‘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 he will stand shivering and motionless in the middle of a coal-less, oil-less, treeless, steel-less planet’.

As if that prospect wasn’t alarming enough, McKay concluded his survey of modern civilisation’s wasteful ways by imagining life in a future ‘treeless age’. The world’s great forests, he explained, worked to ‘restore oxygen to the air by absorbing carbon from the carbon dioxide poured from a million factory chimneys’. Without trees, carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere ’till it precipitated an Age of Heat, similar to that of the prehistoric times of the giant reptiles’. Favoured by this ‘moist tropic heat’, he predicted that earth’s reptilian masses would arise once more, forcing the last remnants of humankind to ‘retreat to the poles and fight hopelessly… a sun-darkening horde of winged lizards, already rulers of a new heaven and masters of a new earth’. Headed ‘Mankind’s Last Stand’, McKay’s article was illustrated with dramatic images of giant reptiles drawn by cartoonist Syd Miller (the creator of Chesty Bond).

Hugh McKay was a ‘modest genius’ – a journalist, chemist, inventor, poet, and writer of speculative fiction. But, as one Smith’s Weekly colleague recalled, he ’sometimes wearied of everything and everybody and retired into a beery twilight from which his harsh voice might be heard addressing humanity as “Insects! All insects! Insects all!”’ Perhaps McKay’s nightmarish vision of reptilian conquest was fuelled by a boozy bout of misanthropy. But his concerns were well-founded. Civilisation’s profligate use of fossil fuels and heedless destruction of forests has contributed to a rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Sixty years before the implications of this rise would gain widespread public attention, Hugh McKay was warning the Australian people of the dangers of global warming.

While the threat posed by winged lizards rarely features amongst the assessments of contemporary climate scientists, global warming has inspired no shortage of apocalyptic forecasts. In his depressingly persuasive book, The Weather Makers, Tim Flannery spells out the consequences should we fail to curb our runaway production of greenhouse gases. ‘If we carry on with business as usual’, he concludes, ‘in all likelihood three out of every five species will not be with us at the dawn of the new century’. Three out of every five – 60% – of all species would be lost. These are truly terrifying figures, making our well meaning attempts to preserve endangered wildlife seem painfully insignificant. But, of course, humanity itself would not escape the maelstrom of catastrophe. The damage it has wrought upon the globe would be repaid through the increased severity of droughts, more frequent and violent storms, and rising sea levels. Could our social and economic fabric survive this climatic onslaught? If our greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, Flannery argues, ‘the collapse of civilisation due to climate change becomes inevitable’ (209).

I’ve no doubt that such warnings are important, well-documented, and suitably impassioned. But do they work? If the object of all this doomsaying is to provoke the people of the world into action, those of us concerned with the complexities of history and culture might usefully ask whether fear can really change us for the better.

This is not, after all, the first time that scientists have sought to scare the public into line. The use of the atomic bomb to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inspired a vigorous campaign by scientists aimed at winning public support for the international control of atomic energy. By describing the effects of an atomic war in horrific detail, the scientists’ movement deliberately sought to ’scare the pants off’ the public. Humanity’s looming fate was symbolised by the clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – its hands edging perilously closer to midnight. One of the Bulletin’s founders, chemist Eugene Rabinowitch, explained that the journal aimed ‘to preserve our civilisation by scaring men into rationality’ (70).

Tim Flannery’s suggestion that civilisation itself might fall apart under the pressure of climate change seems to echo the words of Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, who fifty years earlier warned that in the aftermath of atomic war ‘humanity could return to the Middle Ages, and chaos would reign’. Addressing a large crowd in the Sydney Town Hall, Oliphant concluded his litany of atomic terrors by claiming that, paradoxically, ‘this desolate and terrible picture holds great hope for peace’. ‘We have not given up war for moral reasons’, he observed. ‘Perhaps we will do so to save our lives, our possessions and the lives and future of our children’.

