I tell the full story of the newspaper’s campaign in Inigo Jones: The Weather Prophet. but I’ve always wanted to do something more with the letters. Inspiration finally arrived this year when a conference on rural media was organised to…
I tell the full story of the newspaper’s campaign in Inigo Jones: The Weather Prophet. but I’ve always wanted to do something more with the letters. Inspiration finally arrived this year when a conference on rural media was organised to…
I’m currently working on a html version of this with added links and content, but in the meantime… Prologue Canberra was in the grip of a heatwave — the longest in its recorded history. After two weeks of hot weather,…
From Wallal, in Australia’s far north-west, to Goondiwindi, near the New South Wales-Queensland border, local and international scientists watched the sun and waited. A total solar eclipse was due on 21 September 1922. An eclipse always held scientific interest, but…
‘Modern man is a forest butcher’, warned the pioneering science journalist Hugh McKay in 1923. ‘He is also an oil-spendthrift and a coal waster’, McKay continued, ‘recklessly spending his capital of fuel… with never a thought of the tomorrow when…
‘I say emphatically that the climate has changed’, Henry Hodgson told the Argus in 1928. The experience of seventy-eight years brooked no denial, summers were milder, and thunderstorms were fewer. ‘It is no use telling me that weather bureau statistics…
We live between weather and climate – between the daily experience of nature and our attempts to discern the patterns and regularities that define an Australian climate. In this land of extremes, where climatic variability is the norm, we are…
On 26 September 1902, exactly 100 years ago today, the people of Charleville tried to make rain. Stationed around the town were six Stiger Vortex guns, their long, funnel-shaped barrels aimed skywards. At noon the guns were manned, and at…
forecast: 1 January 1901 The day had been hot, the air hung ‘heavy and dead’; but as evening approached, ‘ominous-looking clouds’ swept over the city, and a thundery change seemed imminent. On this, the last day of the nineteenth century,…
the charleville rainmaker Cloudy skies at last! On 26 September 1902, the drought-wearied residents of Charleville looked to the heavens with new hope. They knew, of course, that clouds offered no certainty of rain; too often before they had watched…
