For me, the blackwood is a tree deeply imbued with emotion. They have often consoled me in the sadness that sometimes comes with September. They grow adjacent to grief. More than once in my life, they have been companions in a season of sorrow. I have put their leaves in my pocket as I walk to funerals.
photographs BERT SPINKS
I have been thinking about butterflies. I am imagining a smattering of them, emerging from the cryptic shelters in which they’ve overwintered, clumsily staggering through the air – goaded by some sweetness or musk – in search of mates, cluttering the bush with their colours.
There are not here yet. Instead, I have been wondering where to find the eggs and pupae of certain species, an activity that involves frequent reconnaissance trips in the bush around me. I have done a little bit of reading, but my preferred method, mostly, is to wander around looking under leaves, and when that fails, under rocks.
There are countless fragments of dolerite throughout the bush here – some of them decorously clad in lichens and mosses – so the game can continue for a long time. And even if I don’t find the larvae I’m looking for, under almost stone is something of interest: voluptuous worms, stoic spiders, a bull-ant that looks frozen in a state of fury until I restore the rock to its original position.
I peel back a rock deep in the forest and find, wedged beneath it on a shallow runway, a brown tree frog. The frog’s face makes me laugh. It’s like I’ve caught out a young boy doing something that he believes is naughty. Every night, I hear crowds of these frogs cheering. At this time of year, the males sing like football fans. This hullabaloo is a sign of the Tasmanian spring.
. . .
I have often chastised my fellow Tasmanians for acting as if September belongs to spring. It is often the windiest and snowiest month on the island. Maybe you’ll get a few days for t-shirts and shorts, but just when you think you’re getting away with it, you’ll be swiped with one of the coldest days of the year.
My years of guiding in the mountains taught me that it’s wise to be wary of this time of year. I have heard too many stories of rescues, injuries and cases of hypothermia. One year, it was October 1 when a couple dozen bushwalkers were forced to overnight in a timber shelter at Cradle Mountain – an event that coincided with AFL grand final day.
“It is not Spring yet. Spring is being dreamed,” wrote the poet Edward Thomas. No season presents so many signs in its advance. Every day, clues are strewn about the forest. But conclusions must not be drawn. It is not yet spring. The dream is forming, slowly, in the soil, in the air.
I wouldn’t recommend using a calendar in order to declare the winter over. Who made up that calendar anyway? Where did they live? Why the Latin word for “seven”?
However, September 1 is still worth celebrating. It’s known as “Wattle Day”, an event that inaugurated in Hobart in 1838, and I suppose in almost most every part of Australia there will be an acacia in bloom somewhere. I have no qualms with Wattle Day. But the flowering of wattles follows no exact schedule. They reckon their flowering period on light and temperature, mostly trying to fit in with the appetite of their pollinators, the bees and flies and beetles that become more active at this time of year. Every year I hear a casual observer mention that the silver wattle (Acacia dealbata) has blossomed early, but there are places where those yellow pom-poms are swaying in the breeze not too long after the solstice. Meaner winds scatter them across the road like yellow stuffing.
It is a desperate Tasmanian who declares that September 1 is the onset of spring. Their hopes may be swatted to the ground like inflorescences of wattle. But maybe – maybe – we can say: it is the onset of the onset of spring.
More closely, I watch others in the acacia family – the silver wattle’s cousins: the blackwood (A. melanoxylon) and prickly moses (A. verticillata), which each display their own encouraging brightness. A few sad tufts of yellow fluff have appeared on the prickly moses, but the blackwoods have only tight pale-green buds on them, like balled-up fists. It shows that they won’t produce flowers willy-nilly, that they’re not going to leave winter behind without a fight.
For me, the blackwood is a tree deeply imbued with emotion. They have often consoled me in the sadness that sometimes comes with September. They grow adjacent to grief. More than once in my life, they have been companions in a season of sorrow. I have put their leaves in my pocket as I walk to funerals.
Perhaps in this anecdote you can see why I’m reticent about declaring the end of winter too early. The essence of spring is optimism; it will be some weeks before we fully shake off the darkness.
Nevertheless, there comes a time when I walk out of an evening and find myself stunned by the fact that it’s still light. The winter solstice was 10 weeks ago; the clamp of night has been relaxed. The kindest thing that winter does for us is to separate the shortest and coldest days.
Now, birds occupy a broadening span of daylight. Their spring dream begins sooner than ours, by necessity. They must begin to prepare everything for the season ahead, a matter of life and death. Competition is on: for mates, for territory, for nesting materials. The earliest to rise begin to sing or whistle or shrilly yell before the sun does has begun to dawdle through the scrub. The birds will not dither.
