Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn – our universal 4 seasons right? Seriously? Does anyone in Australia REALLY believe in this Eurocentric crap anymore? Corporate retailers might like to indulge us in a curious brand-fantasy where it snows in December but isn’t it actually just laughable, if not downright insulting, that after more than two centuries of non-Aboriginal experience of Australia we still haven’t redrafted the seasonal calendar to reflect the actual country we live in?
Indeed, I wonder if the colonialism mindset, still a cultural disease of modern Australia, fundamentally inhibits the emergence of a nativist acceptance and love for place? After-all, at its heart, colonialism is obsessed with the total erasure of local realities. The unfamiliar climatic, biogeographical and cultural DNA of colonised landscapes are simply refused or reconstituted in the image of the Motherland. The post-invasion experience of Australia is one of slow, begrudging reluctance to fall in love with this ancient, weird continent. Unshackling ourselves from a wistful allegiance to a Eurocentric 4-season calendar seems to me like a first serious kiss (pash) in this long overdue relationship.
“But how do we allow the colonialist scales to fall from our eyes (ears and noses) so we can truly embrace our uniquely Australian seasons?”
First off the bat I would suggest to you there is no such thing as a national seasonal calendar. Australia doesn’t work like that. Rather we have regionally specific seasons, and it is to these local conditions that we need to pay attention.
In the next few editions, I’ll try telling the stories of local seasonal markers that for me pencil in the rough outline of seasonal boundaries for the upper Bellinger Valley.
For starters, just this week (8th July) I’ve noticed the first soft piping song of the Yellow Robin, an end to the scary-plague-proportions Lewin’s Honeyeaters swarming the grevilleas, drifting Wanderer butterflies along Darkwood Road, a distinct tapering-off in Lyrebird song on the ridge and the return of a single, brave paper wasp to their verandah hive-city.
For Winter is not a single season at all, rather it’s a spectrum of mini-seasons, with one such mini-episode ending and another starting over the course of a week or even a couple of days. And every seasonal transition is heralded by changes in bird song and migration, reptile movements, insect hatching, cloud behavior etc. It’s all there plain as day…