It is germane to the concerns of this book that each of the figures just mentioned hails from Europe or the United States. There is an acknowledgment that the four seasons that typify the life of northern Europe and north-east America lose their traction when transplanted elsewhere. In his essay, Macauley treats this phenomenon as slightly surprising: ‘It may signal that the conceptual container of the seasons is either porous or not always portable to distant places.’ It is significant enough to give a philosopher pause for thought: ‘We can’t always or easily move this model too quickly across the nation or around [the] world. When we do, the bucket may spring a theoretical leak.’ That climate change might also challenge the theoretical buckets of the European seasons is similarly accepted. Yet the way such moments are registered in this book – as reconcilable variations on a master trope – is indicative of a certain diffidence in the face of radical difference. The contributors generally seemed reluctant to contemplate, except as a kind of academic possibility, the fundamental limitations of the term ‘season’. In particular, placing seasons in the space of abstract critique as ‘conceptual containers’ or ‘theoretical buckets’ ignores the constitutive dimension of seasons. There is an underlying conviction in the book that the northern Europe season is a transcendental category whose ultimate logic and shape could, with some adjustments here and there, fit the entirety of the planet’s biomes, the vicissitudes of its climatic history, and the diversity of human societies that have evolved in the affordances of climate.

Fortunately, the book’s tendency to reify the northern European season is redeemed by contributions from Australian-based scholars, particularly the essays by Rod Giblett, John Charles Ryan, and Tom Bristow. Each of these authors considers the particularities of the south-west of Australia in ways that opened the concept of season up for much more thorough rethinking than was visible in other parts of this book. Both Giblett and Bristow throw the Australian experience against the work of Thoreau. Bristow does this more successfully by introducing the spiky poetry of John Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully series, which takes On Walden Pond as its intertext. Kinsella’s poetry scandalises what it embraces by situating radical contradiction as natural. Kinsella lives near Toodyay in the Western Australian wheatbelt. As with many parts of Australia, the key seasonal determinants are heat and fire, factors that have powerfully conditioned the adaptation of life forms in Jam Tree Gully. The fact that Australia has a ‘fire season’ and that global warming is making them longer and more widespread is the kind of challenge this book more generally struggles to address. Bristow should be commended, in this respect, for carefully drawing out this aspect of Kinsella’s poetry:

Kinsella’s poetic flowering relies upon a synthesis of images that draw from a sensitivity to heat and to the wake of fire. Such attunement to process registers an intellectual disposition that negates temporal transcendence of any still moment or image in view, and yet this observational frame refuses to stop at the material object: it emphasises events, properties, and location.

Another highlight of the book was John Charles Ryan’s essay addressing ‘Australian seasonal plurality’. Focusing on the south-west of Australia, where he was based for many years, Ryan works carefully through the settler archive to note the way these accounts have recorded the Noongar seasons. It is interesting that the Noongar seasons were recorded by many settlers and that while the naming varied a little (no doubt in part due to the imprecision inherent in transliterating the Noongar phonemes into a foreign alphabet), the accounts were consistent in showing that the Noongar experienced the annual cycle as six seasons.

What I like about Ryan’s approach is the genuine attempt to synthesise the conceptual resources of the European and Indigenous traditions. He points to the Indigenous Weather Knowledge project that began in 2002 as a partnership between the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), and Monash University’s Centre for Indigenous Studies. It may have taken nearly twenty years, but this visionary project is gradually working its way into the mainstream. In Perth, where I live in the lands of the Noongar, we are just folding over from Makuru to Djilba. This is no longer, for non-Indigenous Australians, some obscure anthropological fact. Indeed, it was announced in the weather report of the Channel Ten news, and the forecaster explained this would be an ongoing aspect of their weather reporting. Now that Makuru is passing, the prevailing cool south-westerlies are giving way to periods of warmth as high-pressure systems settle somewhat fleetingly in the Great Australian Bight. Today the maximum is fourteen degrees; by next Tuesday they are predicting twenty-eight. The blue wildflowers that spring out in early Makuru have been joined by the yellow ones – the donkey orchids, hibbertia, and wattles. New Holland Honeyeaters (ban’deen in Noongar) have nested in the Albany woolly bush that grows haphazardly next to our suburban porch. A season has emerged that I once would have called spring, but I’m learning to call Djilba. It seems to fit.