We need to employ a means of looking at the landscape from within, through the eyes and experience of its inhabitants (Potteiger 1987).

His comments were not directed towards the short-term ‘inhabitants’ of a landscape but to the ‘inhabitants’ that had a long personal experience and relationship to a landscape. While referring to the inhabitants of the Pinelands in New Jersey, the cultural theory drew from longué durée perspective embraced in French geographical writings of Ladurie, Bachelard (1969) and Ricoeur (1988).

Time is an ethnocentric construct that has been compartmentalised by European conventions. So much so that time in landscape is read as four equal temporal phases directly associated with four generic climatic phases within the western European landscape. This construct is foreign to the Australian landscape, bears little resemblance to its climatic and ecological changes, and has no relationship to its indigenous cultural landscape. There is no winter, autumn, spring and summer in any logical sense in Australia. Incorrectly it is a quad-partite temporal construct that our scientific, design and referrential systems are based.

Potteiger simply re-stated a belief of Jens Jensen that coincidentially paralleled an ethno-ecological or ethno-scientific inquiry within the anthropological community concerning indigenous peoples’ relationships and rituals to landscapes. Jensen observed that:

The world is divided into many little worlds, each of which exerts a certain influence on those living within it. This influence is found in the character of the people and expressed in their economic and spiritual life (Jensen 1990: i).

Thus, one can better appreciate a ‘little world’ by understanding the temporally mature customs, beliefs, religions and lifestyle of the inhabitants that are shaped by its bio-geography. Understanding inhabitant patterns, cues, movements can better qualify what they directly and indirectly observe as seasons, and the environmental cues that ignite and determine their cultural responses to time and landscape.

Northern Australian is awash with anthropological essays and research on Aboriginal calendars as avenues of translating Aboriginal community daily life, social and economic structures, and ecological relationships with little concern to landscape relationships. In contrast, southern Australia has become a hunting ground for ornithologists, biologists and botanists to devise and express ecological calendars devoid of long-term cultural knowledge and meanings. Reid (1995b) has demonstrated that six or seven seasons are common throughout Australia, while recognising that alternate Aboriginal calendars exist. Jones, Mackay & Pisani (1997) concluded that there could be between six to twelve main ‘seasons’ in Aboriginal ‘calendars’. They pointed to seven seasons in the Upper Yarra Valley, with two infrequent events.

An important qualification needs to be drawn here. If the quadripartite dissection of the year into four temporal seasons is incorrect in Australia, so to does our cultural understanding of the concept and term ‘season’. In most indigenous Aboriginal communities ‘season’ is a foreign term—a term introduced by anthropological and religious peoples. Rather there are phases of variable times, with the start and cessation of phases being interpreted as concluding with distinctively, but often slow, changes in microclimate and biological systems. Such cues resulted in indigenous nomenclature labels and more often distinct changes in cultural patterns and rituals. Thus time was ‘read’ not by sundials and watches but by nature’s clocks and patterns.

Landscape design little captures time. Yes we think about changes and issues of sun lighting, ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ deciduous and exotic vegetation and colours, the presence and absence of water and fauna, but we have failed to discover a design model that enables a culturally-rich temporal design response.

Knowledge is the rationale for being in country.

Aboriginal people view their residency upon the landscape as being custodians for a tract of country. Within this tract they are both custodians and participants, watchful monitors of environmental patterns and trends, and direct actors in shaping and managing the country. Their term ‘country’ is used deliberately as it denotes, in Aboriginal culture, a spatially dynamic tract of space inter-connected to others, specific enough for a particular community to reside and co-exist within, but one not fraught by European definitions of ‘ownership’ (Rose 1996: 9-13). Country gives and receives life, and is the place within which Aboriginals dwell and their ancestral beings of the ‘Dreaming’ look out over.

Within country is knowledge. Aboriginal people monitor and respond to patterns and messages from their traditional country. They also give attention to the management of their traditional country in line with Dreaming stories and other cultural narratives. In this way communication between country and resident becomes two-way, being based upon the ability to understand, celebrate (‘sing’) and know what is happening where and why.