You can’t deny the logic. If human beings can’t be relied upon to respond to noble causes, you might at least think that they would act to save their own skins. It seems so logical that historians, sociologists, psychologists and others have been forced to scrabble around for explanations as to why it didn’t happen. Why didn’t the people of the world rise up to demand an end to nuclear terror? Instead of labouring determinedly to ensure their own survival, humanity descended into apathy and denial, punctuated by brief bouts of agitation. Instead of putting an end to war, we accepted the pragmatic bastardry of Mutually Assured Destruction. Instead of limiting the development of atomic weapons, we built enough bombs to destroy ourselves several times over.

The oppressive climate of fear that the scientists’ movement helped to create may in fact have stirred up feelings of ‘helplessness and futility’, notes historian Paul Boyer. The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton argues that the overwhelming threat of atomic annihilation engendered a deep-set ‘psychic numbing’ that limited our ability to deal constructively with the bomb. We should remember too, that while our fear of death might be powerful, so too is our fear of the ‘other’. The arguments of the scientists’ movement were lost amidst bluster and paranoia, as the Cold War closed its grip on postwar politics and culture. As global warming takes on the ‘war on terror’ for attention and commitment, we might wonder how many pressing threats our culture can sustain.

But perhaps it’s also the type of fear that matters. Examining the way that fear of the bomb merged with fear of communism, Sheldon Ungar charts a series of dramatic outbursts, or ’social scares’, that erupted from the sticky swamp of nuclear dread. These ’scares’ were inspired by particular events, such as the launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite, and energised political and public debate in a way that generalised doomsaying did not. Turning his gaze on global warming, Ungar ponders whether it might similarly take an extreme climatic event – or ‘weather shock’ – to precipitate largescale action. It seems we need a focus for our fears.

Might the recent devastating hurricane season be enough, or would it take thousands of deaths in a long and brutal heatwave? Certainly, we’re already well practised in connecting our experience of weather with the idea of climate change. As Andrew Ross points out, current fears about global warming ‘can be seen as a continuation of historically regional and national anxieties’. Every bout of strange weather, over the past century or more, has yielded complaints that the climate is just not what it used to be. ‘Are the seasons changing?’, asked the Melbourne Argus in 1932, ‘Every winter appears to be colder than the last, and every summer less warm’. Meteorologists sought to explain away such commonly-held beliefs by invoking both psychology and statistics. It is the outstanding events that frame our memory of weather – those particularly hot summers, or spectacular thunderstorms. But our knowledge of climate is constructed from long-term averages, it smooths out the bumps of individual experience.

In the same way, it’s not going to be easy to find an event that clearly demonstrates the dangers of global warming. Hurricane Katrina might provide evidence that rising sea temperatures will produce increasingly violent storms, but we can’t say that the hurricane itself was caused by climate change. The proof of global warming is in averages and statistics, not in individual events – no matter how destructive or deadly. ‘From the perspective of a human lifetime’, Tim Flannery notes, ‘global warming is slow’. Gradual increases in average temperature are hidden from our day to day experience by the normal variability which makes our weather what it is. Time plays tricks on us.

Time can be measured with an extraordinary degree of precision; we can standardise it across the globe; we can count backwards and forwards from minutes to millennia, reaching deep into epochs far removed. And yet our actual experience of time has a shape and rhythm that refuses to conform to the grid. Time slows down or speeds up according to our mood or activity. Events may seem close or far away depending on their significance. Elizabeth Eisenstein explores how our attempts to narrate the past immerse us in ‘history-book time’. Events are assigned to a series of sequential chapters, developing in texture and detail as we approach the present. But, of course, just as we reach the ‘most personally significant, densely packed, fact-crowded final chapter’, the narrative suddenly breaks off. We appear on the scene as the story ends, where ‘previous experience offers no sure guide’. This is why, Eisenstein suggests, each generation imagines itself facing an unprecedented crisis – positioned at a critical moment in history.

