The way we decide when a season starts has always struck me as somewhat random. I know that the meteorological calendar provides the basis for ideas about what comes when and it is by virtue of that calendar's settings that northern hemisphere seasons are proposed.
So in England, in accordance with the meteorological calendar, the seasons are defined as spring (March, April, May), summer (June, July, August), autumn (September, October, November) and winter (December, January, February). In Australia, we copy these arrangements, having due regard for antipodean eccentricity, so that summer is in December, January, February, autumn in March, April, May, winter is June, July, August and spring September, October, November.
So, as August 31 looms, it is not only a time when, in some states at least, you should think about registering your dog; it's also the very eve of the southern spring. As 19th century Australian poet Henry Kendall saw it: 'Grey Winter hath gone like a wearisome guest,/And, behold, for repayment/September comes in with the wind of the West,/And the Spring in her raiment ... September! the maid with the swift silver feet/She glides and she graces/The valleys of coolness, the slopes of the heat,/With her blossomy traces.'
Kendall was doing his best: like his contemporary brother and sister poets, he had missed the entire Romantic Revolution, the Keatsian, Byronic, Shellyean sensations of which arrived late and slowly in the great South Land and, in any case, scarcely found much resonance in the antipodean seasons. Kendall's personification of September is a good try — but no cigar — because personification distances rather than animates the subject.
Endowing the seasons with actual names — as distinct from their quarterly meteorological positioning — introduces some colour and a poetic note. It adds no further accuracy but is attractively a part of the national rather than exclusively the scientific language of seasonal change. Italy and Spain's primavera and primaverile respectively and the American 'fall' for autumn are examples of nomenclature that has escaped from the lineaments of meteorology.
There's another problem, I think, with the neat deployment of the seasons, quarter by quarter through the 12 months of the calendar year, and that is that no one has told Nature about it. As relatively venerable Eureka Streeters will probably agree (I'm one for sure: my GP announced to me some years ago, 'You are about to become an older person'), past summers seemed longer —