Bill Neidjie, of the Bunitj clan of Kakadu, and a traditional Aboriginal ‘owner’ of part of the Kakadu landscape has stated:

This earth, I never damage.
I look after. Fire is nothing, just clean up.
When you burn, new grass coming up.
That means good animal soon,
Might be goanna, possum, wallaby.
Burn him off, new grass coming up, new life all over (Neidjie in Kakadu Board of Management 2000: 10),

When discussing the role of fire in the Kakadu [National Park] landscape. The lighting of fires, often cool burns, were commonplace during the ‘seasons’ of Yegge and Wurreng (between May-mid-August), where Gunak Garriwurlge announced the ‘starting of lighting fires’.

April Bright, of the Kurrindju country in the Finniss River region of Northern Territory, explained the implication of a season, from her Aboriginal perspective. She tells of some of the cues or markers that announce the ‘Burn grass time’ seasonal phase, in the Kurrindju calendar, together with the patterns that occur. ‘Burn grass time’ is interpreted in this instance as the nomenclature for a seasonal phase in that region. Contained in this quotation is also an expression that the Aboriginal act of firing has beneficial effects upon animals, birds, reptiles and vegetation.

Europeans view seasons in four temporal phases: summer, autumn, winter and spring. These seasons have old names. Spring is an Anglo-Saxon word that means rising; summer comes from a Sanskrit word for season. Autumn is a form of the Latin word for maturing, and winter is an Anglo-Saxon word for wet season. The concept of these northern hemisphere-based seasons evolved in Europe following the imposition of the Gregorian Calendar devised by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Within these seasons, Spring begins in mid-March, summer begins in mid-June, autumn in mid-September and winter in mid-December. In the southern hemisphere, these seasons are reversed. Spring begins in September, summer in December, autumn in March, and winter in June. Each season is composed of a period of three months.

This concept of seasons is predicated upon the European climate and environment and has little relevance to the Australian environment. Climates in Australian vary greatly. The tempests that unfold in northern Australia during the monsoons are an illustration of the unpredictability of climatic happenings in Australia and how they shape human, animal and vegetation responses and patterns.

In contrast Aboriginals often view their country in terms of between five to perhaps twelve seasonal phases depending upon the landscape and its particular climatic and environmental characteristics. This dissection of time according to environmental and cultural patterns has been elucidated from numerous Aboriginal communities in northern Australia by anthropological researchers. Temporal phases within these calendars are extremely variable. Little specific information exists today in many southern Australian Aboriginal communities largely due to the fragmentation of their cultures.

We know however, in terms of the Aboriginal culture, that seasonal knowledge is contained in land-based, sky-based and water-based information, narratives and climatic events. This knowledge is ‘owned’ by a particular community within their country. This sense of multi-dimensional ‘ownership’ is because the ancestral creative beings traversed the whole tract of a country and other countries as well. Accordingly, land, sea, beach, reef, sea grass beds, sky, and fresh water sources are their domains. It is also because Aboriginals accept their position on the landscape as being one of minding in anticipation of the return of these ancestral beings rather than ‘owning’ the land as an object or possession in Western terms.

When we turn to seasons, fine grain information becomes important. Aboriginal peoples in the middle Victoria River of Northern Territory, for example, know that when the March Flies are biting then the freshwater crocodiles will be laying their eggs along the River edge. Investigating this assumption or conclusion is not necessary; rather it is the March flies that are ‘saying’ or ‘singing’ this information as a truth. If we move further inland to another nearby Aboriginal community it is the flowering of the Jangarla or White Dragon Tree (Sesbania formosa) that signals that the freshwater crocodiles are laying their eggs.

Most seasonal calendars have either been presented in list form or in simplified concentric circles. The examples from the Tiwi, Yaraldi, Yolngu and Aurukun Aboriginal communities adopt this format, however simplified versions of this information have been presented in the concentric circle format.

