Sun burnt faces around, with skin so brown

Smiling, zinc cream and crowds, Sundays the beach, never a cloud...

Midnight Oil's tune Power and the Passion evokes the classic Perth summer - long, hot and satisfying.

The past two weeks of brilliant sunshine and hot temperatures have seen beaches across the city packed to their limits.

Every boat ramp along the coast was like a conveyor belt for launches and retrievals. 

But it's fair to say the whole of the summer straddling the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017 has been a cold, wet disappointment in Perth and WA's south as it comes to an official close on Tuesday.

"It's been pretty ordinary that's for sure," the Bureau of Meteorology's Neil Bennett said.

"We broke the record for the wettest summer on record, with 192.8 millimetres of rain compared to 180.4 which was set back in 1955 - and the average summer rainfall in Perth is 35.4, so that's a significant rise."

The main reason for Perth's wet summer was a series of tropical lows in WA's north that dumped huge amounts of rain on the Kimberley and Pilbara, charging rivers and thundering waterfalls for a spectacular wet season - pushing foul weather down to the south.

"We set some record temperatures in terms of the coldest days, the coldest for February, the fifth or sixth coldest days in January, the second wettest day and the second wettest February on record," Mr Bennett said.

"We are still in the tropical cyclone season so it's still a factor."

Summer, autumn, winter and spring are European seasons draped over Australia's climate, which is marked by Indigenous Australians very differently.

The Bureau's website shows that in the South West of Australia, the Nyoongar seasonal calendar includes six different seasons in a yearly cycle - Birak, Bunuru, Djeran, Makuru, Djilba and Kambarang.

​But Mr Bennett said even this more locally focused definition of the seasons would struggle to describe the summer WA has just been through.

"Even with that calendar we would still struggle to make it fit - Birak is the dry and hot and we have been anything but," he said.

Perhaps Bunuru, which promises the hottest part of the year, could bring better weather.

But Mr Bennett said that while the outlook for WA is for more hot weather, anything is possible.

"The outlook for the next three months is that we have an average temperature of 26.2 degrees from March to May and right now we are looking at a 73 per cent chance of seeing above average temperatures," he said.

"But that's still a 27 per cent chance of average or below average, so it's going to be wait and see."

Perth 6-day forecast:
Wednesday - 21, 36, mostly sunny
Thursday - 21, 33, sunny
Friday - 20, 33, mostly sunny
Saturday - 23, 37, sunny
Sunday - 24, 38, very hot and mostly sunny
Monday - 23, 35, partly cloudy