Winter Solstice Frog Soundscape
The 21st of June 2026 was the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere: the longest night and the shortest day of a year that was, in so many ways, a deeply troubled, difficult, and painful year for millions of people – and so many other species, besides our own – all around this one planet world.
To witness, experience, venerate, and learn from this geo-astronomical event, I wandered quietly and contemplatively between several locations at a place of great local importance, from the perspectives not only of pre-colonial but also of post-colonial time: the Kurangk/Coorong lagoon, and particularly in the region that was once the home country of the Tanganekald clan, a tribe of the Ngarrindjeri nation.
Of the recordings I made during the night and morning of the Winter Solstice, this was perhaps the most immersive and energetic. It was recorded with a ‘binaural head’, so please listen with good quality headphones.
If you will imagine (recollect) a cold night, probably colder than the forecast 3°C (a temperature hardly dramatic for far northerners, accustomed to sub-zero winters, but rather cool for mainland arid-zone Australians; just as, for us, 40°C and above is quite familiar and acceptable, and yet a torment for many northerners), far below dew point, with maximal humidity and drenching condensation that left every possible surface glazed with water, a perfectly clear and unfathomably dark moonless sky, and an absolutely still atmosphere that revealed the Milky way, spanning the whole sky from west to east in scintillatingly focussed and unwavering detail, while you listen to the symphonic chorus of these myriad frogs in the freshwater lakes and pools adjacent to the Kurangk/Coorong lagoon, near Pelican Point, you would be forgiven for synaesthetically conflating the countless stars of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, vivid in your vision, and, simultaneously, vivid and almost overwhelming in your hearing, the myriad voices of these frogs singing, calling, relentlessly, tirelessly, and, from the human point of view, perhaps, inexplicably. The meaning of the moment is up to you, your experience of it, your understanding and interpretation of it. No perceptual encounter with Nature is a mere ‘given’. If it were, if it could be, the planet would not today be in the experiencing the stress and danger that it is, in fact, without doubt, experiencing.