Caer Australis Blog

Southern Lugnasa basks under the high summer sun, and the acorns on oaks ripen. The coined term Teine Grian Deas, the Southern Sun Fire, recognises that more than just the seasons are marked by the Celtic Fire Feasts – the constellations are just as part of each festival, and wherever we are in the world, it is an Imbolg story being told in the stars for Celts. Still, it is impossible not to celebrate the high summer when that is the season you are in! The oaks at Tranby House on the banks of the Swan River in Perth are bursting with acorns, and soon they will be falling as the autumn comes around; this brings to mind the episode in the Mabinogi of Math ap Mathonwy where Hen Wen goes to eat ‘Lleu’s rotting flesh’, that is the acorns, highly favoured by our porcine friends, and Gwydion sings his englyns to retrieve the wounded Lleu.

Southern Beltaine is greeted this year with an abundance of sunshine and lifegiving rain. The oaks at Tranby House on the banks of the Swan River in Perth are thriving this year, and their green mantle of leaves mark the start of summer and the beginning of the seasonal cycles in the Southern Hemisphere. November is the southern equivalent to May in the Celtic homelands, concerning the seasons; and to this time at start of the year’s seasons Dafydd ap Gwilym wrote in the mid fourteenth century, "When Spring ended I cared not; May’s golden wealth is purest gold. The beginning of full Summer scattered him, whom tears had nourished; May is faultless: the coming of May is a blessing to me; God and Mary decided wisely and steadfastly to uphold May" The poem has been published in full in the Grove on the Caer Australis website: The poem, ‘May’, was written in the mid fourteenth century by Dafydd ap Gwilym and added to the Grove as part of the southern beltaine summer festival.

The end of October brings winter to completion in the Southern Hemisphere; while Halloween howls through the enthusiastic and care-free, its winter symbolism belies the Southern Season as we enter the beginning of the seasonal procession with the onset of the Celtic summer in the south, our equivalent of Beltaine is at hand! A walk along the banks of the Swan River in Perth to get a picture of the Tranby oaks at the eve of summer took us to meet a family of water fowl – as pictured here – and they serve to remind us of what Dafydd ap Gwilym sang in the mid fourteenth century in his Haf – Summer, "Cnwd da iawn, cnawd dianaf, O’r ddear hen a ddaw’r haf", that is, an excellent crop and untainted life comes forth from the old earth in summer.
Summer has ever been the beginning of the Celtic year,
"So in the South you must remember,
It’s the merry merry month of November!"

The equinoctial season of spring has arrived in Australia and the flurry of wildflowers and the green of new growth marks the warming of the land. The lunation from 19th September is that of the Aedrini moon in the southern hemisphere, spanning the vernal equinox. Follow the southern lunations on the Caer Australis website. The red bottlebrushes have recently burst into bloom, attracting honeyeaters and bees aplenty!
Their bright red display symbolises the Aedh ‘flame of fire’ of the month.

September 1st is the official start to Spring in Australia, several weeks before the southern vernal equinox, and a month after ’southern Imbolg’, Teine Earrach Deas. The Celtic reckoning allows for the spectacular awakening of oaks, and here is the green mantle displayed by the Tranby oaks by the banks of the Swan.

     ”Oak that grows
     between two banks…
     Stately and majestic
     is its aspect!”
                     - Gwydion

We live on a bend of the Swan River where back in 1839 the settler Joseph Hardey built this home, Tranby House, and planted some oaks that had sprouted from acorns which he took with him from the north of Britian, having travelled via the Cape to the Swan River Colony on the ship Tranby; the suburb Maylands is named for his wife. The oaks are of course referred to as Tranby Oaks, from which many acorns have been planted all about Australia. In 1976, John planted one such oakling in Kiama Downs on the south coast of NSW. This photo was taken at the start of the southern spring, with the buds beginning to swell with the promise of a new year’s growth ahead.

Greetings to all at Imbolg and ’southern’ Lughnasa!

Over the next three months we’re going to be building a new section on
Caer Australis that will be a happy consequence of some university
units we’re sitting – an internet design subject and an ancient
history subject – and so in a similar way the Arthur Project
section, we hope you’ll enjoy ‘Conquest’, reviewing the period of
Roman expansion into the Celtic world. Hmmmm, ‘enjoy’ might not be
quite the right verb… It will cover the military and social
conquests of Gaul and Britain and the subsequent expansion of Roman
ideas into Ireland. Our contribution in ‘Conquest’ is to
try to provide inasmuch as it is reasonable a Celtic perspective to
these events. The change from a Celtic civilisation to a Roman one had
great economic benefits like lower interest rates and taxes (huh?) and
excellent market place opportunities to earn greater profits (gaa?),
but at the same time groups such as the Seine River Shipping
Association (the what now?) still felt it honourable to erect an altar
to Celtic gods while dedicating it to the Emporer. The complex and
difficult decisions of this time of change will be explored.

A few bibs and bobs about the site – on the links section are
reasonably expansive divisions to pagan and re-earthing sites in
Australia. This time of environmental concern certainly warrants the
thoughts and philosophies and world-views that can balance human ways of treating the world with the needs of health and wealth. How different things would be if our society held ‘unthinkable’ the abuse of Rivers or that we valued the ‘cost’ of clean air higher than the
convenience of driving down to the shops! Over the past year a project of the Perth Zoo has been to help the sunbears from abuse and decline through a breeding project. We’ve been making some contributions to the Project Sun Bear and have had a link to it from the Fire Feasts section on CA (which has pleasingly been made use of by visitors), and a breeding pair has now come to Perth and now live at a purpose made enclosure for them

CaerOz-l has been made unavailable to view by general visitors, this is only fair for the sake of open
discussion on that Group; naturally, anything that would be wanted to be viewed
for anyone can be placed on the Caer Australis Forum .

John & Rhys
Caer Australis