We’ve been having wet weather and odd winds for the last few days, as we move through one of our local seasons towards the January heat. I say “one of” because having lived in Sydney for more than 20 years I don’t have an experience of four seasons – despite continuing attachments here to the northern hemisphere idea that we have four.
According to Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson, Sydney, in the meteorology of the First Australians, in fact has six seasons. Each is related to the flowering of native plants:
- September to October is Murrai’yunggoray. The red waratah flowers, and temperatures start to rise.
- November to December is Goraymurrai. The hickory wattle flowers. Warm, wet weather and the chance of flooding.
- January to February is Gadalung marool. The wattle flowers are hot and dry. First Australians ate fruit and seeds, as meat would spoil.
- March to May is Banamurrai’yung. The lillipilli (of which we have a beautiful specimen, just outside on the street) has its sour berries. A time of wet weather and cooling temperatures.
- June to July is Tugarah’tuli. The forest red gum flowers. Cold weather, traditional peoples travel to the coast.
- August is Tugarah’gunyamarra. The wattle flowers. Cold and windy. Traditional peoples travel back to the western highlands, following fish upstream.
This is a preamble to reports of allergies amongst friends, and my own conjunctivitis which has this week limited my interest in the computer screen.
Which in turn leads me to this NY Times post on slow blogging, one that’s been linked to now from a few blogs I follow. It’s a good reminder to me to strive for depth rather than frequency, which I intended doing when starting this blog (“Occasional notes on…”). I notice it’s easy to get subtly hooked into frequency however, particularly when the blog becomes a point of contact with like-minded people – something I’ll try to watch, as I remember the “occasional”.
