AustLit

'Early on a July morning in 1983 I drove with Ruth Lipscomb from Darwin to Jabiru. She was visiting the school there and had offered to take me along. She picked me up from my motel around 6 am. Just before we reached the Alligator River, she pulled off the road and produced a flask of hot tea and a packet of sandwiches that she had thoughtfully prepared. As we stood by the roadside she drew my attention to the song of a distant bird. ‘People around here’, she said, ‘when they hear that bird know that a particular tree is in flower and coming into fruit’. I do not recall either the name of the bird or of the tree. But what has stuck with me was the sudden awareness of the importance to a hunter-gatherer people of their knowledge of the signs of seasonal change around them. They lived and still live by a calendar not divided into mathematically determined months and seasons but one they can read in the appearance of winds and cloud, in the songs of the bird life around them, in the behaviour of the animals, reptiles and insects, and in the flowering and fruiting of the plants growing in their country. ' (Introduction)