Day Of Spring Australia ((free)) | First

In the cities—Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane—the first day is often deceptive. Melbourne might throw a “four-seasons-in-one-day” tantrum just to remind you who’s boss: a frosty 6°C start, a burst of glorious sun by 10am, horizontal hail by lunch, then a balmy 22°C by afternoon tea. Sydneysiders might wake to a humidity that hints at the summer steam to come, while Perth offers a perfect, cloudless 25°C, as if the city has already forgotten it was ever cold.

It is a very Australian welcome to spring: beauty and menace in equal measure. For the gardener, September 1st is a starting pistol. In the vegetable patch, it’s time to sow the tomatoes, the basil, the zucchinis that will inevitably turn into marrows the size of small children by January. The citrus trees—lemons, limes, the hardy cumquat—are heavy with their last winter fruit and simultaneously bursting into creamy, perfume-heavy blossom. The wattles, Australia’s unofficial floral emblem of spring, have been going since August, their golden pom-poms a shock of colour against a sky that is finally losing its winter grey.

As the sun sets on September 1st—earlier than it will in December, but later than it did in June—the air cools rapidly. The frogs in the pond begin their chorus. And you realise that spring in Australia isn’t a gentle unfolding. It is a rapid, aggressive, fragrant, sneezy, swooping, glorious lunge towards summer. And it has begun.