Spring did not come to our place until the last weekend in September or the first in October. My mother, who cloaked her life in hope, insisted spring arrived on September 1, wattle day.
My father, a man born close to the earth, had no time for that. Spring, at least in the south-west of Victoria, didn't start until after the September equinox, from September 21 to 23.
The equinox brought equinoxial gales, he'd declare. Ancient mariners and farmers, who ought to know, firmly believed in equinoxial gales, even if meteorologists tend to dismiss them as myth.
Whatever the truth, the earliest official days of spring, even if the wattle had been out for a while, would pretty soon give way to rain and wind and my father would hold back on his triumph, waiting for my mother to concede that, yes, the equinoxial gales were here, just like always.
Only then would it be time for the proper welcoming of spring. It involved driving out to a lovely fern gully in a nearby forest, a place called the Jackass. We'd build a fire and barbecue chops and brew tea in a billy.
My father had boiled a lot of billies in this place since he was a boy, resting above the damp tree-fern gully while driving cattle through the bush before it became a national park.
We'd breathe in the scent of eucalypt, and birds – crimson corellas, cockatoos and, yes, the occasional jackass, which is what we called the kookaburra – would flit about.
Spring was here, my father would announce. The start of the year to him. Spring lambs. Warmth in the bones. Grass shooting up. He read signs everywhere. The curl of a new frond on a fern. Spring.
Time, to him, was judged by the angle of the sun. He never wore a watch until he was old and I gave him one, and he wore it as nothing more than an ornament. Out in the paddocks, he could tell the time any time of day, and he'd be right within a minute or two. Just as he'd judge the seasons.
Every season had its ritual, and the date of its arrival was fluid. Autumn was here when we went mushrooming. My father knew the best paddocks and pine plantations where fine mushrooms grew after the first autumn rain. He'd pan fry them with butter. I couldn't stand eating therm, but they told us it was autumn.
Pretty soon it would be time to take out the tractor and trailer and gather wood. Winter was coming. We always had a woodpile, great blocks sliced on a big old table saw, ready for splitting. It would last right through winter.
The first open fire in the loungeroom fireplace meant winter had arrived for sure. It might only be late April. We had long winters.
We listened to the wireless and poked at the fire and played Scrabble and went to bed early, knowing the old boy would be up before dawn, woken by his internal clock, to kindle the fire in the stove so there'd be a hot breakfast. Sometimes we'd awake to the sound of a record he'd slipped on to the turntable. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. It reminded him, my mother said, when the mornings out in the paddocks were bitter cold and he had to go out there wrapped in an oilskin, that winter wouldn't last forever.
The ancients, who had no choice but to live close to the earth, had other ways of reminding themselves of the same thing. In Ireland, where my mother's family had lived generations ago, there exists a 5000-year-old passage tomb called Newgrange. Every year, at dawn on the winter solstice, December 21, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, a shaft of sunlight enters the chamber and inches its way down the passage to the dark centre of this neolithic monument.
It was, surely, fashioned to reassure the neolithics that even in deepest winter the sun was coming again, that life had a rhythm to it.
Summer came to our lives with more ritual. A block by the sea, a tilly light hissing at night. The proper start to summer was a full moon and a rising tide. We'd wade into the shallows with a spear and catch breakfast: garfish and flounder. There was a creek full of eels. My father had known all his life how and when in summer to catch and smoke them just as Indigenous people had done around those parts for thousands of years.
Up the beach a rock stuck out of the water. A century and a half ago my father's descendants studied the height of the water on the rock to ensure they could get home to their farm around the bay. It told them the state of the tide, allowing them to judge the depth at a river-mouth ford a few hours' journey away by horse and buggy.
We've got smart phones to tell us the tides and the weather and the seasons and just about everything else these days.
I'm not sure, however, that a smart phone is as reliable as those who, close to the earth, can read the signs.
Welcome to spring. Right on time.
