By Tony Wright
If you happened to be outdoors during long evenings at the weekend, or perched by a window, you might have found yourself transfixed by the sight of a pumped-up full moon rising to the north.
You won’t get the chance to see another moment quite like it until 2043.
It was what astronomers call a major lunar standstill.
A rare full moon, seen only once in almost 19 years, rises over Melbourne on December 15.Credit: Tony Wright
We’ll get to what that rather plodding term is supposed to mean, but first, this being almost Christmas, we should allow a more lyric description of that lovely glowing orb.
It is known, this fullest moon of December, as the “cold moon”.
Australians have had to get accustomed to cultural imperialism when it comes to language, and it’s not hard to guess the “cold moon” title comes from the northern hemisphere, where December ushers in the cold season.
And yet, the fact that the cold moon rose in the midst of an Australian heatwave is perfectly appropriate, really.
We are entering that paradoxical season when, dreaming of a cooling dip in the ocean, we merrily suspend disbelief to sing about dashing through the snow on a one-horse open sleigh, or to exhort the weather gods to let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
All very upside-down.
But that fits, too, for as we saunter towards the end of 2024, it occurs that we live in a time when much of what we thought we knew is being upended everywhere.
Australia’s current opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has turned the very meaning of social division on its head in recent weeks.
No mixing of flags for Peter Dutton (left) with then prime minister Tony Abbott and attorney-general George Brandis at a 10-flag press conference in 2015. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Promising not to stand in front of an Aboriginal flag if he becomes prime minister, Dutton argues the presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags in press conferences is a “symbol of division”.
There was a time when we might have thought that the mere existence of Indigenous flags was actually a symbol of unity between white and black Australia after a long history of dire division.
But this is the season of radical reinvention.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick to run the US health system.Credit: Getty
Consider this: The lawyer assisting Donald Trump’s choice for US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is the very man who filed just two years ago a lawsuit to revoke approval for the vaccine that eliminated polio in the US population 30 years ago.
Kennedy, a long-time vaccine sceptic, claims he has no plans to revoke vaccines.
Perhaps. But his anti-vaxxer lawyer buddy Aaron Siri, who has been working for years to deny Americans numerous life-saving vaccines, including those for polio and hepatitis B, has been sitting at Kennedy’s right hand helping select top health administrators for the new Trump era.
Reinvention? Regression, surely.
Across the Atlantic, Europe’s biggest national economy, Germany, is in the hands of a caretaker government as it prepares for an early election in which the political far right is expected to surge in a way not seen since World War II.
The current German government has collapsed at the very time Germany is talking about preparing for war for the first time since Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker.
As Russia’s Vladimir Putin – a would-be new tsar bent on turning back time and re-establishing a greater Russian empire – wages war on Ukraine, the German Defence Ministry recently placed a timeline on its bet for the previously unthinkable.
“We must be ready for war by 2029,” Defence Minister Boris Pistorius told the German parliament in June this year, citing increasing threats from Russia.
Within days, German authorities began reconditioning old World War II bunkers to help protect citizens in the event of conflict.
Given Trump has threatened to turn his nation’s back on NATO, the pact that has kept Europe relatively safe for more than 75 years, you’d hardly blame anyone for searching for any handy bunker. Especially with Putin ramping up threats to use nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, as the death toll in tiny Gaza is reported to have passed 45,000, Israel’s government declares itself outraged that Australia – like 157 other countries – supported a United Nations resolution last week calling for a ceasefire.
Still, Australia received only a dressing-down from the Israeli ambassador. Israel closed its embassy in Dublin this week, citing Ireland’s alleged “extreme anti-Israel policies”.
Ireland, along with Norway, Spain and Slovenia, had announced it would recognise a Palestinian state.
Alarmingly, some of those in Australia protesting the State of Israel’s treatment of Gazans allowed their objections to spill into naked and even violent antisemitism, confusing the actions of a state with the right of ordinary Jewish Australians to live their lives unmolested.
Given that this is my last column for the year, I had thought about a traditional “year in review” accompanied by a few predictions for 2025.
Both, however, seem ill-advised.
Many of the big events of 2024 are unrelentingly depressing. As for 2025, who could venture a halfway reasonable guess about what might occur?
And then came the cold moon, illuminating the night sky and reminding us that at least the seasons change reliably, even if the northern hemisphere’s cold moon heralds winter while ours announces the Australian summer.
This particular moon rose on Sunday night, December 15, at the most northerly point it ever rises. It had taken 18.6 years to reach this farthest extremity of its orbit, and it will take another 18.6 years before we will witness it again.
It is named a “major lunar standstill” for the copycat reason that the sun’s extreme positions in the sky – winter and summer – are called the solstices.
Solstice is a word deriving from the Latin solstitium, meaning “sun standing still” because the ancients felt the sun paused briefly before it moved on. Astronomers simply adapted the idea of a “lunar standstill” to the moon’s behaviour when it completes its more gradual cycle.
And so the cosmos abides, paying no heed to the doings of humans on Earth.
I wish readers a Christmas as peaceful as possible.
Tony Wright’s column will resume in late January.