The way we decide when a season starts has always struck me as somewhat random. I know that the meteorological calendar provides the basis for ideas about what comes when and it is by virtue of that calendar's settings that northern hemisphere seasons are proposed.
So in England, in accordance with the meteorological calendar, the seasons are defined as spring (March, April, May), summer (June, July, August), autumn (September, October, November) and winter (December, January, February). In Australia, we copy these arrangements, having due regard for antipodean eccentricity, so that summer is in December, January, February, autumn in March, April, May, winter is June, July, August and spring September, October, November.
So, as August 31 looms, it is not only a time when, in some states at least, you should think about registering your dog; it's also the very eve of the southern spring. As 19th century Australian poet Henry Kendall saw it: 'Grey Winter hath gone like a wearisome guest,/And, behold, for repayment/September comes in with the wind of the West,/And the Spring in her raiment ... September! the maid with the swift silver feet/She glides and she graces/The valleys of coolness, the slopes of the heat,/With her blossomy traces.'
Kendall was doing his best: like his contemporary brother and sister poets, he had missed the entire Romantic Revolution, the Keatsian, Byronic, Shellyean sensations of which arrived late and slowly in the great South Land and, in any case, scarcely found much resonance in the antipodean seasons. Kendall's personification of September is a good try — but no cigar — because personification distances rather than animates the subject.
Endowing the seasons with actual names — as distinct from their quarterly meteorological positioning — introduces some colour and a poetic note. It adds no further accuracy but is attractively a part of the national rather than exclusively the scientific language of seasonal change. Italy and Spain's primavera and primaverile respectively and the American 'fall' for autumn are examples of nomenclature that has escaped from the lineaments of meteorology.
There's another problem, I think, with the neat deployment of the seasons, quarter by quarter through the 12 months of the calendar year, and that is that no one has told Nature about it. As relatively venerable Eureka Streeters will probably agree (I'm one for sure: my GP announced to me some years ago, 'You are about to become an older person'), past summers seemed longer — 'a joyous time of sun and shade, heat and breeze, turrets of massing cloud and eagerly awaited cool changes' as someone close to me recalls.
School holidays seemed endless, cicadas deafening. The water at suburban beaches flashed sunlight from emerald ripples, and Test cricket and Davis Cup descriptions purred from innumerable transistor radios. On ocean beaches the sand crunched and squeaked underfoot, cockles ('pippies' in some states) rose through the tidal edges and nudged your feet as you shimmied in water up to your ankles; blue swimmers flicked like lasers through the shallows, and stingrays drifted, rising and falling, languid, dangerous.
"It is not clear who — if anyone — will catch the conscience of our parliamentary kings and their hangers-on, or how it might best be done. Memory might be the thing."
Of course, such memories, such a recalled past, are partly explained by sheer youth: days do seem long in memory and weather benign and almost unchanging. Well, almost: I remember the canal behind our 'block' running a banker in sudden massive summer storms and surging through my father's vegetables and shrubs with such hot summer regularity that he constructed a low dam wall around the garden beds and we kids would stand on this eminence and watch the helpless and frustrated water surge past under our triumphantly anthropomorphising gaze.
But memory in general is not treacherous — a bit shaky at times certainly, afflicted with moments of vagueness, but endowed nevertheless with hard jewel like cores of certainty: there are some things you just know you are remembering truly. When Hamlet decided, 'The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King', he coached his actors to reproduce the scene and method of the murder convincingly. 'Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue. [Do not] ... saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently.'
What Hamlet wants to achieve is to remind Claudius of his crime, to bring back the time and the details that the king has repressed.
There are thousands and thousands of Australians easily old enough to remember that the world in which they grew up was radically different from the one they live in now: they remember hot summers starting before Christmas and tailing off into autumn in the early weeks after their return to school; they remember the buddings and flowerings and in due course the wiltings in suburban gardens, country town main streets, parks and ovals and playgrounds. They remember the first chill in the air as they unwrapped their Easter eggs ...
It is not clear who — if anyone — will catch the conscience of our parliamentary kings and their hangers-on, or how it might best be done. Memory might be the thing — among others.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.
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