First day of Summer July 19
2021
I mark the first day of summer by the first snake or goanna I encounter. It’s ridiculous using northern hemisphere terms for our seasons. 
I stopped for a Diamond Python crossing the road outside Coffs Botanic Garden. I stood and guarded it as it took its time. The city is in lockdown, there’s very little traffic. I waved a Ute around it. Its motion was unseen, more a shape shifter gradually reaching the trees. Once it slipped through the fence and under the trees, a mob of Noisy Miners went ballistic.
The gardens were quiet. No sign of the Powerful Owl chick and I missed the Koala which a family saw.
They found a Land Mullet which stayed put until young Henry gently poked a stick at it. Boys are boys.
The first liquid calls of the season by Olive-backed Orioles down from the north streamed by.
The Seasons
Demeter was the Greek goddess who blessed the earth and enabled the harvest. However, the size of the harvest depended on her moods. Persephone, her daughter she loved, was a great beauty, Hades fell for her, asked Demeter permission to marry, but was refused. So he kidnapped her while she was picking flowers and carried her down to the underworld. Demeter was heartbroken which resulted in poor crops and famine. Zeus had to act and did a deal with Hades. They would share Persephone who was with her mother for the spring and summer and the harvest could thrive.
Wattle Day on the first day of September is the official start of the Australian spring. Yet 4 weeks ago our Coastal Wattle was in full bloom in mid-July.
It is ridiculous using northern hemisphere terms for our seasons. Even for Australia to keep to the same timetable of seasons. The weather/climate in Dover, the most southerly town in Tasmania, bears no relation to that in Bamaga, our most northerly town near the tip of Cape York.
Dover: Cloudy. Medium (40%) chance of showers, most likely late this afternoon and evening. Daytime maximum temperatures between 11 and 15. Minimum 7.
Bamaga: Partly cloudy. Winds E/SE 20 to 30 km/h becoming light in the evening. Daytime maximum temperatures in the low to mid 30s. Minimum 23.
Dr Tim Entwisle, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne suggests calling the season we are in now ‘sprinter (August and September), the early Australian spring. That’s when the bushland and our gardens burst into flower. That’s also when that quintessential Australian plant, the wattle, is in peak flowering across Australia.’[i] I can’t see this awkward term ever catching on.The theme of wattle in Australian literature, poetry and song took off in the 1860s.
I live in Gumbaynggirr Country. An elder told me there are two seasons, hot and cold. Another Gumbaynggirr calendar from an area further north has five seasons:[ii]
January and February, hot months. The fruits of the creek sandpaper fig (Ficus coronata) are ripe and the fruit of the geebung (ready to eat when they change from green to purple-brown, drop to the ground and soften).
March, April and May. The roly poly (Billardiera scandens) fruits (the fleshy fruit changes colour from green to grey-brown falls to the ground and is ready to eat. Apple Berry (Roly poly) berries are eaten raw when ripe or roasted when green,
June and July. Coastal banksia and paperbark trees are in blossom. The is one of the most important trees in the local bush calendar. Possums and wonga pigeons feast on the flowers of broadleaved paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia), a good time to hunt them. Fishing for sea bream.
August and September: Bloodwood trees, the fringe lily flower. The fringe lily tubers are easily found and regarded as good tucker.
(Today we planted cucumber, zucchini and sweet corn in the vegetable garden).
October, November and December. The biggest range of edible plant food is available. Native raspberries are also a popular and delicious snack that can be eaten straight off the bush. The berries from the common lilly pilly tree are ripe when they are pale to dark mauve, and can also be picked straight off the tree and eaten raw, or boiled.
The Kunwinjku have six seasons (from western Arnhem Land)[iii]
Kudjewk: Monsoon time, heavy rains, kudjarr (flooding and flowing water) and kunmayorrk (strong winds). Yukkuyyukku (fire flies) flashing at night to signal the abundant bush fruits are ready to collect.
