What is the meaning of Easter in the southern hemisphere?
The days are getting shorter, the cool winter time is coming. The harvests are over.
This is not the time when the leaves come back on the trees and when nature starts again to provide us with fresh food. The rabbit, the egg and the baby lamb are not the appropriate symbols for this time of year here. Millions of rabbits remain a major pest in the landscape expanding the desert as they eat all vegetation from the surface of the land, unchallenged by any predators. Sheep compact the soil with their hooves and transform the landscape which has been shaped by soft-footed marsupials.
Nevertheless the supermarkets are full of chocolate icons representing fertility in other climate zones.
Some people here recognise the bilby as an easter symbol. This endangered indigenous animal has long ears like a rabbit. There are children's stories about it like the one here:
http://users.netconnect.com.au/Easter_Bilby/default.html
Meanwhile the winter flowers are now getting ready to bloom in the evergreen forests and heathlands.