This is a summer of extremes, and Australians love to recite its liturgy.
One morning in late November, you step outside to hang the washing and the air hits you—not like warmth, but like a held breath. By mid-December, the screen door slams shut with a hollow clack that will become the rhythm of the next three months. The gum trees, ever the drama queens, start shedding bark in long, peeling strips, as if shrugging off last season’s skin. The cicadas begin their relentless, electric sawing, a frequency that bypasses the ears and drills straight into the base of the brain. australian summer
On Christmas Day, you eat prawns and mangoes, not roast turkey. You drink bubbles on a deck while wearing a floral shirt and shorts. You listen to the Boxing Day Test on AM radio while the fan oscillates. You go for a swim at 9pm, the water still warm from the day, the streetlights reflecting off the black glass of the bay. This is a summer of extremes, and Australians
Then you emerge, salt-stung, and find a stray chip buried in the sand. A seagull watches you with the cold, predatory intelligence of a dinosaur. The gum trees, ever the drama queens, start
Let’s not romanticise it too much. Australian summer is also the season of anxiety. The fire danger rating on the BOM app: CATASTROPHIC . The smell of smoke on a January northerly wind. The distant thrum of a water-bombing helicopter. You check the Fires Near Me app the way other people check Instagram. It is a summer of sunburns so severe you sleep on your stomach, of paralysis ticks, of bluebottles washing up in a purple, stinging line along the shore. It is the season you learn that "she’ll be right" is a prayer, not a promise.
There is no sky like an Australian summer sky at night. After the heat breaks—usually with a violent, theatrical thunderstorm that drops two inches of rain in twenty minutes and knocks out the power—you step outside. The Milky Way is a spill of diamond dust. The Southern Cross hangs low. A fruit bat (or "flying fox") flaps overhead like a leathery omen.