Melbourne's mad plan to adopt an Aboriginal six-season calendar

Spectator

3 days ago

Victoria's capital, Melbourne, has a dubious meteorological reputation. Our weather is so predictably unpredictable that Melbourne can easily have four seasons in one day. At any time of year, a typical Melbourne day can start off beautifully until the clouds gather, the winds freshen and turn bitingly chill, and it's time to haul in the washing as the rain starts to fall.
Never mind that Sydney has a higher average rainfall. The reputation of Melbourne's rapidly changeable weather is so entrenched it's become a national joke.
But that could all soon change. Melbourne's Lord Mayor, Nicholas 'call me Nick' Reece, has declared that four seasons simply is not enough for his fair city (and mine). It must have six.
Why? Because we're told the local Wurundjeri tribesmen, who inhabited the Melbourne district before British settlement in the 1830s, reckoned their years by six seasons, not four. Those seasons were identified by the fauna and flora abundant in the region at various times of year, including eels, wattle, wombats, black swans and tadpoles.
Reece has told Melbourne radio that if it was good enough for local Aboriginal tribes, it is good enough for him, because a six-season calendar more accurately reflects the spectrum of Melbourne's weather.
'In the Wurundjeri calendar, there were six seasons. It was a wet summer and a dry summer. A wet winter and a dry winter. And when you think about it, it makes sense,' Reece said, forgetting that to make six, autumn and winter need to be squeezed in as well – and ignoring that some Aboriginal lore says it's actually more like seven seasons.
The four seasons of the traditional calendar are, by contrast, apparently un-Australian. 'We have gone and superimposed four seasons, essentially from northern Europe,' Reece told a gobsmacked Melbourne radio presenter.
'This is one of those things where a bit of (Aboriginal) knowledge appears to make a bit more sense … Literally, wattle season starts, and that week you look around Melbourne and all of the wattle trees have turned fluorescent yellow and it's beautiful.' Which just happens to be now. Here in Melbourne, the wattle is out in all its golden glory, and it truly is beautiful.
Melbourne's much-lampooned climate could well accommodate six seasons in one day, but there's just one small problem with Reece's 'decolonising' Melbourne's calendar. Absolutely no one, not even local Aboriginals, measure their years using pre-colonial definitions of the seasons. It's definitely an annual cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter, everybody accepts it, and nobody's even thought anything different.
That Melbourne's Lord Mayor seriously suggests tampering with the traditional calendar to prove how woke and switched-on he is reflects not just on him. It is the sort of twaddle that is eagerly grasped and propagated by the progressive political, institutional and media left-wing establishment that currently dominates all levels of Australian society. This progressive establishment believes that ostentatiously rendering homage to romantic notions of pre-colonial Australia beats worrying about boring and mundane things like reducing the cost of living, better managing Australia's sluggish economy, and being able to feed and house the torrent of international migration Australia has welcomed since the blighted Covid years. And, at a local council level, concentrating on roads, rates and rubbish.
It certainly would be more useful if Reece could stop worrying about reordering the seasons and concentrate on his core mayoral challenge: reversing the rapid decline of what was once Marvellous Melbourne. Covid and the world's harshest lockdowns, followed by the rise of home working, have turned the city's central business district into a shadow of its former self.
As for the rest of us, we stand bemused and bewildered as the self-appointed great and good talk about reordering the seasons and giving our cities Aboriginal names. Our political class are happy to spend hundreds of millions on expiating the perceived sins of our colonial past, treating the Aboriginal cultures that existed before Captain Cook landed in Botany Bay as man living in a perfect state of nature that evil Europeans destroyed.
Lord Mayor Reece is welcome to indulge in his seasonal fantasy. For the rest of us in this most European of Australian cities, our seasons actually do align with northern Europe's, but in reverse. September marks the start of spring; December summer; March autumn; and June winter. And just now, in the gradually lengthening winter days of early August, we're freezing down here. At least the wattle's in full bloom though.