Armidale’s Imported Autumn

Abstract

In the mid-twentieth century an accountant named Alwyn Jones brought seasons to the streets of the Australian New England tableland town, Armidale. Jones, a local resident and active civic member, initiated the planting of over nine thousand trees throughout Armidale over a five decade period. Armidale is now known as the ‘City of Four Seasons’ due to the brilliant colour of its imported deciduous foliage.

In this paper I argue that the invention of a chromatic autumn in an Australian town is a colonisation of time. The imposition of an abstractly measured four seasons refuses dialogical engagement with Indigenous modes of change and obscures nonhuman agency. Adopting environmental philosopher Val Plumwood’s vision of an ‘adaptive garden’, and applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s critique of cyclicity, I advocate a counter-hegemonic ethic of ‘ecological remembrance’ to decolonise Armidale’s streets and parks. Ecological remembrance involves the collective cultural remembering of forgotten human and nonhuman agents involved in the collaborative and ongoing constructions of place.