The Tiwi community, in the Arnhem Land, identifies 13 seasonal phases (of which 12 are indicated below). They apply a name to each season that reflects plant, animal or climatic effects or patterns, as follows:

• Clap Sticks
• Flowers
• Knock-em-Down Winds
• Tall Grass
• Fire
• Cold
• Fog
• Dry Creek Bed
• Hot Feet
• Thunder
• Breeding Mangrove Worms
• Muddy Possum Tracks

Respected anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt identified four seasons for the Yaraldi on the lower Murray River and Lakes region of South Australia (Berndt, Berndt & Stanton 1993: 76, 79-80, 230-231, 240, 243, 367). Their conclusion was that the “seasons were distinguished by the growth of particular plants, the appearance of various creatures and alterations in the weather” (Ibid: 76). These seasons were:

The seasonal calendar for the Yolngu, also in Arnhem Land, is consistent with most northern Australian coastal tropical Aboriginal communities (Davis 1984; 1989: 2, passim). It has eight main seasons, denoted by an Aboriginal ‘title’, each has a varying temporal period, and each has distinct climatic and animal activities. The listing below summarises these seasons:

Perhaps the most accepted use of a seasonal calendar in Australia is in the Kakadu National Park in Arnhem Land in Northern Territory (Kakadu Board of Management 1999). This has been prepared by the Australian Nature Conservation Agency (ANCA) with the Bininj Aboriginal community who reside in the central portion of the National Park. In this instance the calendar is used both as an interpretive tool to visitors as well as a land management tool.

Kadadu Seasonal Chart Source: Kadadu Board of Management 2000:10

For visitors, it starts explaining the particular monsoonal climatic events in the region, why low burn firing is still necessary, and when and why visitors can observe particular wildlife. For the managers, it enables a more finely grained temporal strategy on how to manage this rich natural resource base together with empowering the traditional custodians with the temporal nomenclature and cultural ‘logic’ of the country in which to carry out land management and tourist activities. These seasons are:

Time, through a Wurundjeri translation, was considered in a landscape architecture design studio at RMIT in 1994. The studio provoked internal controversy but garnered considerable positive encouragement and intangible endorsement by Museum Victoria staff and various Wurundjeri individuals in Melbourne. Studio outcomes were eagerly taken up by Wurundjeri elders, as cultural landscape possibilities, but were subsumed by internal Wurundjeri disparate politics, the spokesperson-representational workload pressure upon the few Wurundjeri elders, and their involvement in the new Museum Victoria project.

The studio considered a tract of the Coranderrk landscape now occupied by the former School of Army Health barracks. The studio sought to propose land use options and design that were culturally-relevant to the Wurundjeri culture. In doing so, the studio distanced itself from conventional scientific and western site analysis techniques and sought to explore myths, stars, emotive feelings and intuitions, the properties and characteristics of animals and vegetation as they would have been traditional approached and used by the Wurundjeri.

The topic was re-ignited by Jones, Mackay & Pisani (1997) when a season’s thesis for the Upper Yarra Valley was published in the Victorian Naturalist. Unlike conventional Victorian ‘calendars’ that were natural science-based, the Upper Yarra seasonal calendar approached the topic through Wurundjeri myths and totems resulting in an alternate insight. This approach mirrored similar ethnographic and anthropological calendars devised in South Australia and Northern Territory in the 1970s to 1990s that viewed calendars as constructs of cultural relationships to landscapes rather than analyses of natural system (animals, birds and micro-climate) patterns.

In contrast, naturalist Alan Reid proposed a calendar of six seasons for the middle Yarra Valley in 1995, based upon the personal records and observations of several specialist zoologists, botanists and amateur naturalists. This calendar had little reference to Kulin and Wurundjeri culture. This research work was contained within the Australian Timelines project, initiated by the Gould League in Victoria through Reid. The calendar is valuable here as a reference contrast to that proposed by the Jones, Mackay & Pisani (1997). Reid proposed:

The publication of the Upper Yarra calendar provoked a revisitation that aided the landscape design of the new Museum of Victoria’s Gallery of Life (Jones, Mackay, Paton & Pisani 1998; Taylor & Cullity 1997, 1998). Subsequent explorations of the thesis for the Kaurna community of the Adelaide Plains (Heyes 1999a, 1999b) and the Narangga community of the Yorke Peninsula (Huntington-McBurney 2000) have validated the applicability of the ethno-ecological methodology that embraces a culturally rich research inquiry and landscape design thesis.