:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/43156630/186431924.0.0.jpg)
In most countries, Halloween is either a beloved tradition or it's generally ignored. It's popular in the US, much of Europe, Japan, and getting that way in India. But it generally elicits shrugs in mainland China, the Middle East, and most of Africa. There is one country, though, where Halloween is well known but surprisingly controversial: Australia.
"It's Halloween tomorrow," Business Insider Australia's Simon Thomsen wrote on Thursday, "which brings out a number of things: witches, lollies and hand-wringing opinion columns by Australians opining our cultural colonisation by the US."
The story of Australian anti-Halloweenism is surprisingly complex, goes back to before the nation's founding, and ultimately has to do less with the holiday itself than with the country's legacy of being pushed around by more powerful Anglo nations: first the British Empire and now the US.
The backlash against Halloween is so severe that there's even a backlash against the backlash. Take, for example, this super-earnest headline on News.com.au, the country's second-most popular online news source: "It's time Australia embraced its dark side and stopped hating Halloween."
Yes, hating on Halloween is an annual tradition in Australia. The argument typically goes like this: Halloween is a form of American cultural imperialism, just another way of trying to destroy our Australian heritage and make us the Americans' lackey, and in any case October is springtime here so it's the wrong season.
Sure, there are some holes you could poke in this argument. It's a bit silly, for example, for Australians to complain about metaphorical cultural imperialism against them, when their national existence is founded on actual, non-metaphorical imperialism that involved so many genocides there is a Wikipedia page listing them all. (Yes, you could say the same of the US.) And while it's true that Halloween feels out of place in the Australian spring, so does Christmas.
Australia's anti-Halloween sentiment is widespread, though, and the holiday's opponents remain vocal. "Every year, the debate is thrown around," Mashable's Jenni Ryall wrote from Australia of the Halloween argument. "People are FREAKING out." Ryall wrote as one of the reasons for this, "Australians hate American culture."
Oh look it's Halloween. Can't wait to tell the 2.5 sad kids who turn up tonight that I don't have any lollies. BECAUSE THIS IS AUSTRALIA.
— Petra Starke (@petstarr) October 30, 2014
Last year, the left-leaning Australian columnist Van Badham wrote in the Guardian to defend fellow Halloween-objectors across Oz, explaining that the holiday isn't just bad because it's "imported cultural ritual" — it's a indistinguishable from warmongering American militarism.
"For people like my mother [who refused to celebrate Halloween], it's a deliberate rejection of the kind of US imperialism that suckered her generation not into witches hats and candy, but Australian participation in the Vietnam war," Badham wrote.
What Badham is articulating, if a bit inartfully, is the sense in Australia that they are being pushed around politically, and overrun culturally, by the Americans. That's not totally unreasonable. The far larger and wealthier American entertainment business means that smaller, English-speaking markets like Australia's are overrun with Yankee accents and tastes.
Politically, Australia, like the UK, is a close American ally, but one that can at times feel pushed around like some sort of geopolitical kid brother. Australia participated in the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, leading a lot of Australians to ask whether they invaded those countries because it was in their national interest or because the Americans pushed them into it.
More recently, the US has opened a small but politically significant military base in the Australian town of Darwin, which to Australians feels like they're being conscripted into the US-led effort to militarily contain China.
But there's a tremendous irony to all this: Halloween isn't an American cultural import at all. It's originally a Celtic holiday.
Even more ironic, Australia's own anti-Halloween sentiment is a direct hand-down from the British Empire. In the late 1800s, Great Britain undergoing a social experiment known as Victorianism, named after then-monarch Queen Victoria. The ultra-conservative social mores of Victorianism enforced rigid class roles and gender roles; it ingrained misogyny and homophobia within Great Britain and across the Empire.
The Victorians also hated Halloween, with its indulgent superstitions and excessive fun, and so tried to stamp it out. This all happened just as the Brits were out conquering and pillaging much of the world, including the South Pacific, where it founded the colonies that would become Australia. The Brits who filled in the Australian island (and did their best to empty it of native populations) brought a deep suspicion of Halloween with them. And that sentiment appears to have survived. In other words, Australians' ostensibly anti-imperial rejection of Halloween is actually a continuation of British imperialism.
You might wonder, then, why so much of the rest of the former British Empire celebrates Halloween today. The answer is timing: the US broke away from the Empire before Victorianism's anti-Halloween movement could come to America, while other colonies such as Hong Kong and Singapore only broke away later, after Victorianism had fallen away and Halloween had returned to the wider British imperial world. But Australia became independent in 1901, just as Victorianism was ending, so never got the full Halloween resurgence.
In the end, of course, most anti-Halloween Australians are probably thinking of neither the Vietnam War nor of Victorianism; they just know that the holiday feels foreign and dislike the sense of foreign cultural imposition. That's certainly a widespread and understandable feeling in the globalized world. But, whether they know it or, there's a long, strange, and complex political history to the rejection of Halloween there.