Bangkerreng: Nakurl (knock ’em down storms) frem the east flattens Manbedje yirridjdja (the early spear grass). Manbedje duwa (the later spear grass) is still green and growing until barra (the later rains). It is the time for collecting magpie goose eggs, Manimunak wirlarrk and go fishing.
Yekke. The rains have finished, the start of the cooler dry time. Many djalangkarridjdjalangkarridj (dragonflies) and Manbarndarr (Calytrix exstipulata) and flowering.
Wurrkeng: Dry winds blow from the east, koyek kunmayorrk. Many plants are flowering so it’s a good time to collect Mankung, sugar bag from native bees
Kurrung: The hot dry, the air is fragrant from many plants flowering. A good time for hunting waterbirds like Manimunak (magpie goose), Ngalmangiyi (northern long-necked turtle). Time for kawurluwurlhme kunak (floodplain burning) to clear the kundalk (grass) as well as hunt Kedjebe (Arafura filesnake) around the billabongs.
Kunumeleng: the humidity builds, kunngol (clouds) and kunmayorrk (wind) gather together from all directions. Animals hear kangurdulme (thunder) and know it’s time for a change. Ngalmangiyi and Kedjebe are moving closer to the bank, easier to collect.
Dadirri is a concept of deep listening which involves waiting: ‘Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course – like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases . . . When twilight comes, we prepare for the night. At dawn we rise with the sun. We watch the bush foods and wait for them to ripen before we gather them.’ Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann. [iv]
Information was often seasonal in oral cultures. David Abram explains, ‘The stories, of an oral, non-writing culture, are like the living encyclopedias for that culture. The stories carry all of this information in the tales, tucked in various points within these tales, or in the cycles of stories that are told in certain seasons. And, sometimes, the storyteller will break into a chant or a song, a rhymed set of couplets that carry particularly careful, carefully encoded information about how to make a particular food or how to construct a particular artifact that one might need.’ [v]
There is a problem with our fixed Europeans seasons – people don’t bother to look for the natural signs by paying nature attention. Our knowledge of and experience of the environment via skilled practice or natural aesthetics shapes the ways we perceive and treat our environment. So getting to know our environment, its seasons, features and processes changes our attitudes towards it.
David Haskell, a professor of biology, does pay attention and suggests there are hundreds of seasons. He writes, ‘Every species has its own tempo of sound-making through the year, tuned to the particularities of food plants and insects, refined by local weather. In these sounds we learn that there are not just four seasons, but dozens or hundreds. Bird sounds reveal the polyrhythms of a living Earth.’[vi]
‘Most people can no longer ignore climate change, because it is now happening in their own backyards. They may notice that geese have stopped migrating, or that their annual plants are overwintering, or that Lyme ticks and other ‘pests’ are finding their winters bearable, or their traditional fishing holes are barren, or their seasons are hotter or stormier than ever before. We used to talk about going into the wilderness and leaving only our footprints behind. In the Anthropocene we realize that’s no longer possible . . .’ Diane Ackerman[vii]
Recent research shows that the distribution of weight of the earth has shifted from melting glaciers enough to change our angle of axis, research shows.[viii] Which brings me to …
Why do we get the seasons?
An estimate 10 giant collisions hit our planet in its early stages, each one altered the tilt of the Earth in one direction or another. In the last, rocky roughly the size of Mars smashed into Earth, traveling more than 10 kilometres per second. The impact shattered pieces off (coalescing into our moon) and left us tilted at 23 degrees. We are leaning towards the sun right now.
The seasons affect our activities, our physical and mental health and even our microbial world, our biome. The number and variety change with the seasons as well as day to day. We used to eat with the season, but now consume food out of season.
The seasons have always been a source of inspiration for artists – change is energising. Starting with summer: Golden Summer, Eaglemont, by Arthur Streeton, 1889 (in my history of Australian Impressionism); Autumn Effect at Argenteuil by Claude Monet, 1873 (new vivid colours on the canvas); Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565 (part of a series ‘Twelve Months’ for each month of the year; most are lost); Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, c1480 (one of art history’s most famous and elusive allegories of the season).