History is littered with discarded crossroads, with crucial decisions that were never made, with new eras that were never born. ‘Humanity is at the cross-roads’, the Rev. Dr Clifford Norman Button warned his Ballarat congregation on the Sunday following the first use of the atomic bomb, ‘This is a turning point in history, perhaps the most solemn turning point of all history’. Like Button, many commentators argued that this ‘new age’, the Atomic Age, confronted humankind with a choice between progress and destruction – a choice it could not ignore or escape. But, sixty years later, we inhabit neither a nuclear wasteland nor an atomic utopia. The choice was never made. Instead we stumble along the easiest path, as our expectations of change are consumed by inertia and expediency. But next time, of course, it will be different! ‘[E]ach generation discovers that earlier turning points have failed to turn after all’, Eisenstein notes, ‘while remaining convinced that the real “great divide”… is occurring in its own day and age’.

If we are to grapple with the complexities of global warming we must become more aware of our own passage through time. The idea that we are facing something new is itself extremely old. By focusing on the ‘new’ challenges wrought by climate change, on the critical juncture we face, there is a danger we will merely replay familiar rituals of accommodation and denial. We will hide behind our faulty memories and watch as the world burns around us.

But why worry? A solution is sure to be found… in time. While the past seems to leave us on the precipice of history, the future promises to solve all our problems. The idea of progress invites us to gaze with confidence upon an ‘open horizon’, an empty future into which we can shovel all our unpleasant, stinking messes for disposal. We imagine that time itself will dispel our dilemmas, time will give us the answers we lack. We colonise the future as an ‘extended present’ to free us of any uncomfortable sense of urgency – we have all the time that we need!

The assumption of linear progression implicit in modern western culture has bestowed upon us a timescape that inhibits our ability to respond to environmental challenges. And so, global warming looms as an unprecedented crisis, when it is an expression of our long love affair with growth and materialism. Even as we find in it our latest turning point, we break the chain of consequence that would lead us back to examine our culture’s sordid history of environmental exploitation. Answers are sought, not in fundamental change, but in the hope that the future will grant us redemption. We pile up our shit and roll it ahead, like an army of frenzied dung beetles.

My fear is that visions of a climatic apocalypse might simply bring about more of the same. Those who are already sympathetic to the cause may well be inspired to action. Tim Flannery’s impassioned account of the coming environmental holocaust has certainly landed a well-aimed kick upon the cushioned quarters of my own complacency. But how many will instead fall back upon familiar habits of forgetting and denial? No doubt, as with the nuclear threat, we will experience cycles of awareness and activity – but what will really change? Instead of real choices we will be presented with limited, short-term policy responses, in which biodiversity ultimately loses to economic growth. As temperatures rise, large-scale engineering schemes will provide the illusion of security, while adding to the profits of multinational corporations. While the world’s climate system teeters on the brink, the rich will find ways to insulate themselves (both literally and figuratively), leaving the poorest nations and the poorest people to bear the cost of our hunger for power. Imagine Hurricane Katrina on a global scale – those with resources will flee to safety, leaving the poor and marginalised to defend themselves against the climate’s growing fury.

If we are going to rescue the future from our recklessness, if we are going to discover new ways to live, if we are going to save at least some of the species that are scheduled for extinction, then we have to learn to change our minds. Scientists have warned us of the scale of the task ahead, now we have to translate the threat into action and belief. We have to understand the culture of climate change.

Such an analysis might usefully begin with an exploration of time and space. How do we comprehend the dimensions of global warming? The cultural complexities of global space have already been brought into focus by the onwards, grinding pressure of globalisation. Andrew Ross notes that while the threat of climate change might encourage a greater sense of ‘global awareness’, we still have to consider who sets the rules for participation in the framing of global solutions. Questions of global equity also concern Clive Hamilton who argues for new ‘legal and ethical relationships between nations’ based on the principles of ‘contraction and convergence’. Global space demands a global ethics.

