The Lord Mayor of one of Australia’s biggest cities wants to switch to a six-season Indigenous calendar, claiming it is more accurate than the four-season version.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece said adding two extra seasons would be more representative of the city’s weather than the current Northern European model.
‘In the Wurundjeri calendar, there were six seasons in the year. It was a wet summer and a dry summer,’ Mr Reece told 3AW.
‘A wet winter and a dry winter. And when you think about it, it makes sense.
‘But we have gone and superimposed the four seasons essentially from Northern Europe here in Melbourne.
‘They don’t really match up with the weather patterns that we experience over the 12 months.’
The idea was brought up at the Melbourne 2050 Summit, hosted in May, where around 1,000 people discussed the city’s future.
Mr Reece, who was only elected Lord Mayor in 2024, said it was logical to have a system created by Indigenous people.
Melbourne Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece thinks we should add two extra seasons to the calendar
‘This is one of those things where a bit of First Nations knowledge appears to make a bit more sense,’ he said.
‘Literally, wattle season starts and that week you look around Melbourne and all of the wattle trees have turned fluorescent yellow, and it’s beautiful.
‘Aboriginal people who lived here for tens of thousands of years, in their calendar, had six seasons here in Melbourne and when you actually look at the calendar and the seasons you actually realise hey that actually does line up.’
Many Aussies poked fun at the Lord Mayor’s proposal.
‘We should all be able to adopt and identify with as many seasons, months of the year and days of the week as we feel like. Just like our pronouns,’ one wrote online.
‘Melbourne has really lost the plot. This is complete nonsense,’ another said.
The idea of changing the number of seasons in Australia isn’t new.
In 2013, Dr Tim Entwisle, at Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, told National Geographic Magazine that ‘four seasons just don’t make sense’.
The idea to switch calendars was brought up at the Melbourne 2050 Summit, hosted in May, where around 1,000 people discussed the city’s future
‘When Europeans arrived in Australia, they brought a lot of cultural baggage, including a seasonal system from the temperate Northern Hemisphere,’ he said.
Australia’s weather is very different to Northern Europe’s, with some regions experiencing high rainfall for several months of the year, followed by long, dry periods.
Dr Entwisle developed his own five-season model for Australia’s central east.
He said spring should begin a month early when native plants flower and last just two months instead of the usual three.
It would then be followed by two-month-long ‘sprummer’, a four-month-long summer starting in December, before autumn sets in.
He also agreed that indigenous calendars did a much better job at reflecting Australia’s climate than the inherited European model.
Daily Mail contacted Mr Reece for further comment.