So it is that the various honeyeaters around here are going hammer and tong, battling through the branches. It is a crazed game of chase. To name a few of the combatants, there are new holland honeyeaters, crescent honeyeaters, yellow-throated honeyeaters and yellow wattlebirds. Every day, these birds are scattered in every direction, an avian explosion. Beaks clack; bark and leaves are kicked off trees. Thus far, I have been lucky; I have not been struck in the face by a wayward bird.
Noticeably, the eastern spinebills have moved in. I’m not sure where they’ve been, but they come like clockwork when the common heath begins to flower. This pretty little shrub produces abundant flowers, in pink or white, in which nectar is secreted at the end of a long tube. The curved beaks of the spinebills’ fit perfectly, so the flowers are presented as an invitation back to my neck of the woods, which they have gladly accepted.
Now that it’s September, I must keep my eye open for migrating birds. Dusky woodswallows, satin flycatchers, silvereyes and black-faced cuckoo-shrikes have all enjoyed their season away, up north. Well, who can blame them: they say that winters in Queensland are pretty nice. But they’re on their way back here, perhaps waiting for a strong storm front that they can travel on. I will mark down the day that I first see them in this forest, though of course I cannot be called the most scrupulous observer – for I am frequently ducking in and out of this particular patch of bush.
. . .
Edward Thomas was an English poet, sensitive to the environment of his native island – which means he was suitably attuned to the weather. One of his books, called In Pursuit of Spring, is instructive. You might well do as he did, and jump on a bike to track it down. You might try to pin down the signs of the new season. In other words, you could desperately try to hurry winter away, hasten the spring along. You could make a dash for where the first wattles bloom. Put the eggs of butterflies under a microscope. Get to the Bass Strait coast, pronto, as the little silvereyes are arriving, buffeted from the mainland by stormy gusts.
Ask the migrating birds. They aren’t ashamed of chasing the weather they like. I have been a little more embarrassed, because to miss a large chunk of the Tasmanian winter can be considered a mark against you, at least among certain acquaintances. I know the feeling myself: that irrational resentment against someone who was able to skip the grim gloom, who was lying on a beach in a red bikini while I was enduring 15 hours of darkness, curled up in a ball, wearing three layers of wool on both halves of my body.
Yet there is so much beauty in the drawn-out transition from winter to spring. One morning, I wake up (swaddled in clothes) and know that there will be snow on our neighbourhood mountain. The chill in the air seems three-dimensional, but I am more aware of a sound that augurs the presence of snow. I can’t say precisely what it is, but there is a hush, a muted quality to the general ambient noise, that is now an unmistakable signal that I will find a decent amount of snow on the mountains’ summits.
Clumped throughout the forest just below the massif are swatches of neon yellow, the silver wattles’ good cheer – spring tidings – spreading despite the sterile crust of snow just above it. “Now I know that Spring will come again,” wrote Edward Thomas, “Perhaps tomorrow…”
Nevertheless, those who see out the duration of seasons get to celebrate more often. The first skink out of hibernation, the first dragonfly, the first tiger snake (remember snakes?) Reclining on the front deck, you inadvertently squish a pissant and that pungent smell declares that winter is fully over. You must mark down the date of your first skinny-dip in the local swimming-hole.
. . .
Those butterflies are not so far away. From memory of previous springs, the first butterflies I’m likely to see are a common brown or a painted lady. Whoever decided that the name of Heteronympha merope should be “common brown” needs a stern talking-to: like all butterflies, it is uncommonly beautiful as it flaps around “carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings” (as Thoreau said).
Anyway, my eyes will be peeled. Not long after that, I will go searching for the fey, mint-green species known as Macleay’s swallowtail, but that’s a different story altogether – one that might be described as the pursuit of summer, but whoever had to pursue it? Yes, you plan and dream, but then it just lands in your lap. And just is suddenly, is gone.
Because the butterflies’ appearance is ever so brief. They wake up, mate, lay eggs and are gone. Some don’t even eat. (A summer without a barbie!) Spring comes on incrementally, almost as if it’s trying to slip in unnoticed. The door of summer shuts with a resounding clang. It may seem premature, but I’m just trying to warn you: this cool season will begin again before you know it.
Bert Spinks is a writer, poet, storyteller and bushwalking guide from Tasmania. For many years he has performed and published Tasmanian stories. Most of the time, he's based in an old train carriage in the bush. He has a podcast, "In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere" (soundcloud.com/storytellerspinks), and shares writing and photography at "Letters from a Storyteller" (storytellerspinks.substack.com).