Reading Crockett Home and Away.
What were they reading ‘down under’ for Christmas 1901?
When “The Packman’s Pool” appeared in syndication in 1901, it would have reached readers across the British Empire, including newspapers in New Zealand. What might those antipodean readers have made of Crockett’s snow-bound Christmas?
For Scottish emigrants—and by 1901, New Zealand’s population included substantial numbers of Scots, the story would have offered something complex and potentially painful. These were readers who knew precisely what Crockett meant by “the wild hills of Galloway,” who could parse the Scots dialect without stumbling, who understood the economic desperation of “five-and-twenty pounds in wages” because many had fled similar circumstances. The story brought them home—not to the sentimental Scotland of tartanry and romance, but to the hard Scotland of subsistence farming, grinding poverty, and winters that killed.
Yet they were reading it in a place where Christmas fell in midsummer, where December meant long light and warmth rather than early darkness and frost. The sensory details that make the story so vivid—snow falling “soft, whisperingly,” the “dead black” pool amid whiteness—would have required an act of imaginative reversal. For readers of the Dunedin Evening Star where the story was published on 21st December 1901, Crockett’s winter would have been purely literary, a remembered or inherited season rather than an experienced one.
But perhaps this temporal and climatic displacement actually served the story. Read in summer sunshine, “The Packman’s Pool” could not rely on atmospheric solidarity—readers sweating through a Southern Christmas could not feel the cold alongside Gray Stiel. Instead, the story’s power would have rested entirely on its moral and psychological architecture: the desperation of a man preparing to kill his brother, the child’s innocent contentment with his porridge, the terrible mercy of a death that prevents a murder. Divorced from its original climate, the story might have revealed its bones more clearly.
There’s another layer worth considering. New Zealand readers in 1901 lived in a colony barely sixty years past organised settlement, where the relationship between humans and landscape remained uncertain and sometimes violent. The land was still being “broken in,” forests cleared, swamps drained, mountains made passable. Crockett’s vision of nature as active agent—snow that decides, weather that executes judgment—might have resonated differently in a place where nature’s resistance to human intention was immediate and ongoing. The story’s implicit warning that nature ultimately holds the power would not have seemed quaint or nostalgic but grimly contemporary.
For Pākehā (European) readers particularly, there may have been an uncomfortable recognition in Gray Stiel’s position: the trapped man, economically dependent, romantically thwarted, preparing violence that he cannot quite commit. Colonial anxiety frequently manifested as paranoia about threats (from the land, from Māori resistance, from economic failure), and Crockett’s narrative of deferred violence—the blow that nature prevents from falling—offered a strangely apt fable for colonial consciousness.
And then there’s the story’s treatment of Christmas itself. Robin’s question—”what is’t?”—might have echoed for readers in a young colony still establishing its seasonal traditions, importing Northern Hemisphere customs wholesale into a Southern summer context. The cognitive dissonance of singing carols about snow whilst sweating through December heat, of celebrating a winter festival in midsummer, was and remains a peculiar feature of antipodean Christmas. Crockett’s story, in which Christmas is genuinely alien rather than merely relocated, might have offered unexpected validation—permission to acknowledge that Christmas could be strange, uncomfortable, incompletely understood rather than simply celebrated.
The story’s final moral—that contentment can come from sufficiency rather than abundance—would have carried particular weight in a colonial context where material accumulation was often the explicit justification for migration. Robin’s declaration that “porridge is hard to beat” challenges the logic of emigration itself: perhaps the plenty promised in the new world is less satisfying than simple sufficiency in the old. It’s a potentially subversive message for readers who had crossed the world in search of “as muckle as ever they can eat.”
Yet the story also affirms endurance, self-reliance, and the virtue of making do—all qualities colonial discourse celebrated. Gray Stiel’s “brave, brisk, hard life” among the hills could be read as excellent preparation for colonial existence. The story might have served simultaneously as nostalgia for what was left behind and validation of the qualities needed to survive in what was found.
What New Zealand readers in 1901 almost certainly would not have done is read “The Packman’s Pool” as a quaint period piece. Crockett’s rural poverty was too recent, his economic calculations too precise, his winter too real. This was contemporary social documentation as much as literary entertainment—a reminder that whilst some had escaped to the antipodes, others remained trapped in those wild hills, still counting every penny, still at the mercy of nature and employers and circumstances beyond their control.
For Scottish emigrants reading by summer light, remembering winters they would never experience again, “The Packman’s Pool” offered something valuable and melancholy: recognition that home was not merely the place left behind but a set of conditions—material, climatic, moral—that shaped who they had been and, perhaps, who they remained. The snow that saved Gray Stiel would never fall on their new farms, but the story suggested that its lessons—about nature’s power, about sufficiency, about the mercy of prevention—travelled nonetheless.
It’s a point worth remembering that readers bring something of themselves to every story. We read through the prism of history, but even in its day Crockett’s work was read through geographical lenses and was read from many different cultural perspectives.
‘Packman’s Pool’ is part of The Christmas Special collection in The Library.