Autumn — the fruiting and the turn

Spring shouts and summer roars. Autumn comes to the coast as a change of pace. Somewhere in March the summer storms lose their steam, the humidity slackens, and the country begins its long tilt from the wet season into the dry. The turn is easy to miss, because its great event happens quietly overhead. The rainforest, gorged on months of warm rain, is coming into fruit, cashing out as food all the growth the wet laid on.

Walk a hinterland gully in April and the canopy hangs heavy with figs, laurels and palms, bearing their crops just as the animals that live on them need them most. The mutualism runs both ways. Because different figs fruit at different times, a scrub with its figs intact rarely goes a month with nothing bearing. By day the fruit-doves work the load. The wompoo, one of the largest doves in the country and improbably dressed in green, purple and gold, throws its deep bubbling call from somewhere in the leaves you will never quite locate; the smaller rose-crowned fruit-dove feeds alongside it, and topknot pigeons sweep through in nomadic flocks, chasing whatever has ripened. Down in the wet ground the piccabeen palms hang their bunches of red fruit for the same guild. Every one of these birds runs a delivery service: it swallows the fruit whole and carries the seed away, so a rainforest with its pigeons starved out is a rainforest that can no longer move.

When the light goes, the night shift clocks on, and here autumn does its heaviest work. The flying-foxes wheel out from their camps to strip the same trees, and a flying-fox is built for distance: it will cross tens of kilometres in a single night and pass a fig’s seed through its gut in flight, dropping it, neatly fertilised, in some other patch of forest entirely. On a coast chopped into ever-smaller islands of scrub, the much-maligned bat is often what still joins one fragment to the next, seed by seed and gene by gene. Autumn moves the most seed.

Step out of the gully onto a dry ridge, though, and autumn is doing something else entirely. Here the black she-oaks flush a whole crown rusty-orange as the males shed their pollen, while the females carry the crimson-styled flowers that will harden into cones. Stand still and you may hear the wailing creak of a glossy black-cockatoo working those cones apart, a smoky-brown bird so devoted to she-oak seed that it eats almost nothing else, returning to the same favoured trees year after year and ignoring perfectly good ones next door. Nearby the ironbarks, and down on the swamp margins the swamp mahogany, are setting the buds that will open into the cold. They flower against the season, laying on nectar when little else does. Autumn loads the guns for the winter feed. So in a single week the same season is fruiting in the rainforest, flushing on the ridge and merely budding on the swamp edge.

Two quieter turns run under all of this. The storms that spent the summer soaking into the sand mass are ending, and the country now begins to live off what it banked: the hidden aquifer that will keep the wallum swamps wet and the blackwater creeks flowing right through the coming dry (the groundwater-dependent ecosystems that Dyring and colleagues mapped across Cooloola in 2025). And as the ground firms and the tracks drain, autumn opens the easiest and safest walking of the year, and the first planned and cultural burns go into the fire-country.

None of it, though, keeps an appointment. A late, heavy wet holds the fruit on the trees, the water on the tracks and the burning window shut, and pushes the whole turn back by weeks; a dry, early autumn brings it all forward. The season opens when the rain stops, not when the calendar says March. Watch the figs and the fruit-doves, the rusty she-oaks and the drying ground.