Songs, Scents and Seasons

Coming home and being in place

I am back home after a month of travelling. I left on a wintry morning of drizzle, and returned on a warm evening drenched with the scent of jasmine. I loved every minute of my travels and the joyful reunions with family and friends but now I am back home my senses are immersed in life’s transformations here on Wangal Country.

My first night back I am woken up at 3am by the cry of the koel, plaintively calling for a mate. The koel is a member of the cuckoo family, who migrates to Australia from South East Asia, signalling the arrival of warmer days. On this first night back, the koel roosting in the tree across the road sounds young and unsure, more like he is seeking his Mum than a mate. But a week on he is gaining volume and confidence in his quest, settling in for the long haul. By dawn the koel is joined by a chorus of magpies, butcher birds, lorikeets and noisy miners, every tree a conversation of song.

In our park the Chinese tallow and robinia trees have gone from bare limbed to full flush vibrant green while the large jacarandas, one of which we planted twenty years ago, have lost their leaves ahead of their November festival of purple. The wisterias are in full bloom splashing footpaths with lilac.

Despite all this neighbourly flaunting and unfurling, I hesitate to use the word spring to describe what’s happening around me because European seasons are a poor fit in Australia, both in timing and description. This continent is hugely varied in its climates and terrains. The weather patterns of southerly Tasmania are wildly different to the tropical North or to the deserts of the Red Centre. Seasons are determined by bioregions in ways that the traditional four seasons of Europe cannot capture. While these four seasons are imbued in my psyche through a lifetime of cultural conditioning, they are generating more and more of an itch in me.

Most recently I am noticing this on Substack where European seasonal descriptors are a frequent theme of posts and programs, creating a dissonance for us Southern Hemisphere folk. But Substack being what it is there is always something else to be found. I relish the work of  Genevieve Hopkins  The Wheel and The Cross who writes eloquently from Ngunnawal Country, some 400km south west of me  about the seasonal changes she experiences while also exploring resonances with ancient European pagan traditions, transposed by six months for the Southern Hemisphere.

I have mixed feelings about celebrating European pagan traditions here in Australia, the home of the longest living human culture on Earth. Every inch of this continent is imbued with the earth-based stories and ceremonies of the First Nations people, whose ancestors have lived in kinship with their particular Country  for over 65,000 years. As a migrant to Australia, my first priority in beginning to understand where I live is to listen to the Traditional Custodians about how to relate and care for Country.

Aboriginal culture is very much alive here despite the cruel and often genocidal policies enacted by colonising governments over the last 250 years. There are at least 250 Countries, in Australia, each with their own culture and language. In the case of the latter many sadly have been lost as a consequence of the genocidal policies enacted by colonising governments over the last 250 years. But for all the differences and the losses, what continues to be strongly held in common is the centrality of Country in First Nations culture.

It will take me far more than a lifetime to truly grasp what Country means, but my journey towards understanding is nourishing and satisfyingly mind blowing. In their book Songspirals: Sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines, the Gay’wu Group of Women repeatedly state that “We can only understand people through Country, as Country”. They talk about how their Yolnju ceremonies and songs feed the relationships that make them who they are “from the smallest living creature that lives in the earth to the furthest stars we can see, for the maggots and flies, for the soil and deep roots”. When, far to the north of where I live,  the Yolnju people wake up to the predawn call of guwak (the koel),  they hear his songspiral. Like all songspirals , they are a communication between “land, animals and people, between the tide, the sun and moon” speaking of “the seasons, about the weather, about people’s and Country’s safety and wellbeing”. As a whitefella and a migrant to Australia, much of this is way beyond my consciousness, but my imagination and spirit is enlivened by even knowing that such rich relationality is possible, and that I am being invited to find ways of practicing this myself, individually and in community.

What is remarkable, given the ongoing horrors, burdens and griefs of colonisation,  is how generous First Nations elders and teachers are in offering to all their knowledge and about how to live well and care for the Country . One elder who particularly makes my heart sing is Professor Anne Poelina, a Nyikina Warrwa woman, who says:

What we are saying as Indigenous people is it’s about stewardship and your ethics of care and love and attention. Wherever you are, you need to form your own relationship because this is about your obligation to yourself as a human being to reach your full potential. If you are missing these experiential learnings, you could never be fully human, particularly as an Australian because you are missing what is deeply embedded in this cultural landscape.

So what we are saying is that we can teach you, we can show you, but the most important thing for you as a human being is to have a commitment and a law of obligation that you want to know your Country, you want to create this relationship, to feel your Country, and that you want to be a part of it.

From Between Stories Roundtable

One accessible way to start to know your Country is by watching the changing seasons, referencing Indigenous knowledge where possible. The closest recorded First Nations seasonal calendar for where I live in Sydney belongs to the Dharawal people. Their traditional calendar describes six seasons in the year with the current September-October season, Murrai'yunggor , being described as the Time of Ngoonungi. This is the season when the cool weather gets warmer while flying foxes gather over the Sydney area at dusk before setting off for feeding grounds to the south.  It is a time of ceremony when gentle rains fall and native flowers bloom heavy, beginning with the bright red buds of Miwa Gawaian, or the waratah (Telopea speciosissima). It is also the time when the restrictions on eating shellfish, prawns, crabs, yabbies and the lobsters are lifted, bringing feasts along coastal and river shorelines.

I can read about all of this on websites. Then I can  see it in action in my local park. While there are no waratah blooming in my immediate vicinity there is an abundance of native grevillia and bottlebrush flowers and, while the flying foxes gather in ‘camps’ around different parts of the city,I see an abundance of kookaburras, young and cheeky with fluffy crowns, looking out for worms as we weed and plant in my local Food Forest and Community garden. Their cousins, the usually shy butcher birds, are more prolific too, their melodic triple note call  ringing over the park, often translated by locals as  “I see you”. One is singing to me now as I write, although I cannot see her.

Grevillia with bottlebrush in background

Indigenous seasonal calendars not only point to closely observed patterns of annual change on Country, they also are valuable sources of information about what is changing because of climate and ecological crises. Professor Poelina describes how:

where we mark out the seasonal calendars, we say what seasonal food is going to be shared, going to be produced [but] … all of these signs are now out of sync, and so … these seasonal calendars are our body of evidence to show how our land, our water, our food, our medicine is changing. 

Here in Sydney, while the flying foxes are more visible in the city, because their traditional bushfood sources have been eradicated, they themselves are an endangered species, vulnerable to heat-related deaths as well as loss of food and canopy. Shellfish, while they are meant to be in abundance at this time of year,  are not safe to eat from Sydney Harbour even when you can find them.

We all have so much to learn from First Nations cultures about caring for Country wherever we live or whatever our ancestry. I don’t mean by this that we should be adopting particular ceremonies and cultural practices from First Nations cultures but rather that we can be guided by their teachings to cultivate relationality, respect, responsibility, reciprocity and reverence for the places we live within, recognising the connections and changing conditions of our particular places and bioregions. From this experience, we can learn how to become custodians and co-creators for life, working with what sings us into existence.

I leave you with these words from the The Gay’wu Group of Women:

We long for the land, and the land longs for us. It wants to be with the person who walks. This frisson of connection, of the land and the person’s co-becoming, it holds them together. It is the raki, the string. When there is no-one on the land it grows uncared for…. For us, we balance as we care for Country and it cares for us. But we are not separate from it. We are kinship with it. This kinship, gurrutu, underpins who we are.

Please do leave a comment, I would love to hear from you about what connections you are feeling and changes you are noticing in your place at this time of year.