Summer — the dry

By December the green has already started leaving the year. Paddock grass that stood soft and blond-tipped in October cures to full straw within a few dry weeks, the clay under it shrinks and cracks into a crazy paving you can lose a finger into, and cicadas take over the soundtrack with a drone that only quits after dark. This is the season the rest of Adelaide’s ecology spends eleven months preparing for: the dry half of the Mediterranean bargain, when the subtropical ridge parks itself overhead and switches the rain off. It is not a gentle absence. Adelaide’s hottest recorded day arrived in the middle of it — 46.6°C at West Terrace on 24 January 2019 — and a run of days at or above 35°C, on the order of seventeen a year at the Airport, is the going rate for this stretch of the calendar rather than a series of exceptions.

Life crosses this gap two ways, and the difference is worth learning to see. One strategy is to keep working: the hard, small, leathery leaves of the local sclerophyll bush hoard water well enough to stay green and photosynthesising right through the drought, the same toughness independently invented on five continents wherever a climate sets this exact test (Cowling et al. 1996). The other is to stop: skinks and small mammals shift to the cool hours either side of noon, geophytes pull their whole above-ground selves back into a bulb or tuber underground, and the shadiest gullies fill up with everything that cannot bear the heat of the open ridge-top. Running on what it banked, or shutting down to wait — between those two answers is most of what is alive here in February.

Summer is also fire season, and for the same reason it is drought season: cured grass and leaf litter, low humidity, and hot northerly winds that can precede a cool change by hours, all stacked under a climate that has always burned as part of its normal rhythm rather than as disaster (Keeley et al. 2012). Walk into a stringybark forest three weeks after such a fire and it looks finished — blackened trunks, a grey felt of ash — until the bark breaks out in green fuzz from buds that were waiting under it the whole time (Burrows 2013). That is the trick to reading an Adelaide summer honestly: the brown, the crack and the smoke are not the country failing. They are the test it has been rehearsing for since long before anyone kept a thermometer, and the readiness is written into practically everything green or breathing you can find.