Why Brisbane deserves its own spring story, and why your ancestors can still come along for the ride
Every March, the internet starts behaving as if the whole planet has agreed to put daffodils on the kitchen table.
There are pictures of lambs. There are pastel eggs. There are women in linen dresses standing in fields, looking as though they have never once had to hunt for their keys. Everyone is talking about the spring equinox.
And if you live in Brisbane, you might be standing there thinking: Spring? Mate, it is March. The air is warm, the storms are dramatic and the year is starting to slow down. Are we all pretending?
This is where it gets interesting.
If your ancestors came from England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland, you may feel spring in March because that is the seasonal story handed down through your family, books, festivals, church traditions, old songs and modern witchcraft. You may have celebrated Ostara, the spring equinox or simply “the first day of spring” for years.
But Brisbane is in the Southern Hemisphere. Here, March is autumn and September is spring.
You are not wrong for feeling connected to the northern spring. You are not disloyal to Australia for loving the traditions of your ancestors. You are simply standing in two places at once: one in your family’s memory, and one under your actual feet.
That is not a problem to solve. It is a story to live.
First, the cosmic housekeeping
An equinox is an astronomical moment. It happens when the centre of the Sun crosses Earth’s equator. The word comes from Latin roots meaning “equal night”, although day and night are not perfectly equal everywhere on the exact date. The Sun is not a light switch, and the atmosphere bends sunlight a little, because apparently even the sky enjoys making things complicated.
There are two equinoxes each year. The most useful names are March equinox and September equinox, because “spring” depends on which hemisphere you call home.
In 2026, the exact Brisbane times are:
March equinox: Saturday 21 March 2026, at 12:46 am AEST. This marks the beginning of astronomical autumn in Brisbane.
September equinox: Wednesday 23 September 2026, at 10:05 am AEST. This marks the beginning of astronomical spring in Brisbane.
The March equinox occurs worldwide on 20 March at 14:46 UTC. In Brisbane, that becomes 12:46 am on 21 March. The September equinox occurs on 23 September at 00:05 UTC, which becomes 10:05 am in Brisbane.
So, if someone in England says, “Happy spring equinox” in March, they are correct for their hemisphere. If someone in Brisbane says, “Happy autumn equinox”, they are correct for ours.
The planet has not made a mistake. We are just on different sides of the seasonal seesaw.
Earth’s axis is tilted by about 23.5 degrees. As Earth travels around the Sun, the Northern and Southern Hemispheres take turns leaning towards the Sun and receiving more direct light. At the equinox, neither hemisphere is leaning towards the Sun. After March, the Sun appears to travel north in the sky. After September, it appears to travel south.
There is also the practical Australian version. The Bureau of Meteorology uses September, October and November as spring because that works better with our weather than waiting for one astronomical moment to wave a tiny flag. In tropical Australia, the old European four season system can be even less useful than wet and dry seasons.
In other words, even the word “spring” has a few different jobs.
A family story, a local season and a slightly bossy calendar
Imagine one of your English ancestors standing in a damp field centuries ago.
They are watching the light return. The soil is beginning to soften. Something green is pushing through the ground. Perhaps they do not know the word “equinox” in the modern scientific sense, but they know the feeling: winter has loosened its grip.
Now imagine you in Brisbane in March.
You are not standing in that same field. You are standing beneath a different sky, in a different climate, with different plants, birds, weather and seasons. Your body knows this place too. It knows when the heat begins to change. It knows the smell of rain. It knows when the year is turning towards cooler nights.
Both experiences can be true.
The mistake is thinking that ancestry must cancel out place. It does not. Your family traditions can be a thread. Your local landscape can be another thread. You get to weave them together instead of choosing one and throwing the other in the bin.
The Celts did not have one giant seasonal group chat
When people talk about Celtic spring traditions, the conversation often becomes a bit too neat. Imbolc is mentioned. Beltane appears. Alban Eilir is added. Someone brings up a hare and an egg. Suddenly the whole thing looks like one ancient, perfectly organised calendar shared by every Celtic person from Cornwall to County Cork.
History is rarely that tidy. It is more like a kitchen drawer full of string, old receipts and one mysterious key.
