It’s a great idea: bring a few sailing ships from England to the bottom of the planet and make it more like home.
All you need to do is release a few rabbits and foxes, unleash those furry ride-on mowers known as sheep and run cattle which have mattocks for feet.
One other thing: let’s acclimatise the climate. Autumn, winter, spring, summer? No problem! Down here in Australia we can make anything fit. The only problem is that it doesn’t. And the other problem is that there were people here already who had come up with their own seasonal calendar.
Recently, a book arrived on my desk from an Aboriginal woman I respect a great deal. Her name is Frances Bodkin and one of her passions is trying to get Sydneysiders to understand that there are other frameworks than the protestant work ethic one.
Her book, D’harawal Seasons and Climate Cycles, is about the weather and times of the year as they were known to some of the original inhabitants of the Sydney region.
Most Sydneysiders begin their day with an alarm clock, shortly after that their headspace is punctuated by the ping of lifts and arriving e-mails. As the sunsets over the Blue Mountains there is the forlorn and distressing announcement at Town Hall station that the train to Epping is late.
Reading Bodkin’s book gives a glimpse into a different Sydney and a far more sophisticated culture than many people realise.
As she writes in her introduction: “We were intelligent, observing people, who had a complex system of protecting knowledge from being lost.”
In the climate framework detailed in Bodkin’s book the day begins with the Time of the Kookaburra Laughing (Gugagara’djanaba) and ends with the Silence of the Night (Nguwing’kapo).
The annual cycle begins with Ngoonungi – the September-October of the European calender – and is the time of cool getting warmer. From October to January is Gooray’murrai a time of warm and wet. January and February is Gadulung Marool – hot and dry – the time of the kangaroo.
The time of the kangaroo may be the peak of the modern Australian bbq season but in traditional times, Bodkin writes, the people were forbidden to eat meat or fish.
March, April and May was Bana’marrai’yung – wet becoming colder. This was the time to move from the highlands and plains to the coastal areas.
Tugarah Tuli were the cold, frosty, short days and then the final season is Tugarah Gunya’marri – cold and windy.
Overlaid on top of this annual cycle was another cycle which ran over around a dozen years and for all of these little and big cycles – the seasons and shifts – there were natural indicators that signalled longer-term changes in the weather.
These included things like the flowering of certain Eucalypts and the behaviour of particular animals.
A person’s life consisted of as many as six of these bigger 12-year cycles.
Sydney is a complicated place now but reading Bodkin’s book there is a sense that it is also a lot less less subtle than it once must have been. We have overlaid four seasons over almost an entire continent and yet Bodkin’s book is about the calendar as it was known to one community in one part of Australia. There were dozens if not hundreds or thousands of permutations of these calendars across the various Aboriginal nations and yet today most city dwellers are probably not even aware when the moon is out.

(Frances can be contacted and books obtained from dharawal@tpg.com.au)