original — represent the traditional life Ellen so craves.

Taylor-Johnson says he drew on lived experience to build out the new version of Friedrich Harding.

"They're a compassionate, traditional, thinking, loving family that just want to protect one another through this sort of sweeping plague that comes through," he told ABC Entertainment.

"I felt like these were characters that felt almost contemporary and relatable in a sense that we as a collective have all gone through a global pandemic."

As Orlok's grasp tightens on Ellen, her friends are first in the supernatural firing line. But ultra-traditionalist Friedrich refuses to accept it, bullishly insisting the plague they are experiencing is natural, even as the consequences of Ellen's possession become impossible to overlook.

"It's very black and white with him, which is why he ignores all of Ellen's symptoms," Taylor-Johnson says.

"It was a very misogynistic, male-centric way of thinking in that period in time. There's this perversion or sort of erotic thing that's happening in her, in all her sort of contortions when she's possessed.

"So the men in the room don't know how to look at her. They can't handle this very beautiful woman rolling around the floor; they think it's sinful."

Revealing Orlok

The original image of Nosferatu — all clawed hands and pointed ears — may have terrified audiences in the 20s, but horror fans have become more desensitised over the years.

Bill Skarsgård (It) undertook such extensive preparation to play Nosferatu, including working with an opera singer to lower his voice, that it became legendary among the cast.

"The first time we kind of got a glimpse of what Bill was building, was when we heard a recording of the voice that he was working on," says Nicholas Hoult, who plays Thomas Hutter.

"It filled the room. Even though I was on a phone speaker, there was something that really got inside of your bones about that voice."

Hoult says Skarsgård's triumphant performance goes beyond the prosthetics.

"I think that's what's exciting, he doesn't feel like a monster. This was a Hungarian nobleman who has died, but he has human elements to him. So it feels more chilling and scary because of that."

While Eggers says he respects all the versions of vampires that have come since the original, the fear factor was at the front of his mind for Orlok.

"I think the versatility of vampires is awesome, but if I was going to do this new version of it, it needed to be scary," he says.

"In order for a vampire to be scary again, we needed to go back to the source, we needed [Orlok] to be a corpse, we needed him to be demonic and not sparkling."

Nosferatu will hit Australian cinemas on January 1.

First published at ABC News, December 21, 2024

Best book for the year from the wilds of Tassie

Author Robbie Arnott… exquisite prose reflects and celebrates the unique and strange beauty of the
Tasmanian wilderness. Photo: Mitch Osbourne

Book reviewer ANNA CREER shares her novel of the year plus four others that stand out from the pack.

Award-winning Robbie Arnott’s latest novel Dusk is the book of the year for this reviewer.

Set in the highlands of Tasmania in the middle of the 19th century, twins Iris and Floyd, children of notorious convict parents, are low on money and searching for work. They learn that local graziers have placed a bounty on a sheep-killing puma called Dusk, the last of her kind released in the highlands to control feral deer.

Despite the fact that five men have already died, the twins decide to join the hunt, setting off on a quest into unknown territory .

Arnott’s exquisite prose reflects and celebrates the unique and strange beauty of the Tasmanian wilderness.

ELSEWHERE on my shortlist, in Precipice, Robert Harris retells the story of the tense events, which led to Britain going to war in 1914 and the disastrous decision to expand the war to the Dardanelles in 1915.

At the same time, he reveals the astonishing details of the extraordinary love affair between Britain’s Prime Minister, Asquith, aged 62 and the Hon. Venetia Stanley, aged 27.

Asquith is obsessed with Venetia, writing letters two or three times a day, insisting on replies. (there were twelve postal deliveries a day in London in 1914).

In all, Asquith wrote 560 letters to Venetia, sharing sensitive information about government decisions.

Harris opens a window on a world rushing to war, while Britain’s Prime Minister is constantly distracted by thoughts of his love for Venetia, writing letters to her even during important meetings of the War Cabinet. 

THE Voyage Home is the third novel in Booker Prize winning Pat Barker’s trilogy about the Trojan War.

Barker’s aim in writing her trilogy is to give a powerful voice to the women who are silent in Homer’s The Iliad and yet suffered rape and slavery.

The Voyage Home reimagines the story of Agamemnon returning in triumph to Mycenae with his concubine, Cassandra, daughter of Priam.

