into existence months earlier than expected. These
two events led me to two conclusions: one, that
seasonality probably isn’t as rigid as we think it is;
and two, when it comes to gardening I am definitely
blessed with more luck than skill.A
ustralians love to eat seasonally. A
2017 Choicesurvey found that almost
two-thirds of us consider seasonality when
we buy our own fruit and vegetables, and
our sophisticated food knowledge means we delight
when a seasonal ingredient pops up on our favourite
restaurant’s menu. “Our customers are real foodies,
and they get so excited when, say, the first cherries
arrive on our menus in December,” says Colin Mainds,
head chef at Cutler & Co in Melbourne. But thanks
to climate change, drought, El Niño, supermarkets
flooding their shelves with everything all year round,
and even our strange Euro-centric adherence to the
concept of four distinct seasons, it’s become more
difficult than ever for ordinary consumers to get
their heads around what’s best to eat when.
Fluctuations in what we’ve long believed to be the
natural seasons for many fruits and vegetables seem
to be becoming more common. A spike in winter
temperatures in 2018 saw a glut of Queensland
strawberries flooding the market earlier than usual,
causing many growers to dump their crops. In Victoria,
Trevor Perkins, chef and co-owner of Hogget Kitchen
in Gippsland, says he noticed
the broad bean season was
shorter than usual in the same
year, and Mainds says he found
that asparagus was around for
longer. In New South Wales,
2018 was a shocking year for
wild mushrooms. Simon Evans,
chef at Wollongong’s Caveau,
remembers having to replace
the pine mushrooms he would
usually forage and serve in his restaurant’s braised
wallaby dish with king browns. “This is always the
hard part of using wild ingredients, you never know
what the weather is going to do,” he says. “One week
they’re there, the next they’re gone.”
Climate change is certainly one of the culprits
for these odd shifts, and it’s only set to get worse. We
know that very warm months that used to occur two
per cent of the time between 1951 and 1980 occurred
11 per cent of the time between 2001 and 2015. A
study from the University of Melbourne says that
by 2030, many areas of Australia will be too warm to
grow the crops they’re currently growing. For example
Golden Delicious apples and Lapin cherries maydisappear from their current growing regions of
Queensland and Western Australia entirely. Already,
many farmers and producers are noticing unwelcome
changes. Popular fish species such as kingfish and
snapper are migrating steadily south as northern
waters warm, or simply becoming more scarce close
to the warmer coastal waters, making them more
difficult to fish. Viticulture is particularly sensitive
to rising temperatures and mainland winegrowers are
already rushing to secure vineyard sites in Tasmania
as the more northern states steadily become too hot
for cool-climate grapes.
Another concurrent possibility for these out-of-
season fruit and vegetable appearances is that we’re
simply looking at seasons all wrong in Australia,
warping our idea of what should be available on
our plates when. At Yarri Restaurant and Bar in
Dunsborough, Western Australia, owner and chef
Aaron Carr plans his menus according to the calendar
of the Noongar people, who have lived in the south-
west of the state for tens of thousands of years. The
Noongar follow six seasons that don’t start or end on
specific days, but instead rely on subtle environmental
cues to signal their beginning and end, such as the
flowering of certain plants, the appearance of goannas
or the moulting of black swans. Notably, the Noongar
recognise two springs (Djilba and Kambarang) and
two summers (Birak and Bunuru), with the first spring
starting as early as August, which could help explain
those regular “unexpected”
peas and tomatoes suddenly
appearing in the middle of
what Europeans refer to as
winter. “At the moment they’re
picking all the desert limes,
so it’s a citrusy time right now,
which is kind of weird,” Carr
says when we speak in the
middle of summer, referring to
the fact that a traditional
European idea of citrus-growing says that their peak
season should be in winter.
Professor Tim Entwisle, botanist and director
and chief executive of the Royal Botanic Gardens
Victoria, has been championing the idea of Australia
adopting seasons that better reflect the calendar of
the Noongar and other indigenous Australians since
releasing his book,Sprinter and Sprummerin 2014. “If
you look at Aboriginal people around Australia you’ll
find that the number of seasons varies from two to
13,” he says. “Very seldom do you find four. Mostly
the number is around six. These people have lived
in the country for a very long time and the obvious
conclusion to draw is that Australia doesn’t haveIf you look around Australia,
the number of seasons
varies from two to 13. We
don’t have the classical four
seasons that we dragged
over from the UK.PHOTOGRAPHY BEN DEARNLEY. STYLING CLAIRE DELMAR& LISA FEATHERBY. WALLPAPER (USED THROUGHOUT)FROM EMILY ZIZ. ALL OTHER PROPS STYLIST’S OWN. STOCKISTS P152.74 GOURMET TRAVELLER