Climate, Weather and Aboriginal Culture
A culture in which all things past and present are interrelated
|Introduction||A Precious Heritage||The Rainbow Serpent||Indigenous Seasonal Descriptions|
In any study of Aboriginal meteorology, what emerges early is that much of the knowledge from south and east Australia has all but vanished because of the effect of European arrival and settlement in the late 18th century.
Happily, however, a significant amount of the weather culture of the Aboriginals of central and northern Australia has survived, and this provides us with a path into the way indigenous Australians view the weather and climate of Australia.
This path largely consists of an intimate knowledge of plant and animal cycles, and contains details of the intricate connections between these, which the Aboriginal people have observed over thousands of years and passed down from generation to generation.
This represents a precious and irreplaceable heritage, the value of which is being increasingly recognised, considered and appreciated by all Australians.
Some of this knowledge is of a purely observational type which records how various plants and animals react to the weather around them at the time.
But even more intriguing are other types of observations which are linked to seasonal expectations, some examples of which are:
With example (4), a traditional scientific explanation could be that falling humidity associated with the beginning of the Dry Season triggers the flowering response noted. This illustrates the concept that plants and trees, when viewed by the educated eye, can be read in the much same way as the modern Automatic Weather Station, with their appearance a direct result of past, present and even future weather.
The other examples noted are far more indirect, and result from millennia of observations of the plant and animal kingdoms.
They reflect the deep Aboriginal philosophy that "all things are connected", and that subtle natural linkages are present which can reveal much about climate and weather.