For more on Streeton and my history of Australian Impressionism see here:
James Thomson’s poem ‘The Seasons’ (1730) is the first poem I know off to treat the seasons in detail. The first section Winter, was published in 1726, and he revised and expanded. Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ was composed off four poems he wrote. ‘Under the heat of the burning summer sun, / Languish man and flock; the pine is parched.’ (I recommend Max Richter’s remix of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons). Among Cezanne’s earliest paintings are four huge wall panels for the salon of the family estate in Aix. They depict young women representing the four seasons, in the academic style of Ingres.
Luckily, this planet was smashed into forcing a tilt on our axis, or else – frozen wastelands would dominate the north and south, life would centre on the tropics. Relentless rain would erode soils, leached nutrients and devastated fertility, agriculture would be impossible and the heat and biodiversity debt would enable countless pathogens to thrive.
We should change the seasons
The Christian calendar attempted to remove the various pagan gods, and the French revolutionary calendar removed all reference to Christianity. Gilbert Romme’s calendar kept twelve months, but went decimal. Each was composed of three weeks of ten days each, with the remaining five or six days at the end of the year constituting holidays called ‘Sansculottides’ in honour of the revolutionary worker. [ix]
Fabre d’Églantine, actor, dramatist, poet, and politician renamed the months with to the changing weather and crops during the year. His months are Vendémiaire (named after a word for grape harvester), Brumaire, Frimaire (the autumn, frimas is French for frost.), Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse (winter), Germinal, Floréal, Prairial (spring), Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor (summer, from the Latin fructus for fruit). Fabre d’Églantine was a close friend of Danton and they were both executed in the Prairial of 1794, six months after the calendar was adopted.
So how we change them is tricky.
PS.
‘To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tantamount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.’ Marguerite Yourcenar, Hadrian’s villa: between heaven and earth: a tour with Marguerite Yourcenar, with Nicoletta Lanciano, Apeiron Editori, 2005.
[i] Dr Tim Entwisle, ‘Sprinter and Sprummer A call for more seasons for Australia’ ABC radio’s Ockham’s Radio, 21.8.2014. And, Sprinter and Sprummer: Australia’s Changing Seasons, CSIRO, 2014.
[ii] http://www.arrawarraculture.com.au/fact_sheets/pdfs/00_Fact_Sheets_Booklet.pdf
[iii] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/natural-environment/land/About-the-calendars/Kunwinjku
[iv] The word, concept and spiritual practice that is dadirri (da-did-ee) is from the Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri languages of the Aboriginal peoples of the Daly River region (Northern Territory, Australia). Inner Deep Listening and Quiet Still Awareness, A reflection by Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, 1988. http://www.dadirri.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Dadirri-Inner-Deep-Listening-M-R-Ungunmerr-Bauman-Refl1.pdf
[v] ‘David Abram The Spell of Literacy, an interview’, by David Boulton. No date. https://childrenofthecode.org/interviews/abram.htm
[vi] David G. Haskell, ‘The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging’, Emergence, 26 May, 2019.
[vii] Diane Ackerman interviewing Robert Macfarlane, Conjunctions:73 Earth Elegies, Ed., Bradford Morrow, 2019
[viii] ‘The trend started around 1995. Before the mid-1990s, satellite data showed the poles were moving slowly south. But then they turned left and started shifting to the east at an accelerated rate, moving by about one-tenth of an inch per year. The poles’ average drift speed between 1995 and 2020 was 17 times faster than that from 1981 to 1995, the researchers found.’ Aylin Woodward, ‘Earth has been knocked off its axis over the last 25 years, changing the locations of the north and south poles’, Business Insider, 28 April 2021.
[ix] Ed Simon, ‘Why the French Revolution’s ‘Rational’ Calendar Wasn’t’, 23 May, 2018
