Top pic: Moon hanging above Nick Cave on stage, Hanging Rock, November 2022. Taken by my friend Fleur.
Months go by.
It was Summer in the Southern Hemisphere when I last wrote here. It was warm then, daylight lasted till 9pm, and I felt motivated, and decided I’d write here more often.
Now, we’re half-way through Autumn.
Where did the warmth go? Spring – so long ago now – was filled with endless cold, grey, overcast, rainy weather – a miserable extension of Winter. South-Eastern Australia is supposed to be warm by the end of Spring. My sister, who lives in Ireland, spent November in Australia, and had to borrow winter clothes because she’d expected that it would be warm here by the end of Spring. It wasn’t.
For the entire month of November, I swear there was only one warm day. On the plus side – for me – it was the day – and evening – we had tickets to see Nick Cave and Warren Ellis play (outdoors) at Hanging Rock.
Hanging Rock/Ngannelong, about an hour’s drive from Melbourne, is an ancient rock formation and culturally significant landmark near the tribal boundaries between three Traditional Owner groups – the Woi Wurrung (Wurundjeri), the Djaara and the Taungurung. It’s the setting of the fictional, 1960’s gothic book and 1970’s film, Picnic At Hanging Rock. In local Indigenous culture, and in modern/popular Australian culture, Hanging Rock has some quality that an anglo/settler writer might lamely try and capture with a word like mystic.
It’s easy to sense – or imagine – when you are in front of it, that there’s something deep and powerful about this approx. 6.25 million-year-old rock formation. It was a very special experience, to watch the movement of the sun, the moon and the stars through the sky behind it. Not to mention, the bands playing in front of it.
We arrived at the concert site around 5pm. It was surprisingly warm that day – we joked about how we’d packed everything including raincoats, but had not considered that we might need sunblock. There was a laid back, joyful vibe, as people wandered around, found their seats and opened bags of chips and beers. After so many lockdowns and cancelled concerts – an outdoor concert! Going ahead! On a glorious Friday evening! At Hanging Rock!
Eventually, Courtney Barnett took the stage as support. The sun sank lower in the sky, but (knowing its place) did not set until Cave and Ellis took the stage. We watched the sun until it vanished behind the trees. Then we watched a crescent moon rise into the clear evening sky.
Hanging Rock (stage at right), around 5pm – before bands began playing
That day of decent weather compensated for the rest of the month. (Cave and Ellis played at Hanging Rock again the following night and it rained.)
On 2nd December, my sister left Australia and the temperature shot from 18 degrees to 35. It was Summer.
December and January came and went – warm days, warm nights. Many were far too warm. It’s one extreme or the other now, no middle ground. We sweltered under fans, and wished we had decent cooling, on nights when the temperature was still above 20 degrees at midnight and opening all the windows brought no relief at all.
One Friday in February, when the temperature was still in the high twenties at 8pm, I went to see one of Nick Cave’s comrades going back to the Boys Next Door – Mick Harvey – play at a local pub. Tickets said Doors: 8pm but when has that ever been a true indication of timing? My friend and I sauntered into the bandroom about 8.30pm – around sunset, in fact – to find Harvey already on stage.
An ex-Bad Seed, on stage before sunset?
What happened to the days where the support act wouldn’t even start until at least an hour after the advertised time?
I guess these artists, who are 15+ yrs older than me, prefer to wind their night down on the other side of 5am nowadays?! Fine by me – I’m happy with a great gig (both of the above were really great gigs, on different scales) that starts around 8pm and is finished by 10.30pm.
And now I’m here, catching up, and it’s May. Summer is gone. It departed as suddenly as it arrived. On March 1st, it went from hot to cold overnight. The first month of Autumn used to be full of warm days and mild nights. There’s no in-between anymore.
Summer is now a memory – a brief flash of heat and light that came between a cold, grey Spring and now, a cold, grey, Autumn.
The air is chilly. The temperature seems to have dropped drastically. Is it always this cold by mid-Autumn, we ask ourselves? Or does it just seem as if it’s colder than usual for this time of year? All week, the sky has been overcast and rain has been falling intermittently. I’ve started wearing a knitted beanie on my morning walk.
This morning, though, when I went out, it was only 8 degrees, but the sun was shining and the sky was clear. It shone all day, filling my bedroom/work-from-home office with light, and that always makes everything seem a little bit brighter.
Blathering About Nothing 
Blather away!