Spring Time In Australia |top| -

But spring in Australia also has a temper. One afternoon, the air went still. The cockatoos fell silent, then screamed and flew in a panicked white cloud towards the mountains. The sky turned the colour of a bad bruise. A southerly buster roared up from the Snowy Mountains, bringing a hailstorm that sounded like someone was throwing handfuls of gravel at the corrugated iron roof. Lila hid under the kitchen table, but Maggie just poured herself another tea.

“It smells like flowers and dirt and rain,” Lila said quietly, hugging her knees.

Maggie smiled, scratching Blue behind the ears. “So do I, love. So do I.” spring time in australia

Maggie’s granddaughter, Lila, arrived from Melbourne for the school holidays. To Lila, spring in the country was a chaotic, glorious explosion. The first afternoon, she ran inside with a shoe full of mud and a handful of “frogs”—actually pink and white patrols of clover flowers.

Lila looked out at the jacaranda tree, now a soft, ghostly purple in the twilight. A single fruit bat flew overhead, a dark kite against the last smear of pink. But spring in Australia also has a temper

“Right then,” she said to her old kelpie, Blue. “Time to wake up.”

Spring in Australia doesn’t tiptoe in like an English visitor. It arrives like a surfer catching a break—all at once, bright and reckless. Within a week, the paddocks that had been brown and hard as biscuit were suddenly dotted with a thousand different greens. The ironbark trees, which had stood skeletal against the grey winter sky, began to fizz with new leaves. And the noise! The magpies were warbling their territorial, caroling songs at 4:30 in the morning, and the raucous screech of the sulphur-crested cockatoos meant they were stripping the almond tree in the back garden. The sky turned the colour of a bad bruise

“It’s just spring having a tantrum,” she said. “It’ll be over in ten minutes.”