From the home office in my apartment here in Canberra, it’s clear that the trees are turning. Their burnished and russet tips jostle in the warm breeze, though the branches remain thickly furred with leaves. The landscape – famous for a verdancy that somehow feels so dissimilar to the crisper, sappier jewel greens of Irish trees, still looks fulsome, but the warning is there.
Autumn is coming, the mornings will soon feel unreasonably cold, and everyone (myself included) will be dressed in impossibly unflattering thermal gilets they bought from Uniqlo or Patagonia. The type that break a biting wind and turn you into the sort of exhausting drip who unironically says tedious things like: ‘Do you know where I left my zhee-lay?’
Meanwhile, my brother sends me photos from his garden in Limerick, where his daffodils have been resurrected against the rumour of an impending spring. They drag themselves from the grave by their elbows like zombies in truncated hats, trumpeting forth a season of optimism. Grand stretch, and so on.
While we were laid out in the heat of a blistering Canberran summer here in the Australian capital, spreading at the borders like a Mr Freeze melting on a scalding pavement, my family at home was plunged into the perpetual liquid semi-dark of a Limerick winter. I like to look at the weather app just to get a sense of things at home. “Two degrees,” it would report back, “but it feels like zero.”
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Most Irish people don’t think of chilly walks and hot chocolate and dumb gilets when they consider the Australian alternative life
I would think of every Limerick winter then, walking through air that is somehow also water, so that the shorter bits of hair around your face curl and thrash like you’ve set an open flame on them. The memory of walking to school in the semi-dark mornings with cold shins and cold ears and a resentful expression as the damp breeze buffets and slaps you about like you’re being unscrupulously interrogated. That, I think, is the climate my body was built for. Irish people have a sort of terrestrial aquatic resilience. Water runs off us like we’re waxed. It’s just what we’re used to. Dryness is a luxury. It makes us soft. The dry, radical alienness of Canberra somehow remains a shock.
This will be my second time seeing in an Australian autumn at what still feels like precisely the wrong time of year. I’m forever disappointing people at home with the news that Australia’s capital does have seasons. It’s known for a comparatively spectacular autumn in an Australian context (though it’s also known for its almost terminal year-round hay fever, so everywhere has its challenges). If you drive a couple of hours from here to Sydney, you won’t see much evidence of leaves changing colour unless you visit the botanical gardens.
There are regions of this vast land mass with arid and tropical climates, where trees don’t do anything so dainty as dropping their leaves like a Victorian lady wilting on to a chaise longue. There are weird lizards that look like grinning Tudor courtiers wearing a ruff in those parts of Australia and monsoon rains. There are insects that tick and snicker and whose ghastly little feet you can hear tippy tapping when they scuttle. I’ve never lived in a country that can domestically grow bananas before. Imagine not having to import bananas – it is unfathomable. Even in a much milder Canberran climate, within the familiarity of a red-gold autumn palette as cat-sized cockatoos conduct verbal disputes in the branches above your head, you can feel far from home.
[ Laura Kennedy: Australians respond differently to nature compared to Irish peopleOpens in new window ]
Canberra’s autumn is very pretty, and it serves as a lovely consolation when the weather begins to cool down. Most Irish people don’t think of chilly walks and hot chocolate and dumb gilets when they consider the Australian alternative life we all seem to nurture some dream of.
It serves as a useful reminder, though, of how generally we take our natural beauty for granted in Ireland. The seasonality of it. The rich almost blue-green and slate-grey and navy-black the landscape takes on when, about 200 days a year, everything has just been generously and infuriatingly rained on. Autumn at home for me was always signalled by the Virginia Creeper on my mother’s shed turning a lavish red. Spectacularly beautiful, it nevertheless filled me with dread, symbolising as it did the end of summer and freedom and shoes being optional in the garden. The return to school and the cold, wet walks to sit on a hard chair in cold, wet socks while a nun taught you long division you won’t remember how to do when you’re 30. Slowly, the shed would transform each year from a fluffy green mass until it looked as though some sybarite had draped it languidly in heavy crimson velvet. The sort that crunches when you touch it, and in which your fingertips leave a dent.
An unnecessary extravagance of nature.
The shed is gone now, and so is my mother, but the creeper remains the ultimate symbol of an Irish autumn for me. In the uncanny familiarity of an autumn thousands of kilometres from home – one that, taking place in March, feels as mistimed as someone standing up to object to a wedding only to realise they’ve barged in on a funeral service – things feel very different. We are coming out of summer, but my Limerick clock is still timed to spring.
I wait, like the daffodils, to be resurrected by lengthening days and gentler breezes, only to remember that I’ve moved to a place where that will happen next September. In September, as leaves begin to wilt and drop at home, buds will be screeching into life down here.
It’s all backwards.
I wonder if you ever get used to it.