Cassandra has already had a vision of Agamemnon’s death, like “a stuck pig on a slaughterhouse floor”, because “what he did in Troy was so horrific, so devoid of humanity, that even the gods were sickened”. She also knows she will die with him.

In Mycenae, Clytemnestra waits for her husband to return. She too hates Agamemnon. The two women, his wife and his concubine, have decided his fate.

The Voyage Home is impressive storytelling. Barker succeeds in reimagining the torment of women whose lives have been changed forever.

DERVLA McTiernan’s standalone novel What happened to Nina?, is a disturbing exploration of crime and punishment in a world dominated by the power of social media.

Nina Fraser and Simon Jordan go away together for a week of trekking and climbing, staying at Simon’s parents’ holiday house, but only Simon returns.

He tells his parents that, as a result of a quarrel, he had returned home and Nina was going to Boston to visit friends.

When Nina doesn’t make contact, her distraught parents report her missing to police and plead with the Jordans to allow the police to search the grounds of their holiday house.

The wealthy Jordans decide to hire a PR firm, who specialise in reputation management, to protect their son from gossip and innuendo. They start an online campaign against Nina’s parents, to distract media attention away from Simon. 

The consequences of their actions lead to a shocking resolution. 

SINCE 2007, using the pseudonym Benjamin Black, Booker Prize winner John Banville has written crime novels about an alcoholic pathologist, Quirke, set in 1950’s Dublin.

In 2020, Banville published Snow under his own name, introducing a new detective, Inspector St John Strafford from the protestant land-owning class. In April in Spain (2021) he brought Strafford and Quirke together.

The Drowned, the fourth in the series begins in rural Wicklow with an expensive car in a field, the engine running and the doors open. A desperate man, emerging from the darkness, claims his wife has drowned herself.

An extensive search on both sea and land finds no sign of the woman. Strafford is sent south to investigate, discovering to his surprise that he knows two of the men involved; Charles Ruddock with whom he was at school and Professor Armitage, whom he interviewed when investigating the death of Rosa Jacobs (The Lock-up, 2023).

Infused with melancholy, The Drowned is a lyrical exploration of both doomed and toxic relationships.

First published at Canberra City News, December 21, 2024

The story behind Christmas pop music

Bing Crosby’s 1942 song White Christmas… top-selling single until 1997.

CityNews cinema writer SIMON COBCROFT has a secret life: Christmas music tragic. Over four decades he’s listened to more than 14,000 Christmas songs and arrived at a playlist (which he’s happy to share) of 17 hours of the 359 songs he reckons are worth listening to.  

And so this is Christmas…
So sang John Lennon with his wife and the Harlem community choir, on a balmy October day in 1971.

It is now one of the many Christmas pop staples played every Christmas around the world; accumulating more than 613 million streams on Spotify, as of this week.

But Christmas pop has often had a bad rap, excuse the pun. Sometime in the eighties, when I was living in a share house in Newcastle, I got into an argument with a guy who swore that no one had ever recorded a good Christmas pop song.

I decided to prove him wrong by making a mix-tape of Christmas songs from my record collection. For anyone under 40, a mix-tape was like putting together a Spotify playlist but, in practice, more laboriously like putting MP3s on a USB stick while your computer intermittently crashes.

Anyway, Scrooge McChristmas wasn’t swayed. But thus began my obsessive quest to collate the ultimate Christmas playlist.

Four decades on, I have sifted through more than 14,000 Christmas songs to coal the bad and select the good to put on my Christmas playlist. I now humbly believe it to be the greatest collection of Christmas pop songs ever released. I have 359 songs (17 hours of music) that reflect the diversity and evolution of the Christmas pop song.

The list is in the order that I have compiled it over the years but is thematically organised so that one song flows naturally to the next. I figure you can always put it on shuffle-play if you want to access more recent releases sooner. You’ll also forgive me for the last few songs, as I’m still thematically organising this month’s releases.

But there is everything from pop to punk, from country to calypso and from reggae to rap.

And I haven’t been Triple-J snotty about it either. You’ll find Mariah, Biebs and Tay-Tay in there, too. If it’s got energy or attitude, or an infectious pull on par with COVID, it’s in. So too if it plucks the strings of your heart or tugs at your tear ducts.

Unfortunately though, a number of songs I have on record are not available on Spotify, so there are some gaps.

The list starts with the song that pioneered Christmas pop, the world’s best-selling single up until 1997 –  Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. 