In Gaelic tradition, Imbolc was one of four important seasonal festivals, along with Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhain. Imbolc was linked with the first stirrings of spring. Beltane marked the coming of summer. These traditions belong particularly to Gaelic speaking Ireland and Scotland, not automatically to every community described as “Celtic”.
The ancient Druids also existed in Celtic societies, but the evidence about their rituals is limited. We do not possess a complete ancient Druid handbook saying, “Step one: place three crystals beside the sacred cauldron.” Much of what people call Druid equinox practice today belongs to modern Druidry, a living spiritual revival inspired by Celtic languages, poetry, landscapes, mythology and seasonal symbolism.
Modern Druids may call the spring equinox Alban Eilir, often translated as “Light of the Earth”. It is understood as a time of balance, when darkness and light meet and the light begins to grow.
That does not make it meaningless. It means we should describe it honestly: this is a modern spiritual tradition drawing on older Celtic material, not an ancient ritual that has survived unchanged since the Bronze Age.
And honestly, there is something rather reassuring about that. Traditions do not have to be museum pieces. They can be living things. They can grow new leaves.
Eostre, Ostara and the internet’s favourite bunny
The story of Ēostre comes mainly from the eighth century English monk Bede. He wrote about a month called Eosturmonath and connected it with a goddess named Ēostre. That is the main early written evidence for the name.
The modern Pagan festival called Ostara developed much later through nineteenth and twentieth century Pagan and Wiccan revivals. Eggs, hares, flowers, dawn and new life all make symbolic sense, but we should not present the whole modern package as a perfectly preserved ancient English ceremony.
This is where historical honesty can be useful without being a total buzzkill.
You can love the eggs. You can light the candle. You can welcome the dawn. You can feel connected to your English ancestors. You can even keep the bunny, who has survived centuries of theological confusion and still looks suspiciously pleased with himself.
You just do not need to claim that every detail came directly from an ancient priestess named Barbara.
The witches and seers who watched the world closely
The word witch carries many different stories.
In early modern Europe, people believed in a broad range of magical practices. Astrology, palm reading, charms, fortune telling and other kinds of divination were part of everyday thought. Some practitioners were feared as witches. Others worked as healers, midwives, charmers, herbalists, cunning folk or local advisers.
Between roughly 1500 and 1650, around 100,000 people were tried for witchcraft across Europe, with about half executed. Most of those accused and convicted were women.
That means we should be careful when we romanticise the “wise woman in the woods”. Some women really did hold practical knowledge about plants, birth, illness, weather and the seasons. Other women were falsely accused, tortured and killed.
The old seer was not necessarily someone wearing a pointed hat and speaking in riddles. A seer could be the person who noticed that the birds had gone quiet, the river was behaving strangely, or the first flower had appeared three weeks early.
In that sense, seership begins with attention.
It is noticing what is happening before the rest of us have finished scrolling.
Egypt: when renewal rises with the river
Ancient Egypt gives us a different seasonal story. Its calendar was shaped by the Nile, agriculture, the stars and the practical business of keeping a civilisation fed.
The ancient Egyptians had a civil calendar of 365 days and also used a lunar calendar. Their year was organised around broad seasonal patterns connected to the Nile and farming. Because the civil calendar did not originally include a leap day, its months slowly moved through the solar year over centuries.
This was not a European style spring calendar. It was the calendar of a river civilisation.
The story of Osiris and Isis carries the emotional language of death, fertility and renewal. Osiris is killed and dismembered by Seth. Isis searches for him, gathers the pieces and uses her magical power to restore him long enough for the story to continue. Osiris then becomes lord of the afterlife.
We should not call this an Egyptian equinox festival without evidence. But we can recognise the pattern: something is broken apart, searched for, gathered, restored and carried forward.
That is often what renewal looks like in real life too.
Not a sparkling new beginning with perfect hair and a colour coded planner. More like finding the pieces after a hard season and deciding they are still worth gathering.
Greece: Persephone goes down, and eventually comes home
The Greek story of Demeter and Persephone has stayed alive because it understands grief.
