The Spirit of Giving

South Australians have a long tradition of giving and of offering a helping hand. Sometimes that’s not easy. As Christmas approaches it’s easy to be overwhelmed by recent events. Fires, flood, protests, the COVID19 pandemic with all its accompanying separation and anxiety continue to cause pain. But despite the hardship, people continue to show kindness within their communities and to strangers. And what else is Christmas about if not to remind us, whatever our beliefs, that wherever there are people, there can also be the twin spirits of hope and of giving.

A sprig of parsley

In the early 1930s The Adelaide Chronicle ran a long-running series of readers’ stories called ‘Real Life Stories of South Australia’. ‘A Sprig of Parsley’ was published over the name ‘Bert the Carpenter’ in 1934. 

Bert relates a tale told to him by an elderly lady who had shown him a treasured possession, a few tiny leaves dried between the pages of a book. As a child she had emigrated with her family to Australia from Saxony in late 1853. The Eisebrock (most likely the Iserbrook) carried approximately 70 German immigrants, including around 20 children. They found themselves still at sea in December. The voyage was extremely long and wearing and rationing was in place. Yet somehow a small miracle took place. On Christmas Eve the families were ushered into the saloon to see the Christmas tree.

The lady, now almost ninety, recalled

“a real little pine tree standing on the table, with bright and fresh green leaves. Behind it stood the ship's carpenter, an old man with a long white beard, looking like Santa Claus himself, and we learned that we owed the tree to him.

When leaving port he had put a little pine tree on board for just such a purpose…but when he went to look at it a few weeks before Christmas, he found that the rats had eaten all the needles off, leaving nothing but bare sticks. He was very disappointed, and, after trying to make artificial foliage, he had an inspiration.

From the ballast in the hold he took some earthy sand and washed all the salt out of it with some of his allowance of drinking water. Then he put it in a little basket, sowed parsley seed in it, and hung it at the head of the main-mast, where it would be out of reach of the salt spray. Twice a day he climbed that mast to water the parsley with fresh water from his drinking allowance, swearing the sailors to secrecy…On Christmas Eve he took the basket down again, got out the dead pine tree, and on each twig end he tied a fresh green parsley leaf.

We had been months at sea without seeing a flower or a blade of green grass; quite a lot of the older people had tears in their eyes when they saw what the old carpenter had done. We children could scarcely believe our eyes at first when we saw that the leaves were real.”

Origins of the John Martin's Pageant

A few months before The Chronicle printed ‘A Sprig of Parsley’, another act of giving took place, this time on land.

On 18 November 1933, during the Great Depression, the first ‘Children’s Christmas Parade’ was begun by Sir Edward Hayward, owner of John Martin’s store. It comprised 8 floats, three bands and drew enormous crowds. Adelaide newspapers were full of praise.