Before that, there was no such thing as a best-selling Christmas pop song.

Sure, people had written Christmas pop songs prior to this, but they weren’t big sellers. In fact, record companies couldn’t see the financial sense in putting out a record that would only sell for a few months in the year.

That is until Irving Berlin twigged that those few months occurred every year and with the right record you could re-release it every Christmas and make a motza.

So, in 1940, Berlin sat down and thought, “how can I write a Christmas song that everyone, even Jewish people like me who don’t celebrate Christmas, will like?”

His answer? Firstly, make it about winter holidays with fun in the snow rather than a crying baby in a grubby stable in the Middle East. Secondly, appeal to nostalgia; of a family-orientated golden past that is sadly missing in the modern world. Yes folks, the nostalgia business has been going on for that long.

By the time the song was released in 1942, Berlin was not to know that soulful reflection was exactly what every American wanted, as they grimly faced a wartime Christmas with loved ones overseas.

White Christmas went on to be featured in the movie, Holiday Inn, which formed the template for all Christmas movies to follow – warm, light-hearted and most importantly, not focused on religion.

Christmas carols with secular backgrounds

In a sense this secularisation of Christmas music has been going on for centuries, as a lot of the old Christmas carols we know have secular backgrounds.

Jingle Bells (1857) was a drinking song written for American Thanksgiving and was most commonly sung by sloshed men in taverns, with the original verses about drunken misfortune in the snow:

A day or two ago,
The story I must tell,

I went out on the snow,

And on my back I fell;

A gent was riding by,
In a one-horse open sleigh,
He laughed as there I sprawling lie,
And quickly drove away,

Ha, Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells…

Deck The Halls is another secular song from 1862 with plenty of reference to drinking in the original Welsh version which translates as:

The best pleasure is this time,
A house, a fire and friends,
A warmed heart from much brown ale,
and singing beautiful songs.

As all religious people know, the devil has the best music and our modern corporate Lucifers are no different in serving up secular Christmas bangers that can’t help but tempt the faithful to get down with their bad self. Mariah ain’t no pariah when it comes to uniting the pews to get up and dance.

Look, it’s no bad thing. I’m not religious (in fact, music is my religion) but I support the idea of a final month of the year where people of all faiths can join in. Where we can unwind, have fun and reflect on the year past. And, for this year in particular, slam the door on its sorry arse.

I’m happy to celebrate Chinese New Year in January, or Islamic New Year in August or Jewish New Year in September, but there’s a certain charm and logic to celebrating the last calendar month of the year.

And as no one still believes in the Roman gods, no one should be offended, or at least we should all be equally offended, that the vast majority of the world sticks with the Western calendar Julius Caesar introduced in 46 BC, that has months named after Roman gods, festivals and rulers. It’s hardly a Christian thing.

And besides, the Bible doesn’t even place Christ’s birth in a cold northern December. Shepherds don’t watch their flocks of sheep in winter, and the national Roman census, that Joseph and Mary supposedly came to Bethlehem to register in, took place in summer. The Bible has no record of the birth date of Jesus, but the passing references that do exist seem to point to him being born in June.

Saturnalia was an end-of-year booze-up 

You see, historically, Christmas was introduced to replace the Roman festival of Saturnalia after Emperor Constantine converted the Roman empire to Christianity in AD 312. Saturnalia celebrated the agricultural god, Saturn and was an end-of-year booze-up on December 25 to mark the winter solstice and send out the year.

We similarly end each week on Saturday or Saturn’s day. Saturnalia (which I also noticed was mentioned in Keeping Up the ACT, last week) was a time where businesses shut down for two days, where everyone put on massive banquets, where slaves could rest and feast at their master’s tables, where gifts were given to friends and family (called sigillaria) and where much drinking and merriment occurred.

Sound familiar? It’s basically, what most of us wage-slaves still do at this time of the year, regardless of religion.

And what better way to accompany that, than with some bauble bangers to lift our spirits?

So, here’s to a songful Saturnalia, a carolful Christmas, a harmonic Hanukah, a percussive Pancha Ganapati, a keyboard-driven Kwanzaa and an orchestral Ōmisoka.

I hope you enjoy my playlist. And if you don’t, I know who you are. You really need to concede that you lost the argument, Scrooge McChristmas.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6mv4KtN3swEam4z0f1BaFQ

First published at Canberra City News, December 20, 2024