Persephone is taken into the underworld. Her mother Demeter, goddess of agriculture, mourns her disappearance so deeply that the earth stops producing. Eventually Persephone returns for part of the year. Because she has eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld, she must spend part of the year below.
When Persephone returns, the earth grows. When she leaves, the world becomes barren again.
The myth is not a scientific explanation of weather. It is a story about separation, motherhood, power, agriculture, death and return. At Eleusis, Demeter and Persephone were honoured through the Eleusinian Mysteries, secret rites associated with fertility, regeneration and hope beyond death. The Greater Mysteries took place in September or October, while preliminary rites occurred in spring. Nobody knows exactly what happened inside the secret central ceremony.
That uncertainty is important. The Greeks did not leave us a full instruction manual. Some things were experienced, witnessed and carried privately.
There is a lesson in that for modern life. Not every meaningful thing needs to be turned into content, explained to death and uploaded before lunch.
The Southern Hemisphere is not the footnote
For generations, popular seasonal writing has treated the Northern Hemisphere as the default setting. March means spring. September means falling leaves. Christmas means snow, even when half the people celebrating it are eating prawns in the sunshine.
That northern bias can make Australians feel as though our seasons are an awkward translation.
But the Southern Hemisphere has never been an afterthought. Our sky is different. Our weather is different. Our plants and animals move through the year in different ways.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have developed highly localised seasonal calendars based on Country. There is no single Indigenous Australian calendar. Different language groups recognise different numbers of seasons and read the changes through plants, animals, water, weather, fire and stars.
That knowledge gives us a better question than “What date is spring?”
It asks: What is the land doing now?
In Brisbane, September might bring the signs of our spring: new growth, changing bird calls, warmer light and the particular restless energy that arrives before summer. March may ask different things of us: gathering, releasing, preparing, slowing down and making room.
A spring equinox ritual for Brisbane
If you want to celebrate the Southern Hemisphere spring equinox, try this on or around 23 September. It is a simple modern ritual, inspired by the broad themes of balance, renewal and attention. It is not being presented as an ancient ceremony.
Find a quiet outdoor place, even if that is a balcony, courtyard or patch of grass. You do not need a forest, a stone circle or a flowing white dress. You need ten minutes and a willingness to put your phone down, which may be the most advanced form of magic currently available.
Take three breaths and look around. Notice one thing that is growing, one thing that is changing and one thing that is asking for care.
Place a small bowl of water in front of you. Beside it, place a seed, leaf or flower that has already fallen naturally. Avoid picking living plants or leaving anything behind outdoors.
Say quietly:
“I meet the turning of the light where I am. I honour what came before me, I notice what is alive around me, and I make room for what is ready to grow.”
Write down two things: one habit, fear or old story you are ready to release, and one quality you want to practise through the coming season. Keep it practical. “More patience with myself” is excellent. “Become an entirely new person by Thursday” is ambitious but probably not necessary.
Touch the bowl of water and imagine balance as movement rather than perfection. The equinox is not a frozen moment when everything in life suddenly behaves itself. It is a turning point.
When you finish, pour the water onto your garden or a pot plant. Keep the leaf, seed or flower on your altar, desk or windowsill for a few days. Let it remind you that renewal is usually quiet at first.
So which spring are you celebrating?
Perhaps you celebrate the northern spring in March because it connects you with your English ancestors. That is valid. Call it an ancestral observance, a family tradition or a northern spring celebration.
Then celebrate the Southern Hemisphere spring in September because it connects you with the land and climate where you actually live.
You do not have to choose between ancestry and place. You can hold both.
The old witches, farmers, priests, astronomers, Druids, storytellers and grandmothers all had one thing in common: they paid attention to the turning world.
That may be the oldest magic still available to us.
And it works in Brisbane.
If this season has you thinking about what needs to shift in your life, your work or the way you are carrying the past, it may be the perfect time to book an Energy Consultation for Life and Business with me. We can take a closer look at what is ready to be released, restored or brought into balance, without pretending you need to have everything figured out before you arrive. Your energy is what the Universe reads, it’s your signature.
Sometimes the first step is simply noticing that the season has changed.
While your here, go to the home page and flip a Manifesting Oracle card for yourself. If it resonates, book a session now.
