Six Seasons

Composition III

Six Seasons

Visualised from about 12,000 years ago

Six Seasons celebrates the deep knowledge systems of the Menang-Noongar people, whose connection to the Albany/Kinjarling region extends across many thousands of years. The six Menang-Noongar seasons — Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba, and Kambarang — are specific to this country and its people, distinct from the broader Noongar seasonal calendar. In its second part the sea comes in: what is now King George Sound was dry land, and the harbours only flood into being late.

The observations of place are spoken in Menang voice by Larry Blight and Rachael Colmer, as a musical centre of the cycle.

Theme

Menang-Noongar seasonal knowledge of Kinjarling — six seasons specific to this region and its people. Place-based knowledge across deep time.

What you see

Six Seasons is in two parts, and both are the same country. The ground is real: a model of the land and the seabed around Kinjarling, built from survey data — five-metre lidar over the town, Mt Clarence and Middleton,1 national elevation models beyond (Geoscience Australia & ICSM, 2026), and the floor of the Sound from multibeam sonar and the AusBathyTopo grid (Evans & Beaman, 2024). Take the sea away and it is the country as it stood when King George Sound was dry land.2

The first part stays on and around Mt Clarence and lets the year turn through it: Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba, Kambarang. Each season is named, in Menang voice, as it arrives. By night the sky above is the Milky Way as photographed from the observatories of Chile’s Atacama and the Canary Islands — nearly 1,200 photographs stitched into one sky (ESO/S. Brunier, 2009). The grass dries and bleaches, the light lengthens and reddens.

Dusk from the slopes of Mt Clarence, dry woodland and red-barked trees against an orange horizon
Bunuru · dusk from the slopes of Mt Clarence, about 12,000 years ago

Nothing here is scattered at random. The planting follows OCBIL theory (Hopper, 2009): the south-west of Australia is one of the world’s great examples of an old, climatically buffered, infertile landscape, where plants are local specialists, each fitted to its own ground — granite, sandplain, laterite. No generic library of trees could represent that, so the plants were modelled one species at a time from photographs of the flora of the Albany region — karri and marri, jarrah, red flowering gum, peppermint and paperbark, banksia, sheoak, grass trees — and they grow only where there is soil, never on bare granite.

The whole landscape is a simulation built in Unreal Engine, with one seasonal clock running through it: as the year turns the leaves move between lush and dry, and particular species come into flower in their own season, as they do on this coast. Makuru brings the storms across the granite.

Granite boulders and low heath on the summit of Mt Clarence under a clearing sky
Makuru · granite on the summit of Mt Clarence after the storm, about 12,000 years ago

With Djilba and Kambarang the country greens again, and flowers.

A woodland floor of grass and shrubs with red and yellow flowers, on the ground where the Town Hall now stands
Kambarang · the land in flower where the Town Hall now stands, about 12,000 years ago

The second part lets the sea come back. From five points around King George Sound, the same drowning is seen again and again — the last forty metres of the sea’s rise, several thousand years of it, each view taking its own part and running it in half a minute, the seasons still turning. The water crosses the drowned plain, fills the harbours and cuts hills off as islands.3 Salt comes ahead of the water. The simulation follows it plant by plant: each tree and shrub has its own tolerance, and dies as the sea rises close enough to poison its ground, so the forest thins before it drowns, and a fringe of dead trunks stands out into the shallows.

Not everything keeps the same clock. The sea rises across thousands of years; the light moves as if through a single day; the plants stand as if in a single moment, and die only on the sea’s clock. It is an artistic impression built on measurement: the height of the sea is guided by reconstructions of sea level through the last glacial cycle (Lambeck & Chappell, 2001), but its pace is compressed and its detail imagined.

An aerial view as the sea returns over the waters now called Princess Royal Harbour, a long shoreline and inlets filling
Birak · the sea returns to the waters now called Princess Royal Harbour

No people are shown. Presence is there only as smoke and fire — embers on the dark plain, smoke rising from the high ground, fires burning along the last shore. The fires follow rules of their own: they burn only on dry ground above the sea, two or three at a time, lit in one place and gone the next like a burning mosaic, and they retreat uphill as the water comes. At the end the water reaches the foot of the hills at Kinjarling, and the piece hands on to Four Seasons.

Kinjarling: the sea spreading across a plain of drowned trees toward two wooded hills, smoke rising from the high ground
Kinjarling · the sea reaches the foot of the hills through drowned trees; smoke on the high ground

Sources

Notes

  1. Place names on this page — Mt Clarence, Middleton, King George Sound, Princess Royal Harbour — are today’s names, used to orient a contemporary audience. The Menang names for these places, and how they may have changed across twelve thousand years, are not ours to give. Menang Noongar names for places around Albany today are published on the City of Albany’s Menang Noongar Place Names Map (City of Albany, 2020). ↩
  2. The sense of deep Pleistocene time in Six Seasons owes much to years of conversation with the archaeologist Dr Kate Morse, the artist’s sister, whose work on people and Pleistocene coastlines in Western Australia includes: Morse, K. (1988). Mandu Mandu Creek rockshelter: Pleistocene human coastal occupation of North West Cape, Western Australia. Archaeology in Oceania 23(3), 81–88. doi:10.1002/j.1834-4453.1988.tb00193.x; and Dortch, C.E. & Morse, K. (1984). Prehistoric stone artefacts on some offshore islands in Western Australia. Australian Archaeology 19, 31–47. doi:10.1080/03122417.1984.12092954 ↩
  3. Research elsewhere in Australia has considered Aboriginal accounts that may recall the rising of the sea at the end of the last Ice Age: Nunn, P.D. & Reid, N.J. (2016). Aboriginal memories of inundation of the Australian coast dating from more than 7000 years ago. Australian Geographer 47, 11–47. doi:10.1080/00049182.2015.1077539 ↩

Numen is an artwork. Most of its imagery is original; some is derived from the scientific data, simulations and images credited above, transformed into new work. We have tried to identify and credit every source. If you believe something has not been credited properly, please get in touch.