By some reckonings, today is the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. (Not that you'd know it from looking outside, at least in London.) This is apparently the case in the United States, and is widely accepted to be the case in the UK (though there is no standard definition of when the seasons begin; one could perhaps just as well state that spring starts when Bill Oddie sees the first chaffinch of the year or somesuch).

In contrast. in Australia, things are somewhat simpler. The British colonists who founded the southern colonies apparently couldn't be bothered with equinoxes and solstices, and instead decided that summer is from the start of December to the end of February, followed by exactly three months of autumn, three months of winter, and so on, all evenly divided on calendrical lines. Apparently this is common practice throughout the southern hemisphere, where the sudden peculiarity of the environment had the effect of encouraging European colonists to rip up the rules and start again. Along a similar fashion, the Australian school year begins in February and ends in November (having been settled after the Industrial Revolution, when vacationing schoolchildren were no longer needed to help in the harvest), and the tax year starts on 1 July (breaking off with a tradition which some say goes back to the Roman Empire). Much of this is probably a case of "if it ain't broken, don't fix it"; after all, straightening out a calendar for no reason would cause a lot of disruption. Moving to another hemisphere, however, leaves little reason to not start afresh.

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