Proper Australian seasons

This was by way of a try-out for a small part of a project which was at the time, still to be green-lighted. The project is now complete, and today, 15 January 2017, I signed the contract and burned the CDs that will be Australian Backyard Earth Scientist. Today, I am creating that page, and it will be up later. Tomorrow, I will post the whole lot back to the National Library of Australia.

Please note: I think there is enough raw material here to get some talented person thinking about an illustrated children's book. My project is not going that way: if that's your thing, please, go for it — and I will even help!

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When the First Fleet reached Sydney in 1788, they found “a land of contrarieties”: the swans were black, not white; trees kept their leaves but dropped their bark; it was warm on the hills and cool in the valleys; the eagles were white; the bees had no sting — and the seasons were wrong way around!

They had to adapt, and legend says the Marine soldiers soon learned to change between winter and summer uniforms, using seasons based on the first day of March, June, September and December. Those arbitrary dates sort of worked.

The invaders would have been better off using a natural calendar, as the Dharawal people of Sydney did. You can find the details on the web: search on <Dharawal seasons>, or look at  http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/dharawal.

Flying fox, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

Miwa Gawaian, or waratah

This page is being written during Ngoonungi, which is cool, getting warmer, the time when the Miwa Gawaian (waratah) flowers, but Ngoonungi is mainly the time of the gathering of the flying foxes.

I live in Sydney, just north of Dharawal lands, and as dusk gathers each night, I see these fruit bats fluttering east along the valley below my study, sometimes close to my window, rushing off to gorge on figs. I know then that the time has come to work barefoot during the day. It is the season of happy toes, and it will last six months.

Far to my north, in Yolngu country, the stringybark is in flower now as Rarranhdharr comes to an end. In the Anangu Pitjantjatjara country, in what we call the north of South Australia, it is the end of Piriyakutu/ Piriya-Piriya, when the hibernating reptiles come out. In Western Australia, the Noongar people call this time Kambarang, when the rain gets less, and the quandong is in fruit.

The first Australians have lots of additional season markers for those seasons, as you can find out by searching on those season names on the internet, but I have my own local season markers. I react to the first blowfly, cicada or koel; first magpie attack; the first funnelweb (or brown trapdoor spider) in the swimming pool; and the first Christmas beetle, mosquito and channel-billed cuckoo.

Angophora costata (it looks like a gum

tree, but it isn't).

When my children were younger, they knew it was proper summer when first Bogong moth got in and started banging around on the ceiling at night. For me, high summer is when the trunks of the Sydney smooth-barked apple, Angophora costata, go orange-brown. We take friends on mystery walks that pass through a grove of these, just to watch their wonderment.

When my children were younger, they knew it was proper summer when first Bogong moth got in and started banging around on the ceiling at night. For me, high summer is when the trunks of the Sydney smooth-barked apple, Angophora costata, go orange-brown. We take friends on mystery walks that pass through a grove of these, just to watch their wonderment.

Other season boundaries include the last mosquito, water dragon, or channel-billed cuckoo; the pink haze of new leaves on the gum trees: the first really hot, dry westerlies and the first evening storms with warm rain that you want to run around in. Or the first real electrical storm that you don’t want to run around in!

A few natural season markers come from introduced species, like the jacaranda time in late October. There is a University of Sydney tradition that if you haven't started studying before the jacaranda in the main quadrangle flowers you will fail your end-of-year exams. Sydney’s very first jacaranda comes out at Circular Quay, and I saw it the day I wrote this.

Jacarandas 14 October 2016, Circular Quay, Sydney. Look for the almost-out flowers on the right.

Then there are tulips, daffodils, petunias, and the autumn colours on the liquidambars. There are natural season markers everywhere, when you start to look.

But then I wondered about more human, more urban markers of the seasons, so I asked my friends what they thought, and here is what we found between us: the first time your breath comes out of your mouth like smoke as the water vapour in your breath condenses in the cold; the time when you can stop nagging the children to wear a hat and have to start nagging them to wear a jumper, or when you wake up in spring and hate the thought of porridge, so you go to muesli, and back again in autumn.

I really loved this one from Anil Tortop, a Turkish-born illustrator in Brisbane: “The time I use/stop using hair dryer. Or when ants start to invade the kitchen. Or when geckos start singing all together.”

Urban seasons are also divided by the first mention of “tinderbox” on the news; first Christmas music in a shop; the appearance of footie goalposts; first plastic bags of autumn; the first hot cross bun or plum pudding; the first advertisements for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Halloween, Christmas, after-Christmas sales; the last swim of the season; first lighting of the gas heater at night.

But that’s enough from me: what are your seasonal dividing markers, and what do you call your seasons? There are no rules about numbers: most Indigenous calendars seem to have six seasons.

Guilty parties

Thanks to these friends who threw suggestions at me: Matthew Ansell-Laurendet, Barbara Braxton, Mel Campbell, Peter Chubb, Toby Fiander, Jan Gidge, Anne Graham, Rachel Hennessy, Serene Johnson, Mary-Ellen Jordan, Tamara Kelly, Peter McBurney, Rob McFarlane, Kari McKern, Ian Musgrave, Judith Nelson, KJ Price, Anil Tortop, Tamsyn Taylor, Emily Walpole, Alexandra Williams, Losang Zopa.