Seasons, The by Luke Fischer;David Macauley;

Author:Luke Fischer;David Macauley; [Macauley;, Luke Fischer;David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438484266
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2021-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: Living with Seasonal Diversity in Australia

As suggested by Entwistle’s call, Australia has an uneasy relationship to the four seasons of the Western calendar and the Northern Hemisphere. The rethinking of the Australian seasons entails the recognition of a multiplicity of seasons, calendars, cultures, and places. National models—whether the Gregorian four seasons or Entwistle’s proposal for five seasons—can co-exist dynamically with robust traditions of endemic seasonality, exemplified by the Nyoongar six seasons and the Indigenous Weather Knowledge Project. As Clarke comments, “while increasing globalization prevents European Australians from rejecting the European-derived calendar in favour of a plethora of regional calendars, the future investigation of indigenous seasonal knowledge and behaviour offers to help develop more relevant approaches to landscape management.”130 As this chapter has suggested, the “future investigation” of Indigenous calendars would benefit from experiential, sensory, and place-based approaches.

A dialogic perspective on the seasons is both phenomenological and phenological—cognitive and bodily—constituting the idea of a “phen(omen)ology.” Attending to the seasonal things of place that declaim the passage of time, a phen(omen)ology offers a reflexive perspective on the seasons that blurs the distinction between intellection and embodiment. A phen(omen)ology, moreover, recognizes that actual seasonal boundaries vary year to year, and from place to place, according to a spectrum of ecocultural factors. As Heidegger acknowledged, “a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing [italics in original].”131 Learning to be in the presence of seasonal things requires foreknowledge of when things happen coupled to unmediated sensory witnessing of their emergence.

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