The Seasons: Homage to Henry David Thoreau

Abstract

All cultures have seasons, an understanding of the cycles of the year, especially the growing, gathering and hunting periods, and the predominantly hot or cold, wet or dry times of the year that are related to those periods. Yet the number and nature of the seasons and their physiological and psychological affects varies widely across cultures. The four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter are a European cultural construction of nature. These four seasons were imposed on the antipodean, upside-down world of Australia, and on its climates considered vaguely and inappropriately ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘Temperate’ modelled on European exemplars, and on indigenous seasons – six in the case of some Australian aboriginal groups, such as the Noongars of south-western Australia. In this paper I chart briefly the colonisation of the seasons in Australia and then call for and begin their decolonisation. I do so through a deconstructive reading of some of the writing about the seasons in the European literary canon, especially James Thomson, and through an appreciation of its dissenter in Henry David Thoreau. The seasons, however, are not merely a matter of idle historical curiosity nor an interesting antiquarian hobby. They play a much more vital role in contemporary cultural and environmental politics in the age of human-made climate change in which the seasons, European and indigenous, are being disrupted. Rather than ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ I propose ‘seasonal dislocation’ or ‘seasonal disruption’ as better, more precise and poetic ways to describe these phenomena.