But surely questions of equity and responsibility must also be applied to time. Barbara Adam describes a ‘global present’ that ‘requires personal and collective responsibilities that span not just election cycles… but hundreds of generations’. Instead of turning our backs on the past and claiming the future as our own, we have to learn to share the consequences of our actions across the boundaries of time. Just as any effective action to limit greenhouse gas emissions must involve cooperation between the nations of the world, so we must find ways to cooperate both with generations past and generations yet to come. We are all in it together.

It’s about making connections – connecting our decision whether to walk or drive to the shops with the fate of an alpine frog; connecting the comforts of our homes and lifestyle with a history of environmental pillage; connecting what we do today with the fate of the earth in a hundred years. Scientists must continue to warn of the catastrophe we have brought upon ourselves. But we need more. We need to connect to times and places distant, we have to embrace our responsibilities, and rediscover our hopes. This is more than a change in the weather – global warming challenges us to question our preoccupation with crossroads and crises, to pursue the meaning of progress, to undo our assumptions about time itself. Those of us concerned with the analysis of culture can help negotiate the roadblocks of apathy and denial. We can take up the fight against the giant, winged lizards and imagine a future with a future.

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Remembering Lawrence Hargrave – Hargrave's models on display, 1919.

In 1962 William Hudson Shaw, a Qantas executive, knocked at the door of a cottage in the seaside village of Walmer, Kent. Shaw was in the grip of an obsession – a ‘labour of love’ to document the ‘true story’ of Australian aeronautical pioneer Lawrence Hargrave. This quest had brought Shaw to the home of Helen Gray, Hargrave’s eldest daughter, his beloved ‘Nellie’. Now into her 80s, Helen Gray remained firmly protective of her father’s memory, yet strangely ambivalent about his achievements. Nonetheless, through Hudson Shaw’s visit and the correspondence that followed, the two became friends and collaborators. ‘I feel so grateful that you have such great interest in L.H. [and] his work’, the elderly woman wrote in 1963, ‘what a difference it has made to my life that you appeared at the right time’. The biographer gained insight into the personal life of his subject, and the daughter was relieved of the burden of defending her father against the ill-formed judgments of history.

Yesterday's Tomorrows

Helen Gray entrusted her new friend with a number of her father’s papers and artefacts. These Shaw transferred to the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, which, under director J L Willis, was ‘endeavouring to collect under one roof, all the Hargrave relics’. Lawrence Hargrave had himself donated nine of his monoplane models to the museum in 1891. However, ten years later, his offer of a large collection of models, apparatus and photographs, constituting a ‘continuous record’ of his experimental activities, was carelessly let slip by the director Richard Baker. These models finally found a home at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where most were destroyed by bombing during World War II. The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences retrieved the remnants in 1960, followed shortly after by Hargrave’s journals and drawings from England, as well as Helen Gray’s mementos. ‘Mr Willis’ Hargrave collection … is now of some consequence’, Hudson Shaw wrote to Helen Gray in 1963.

With the return of the models to Sydney it seemed that Hargrave’s legacy had arrived home – a circle had been closed. ‘My thoughts turned back’, Helen Gray remarked, ‘to when L.H. first offered them to the T[echnological] M[useum] …very long ago’. The collected models and documents were finally arranged for public display in the Lawrence Hargrave Memorial Court, opened by the museum on 8 December 1967. Helen Gray did not live to see the completion of ‘Mr Willis’s new gallery’, but she was able to observe and enjoy the reawakening of public interest in her father’s achievements: in 1965, Lawrence Hargrave had been commemorated on a stamp, and the following year he joined Kingsford Smith as one of the faces on the new $20 note. ‘I am sure you will agree that this is the greatest compliment that has been paid to your Father to date’, Shaw wrote, ‘and if indeed you now need any endorsement of his place in Australian history his inclusion with such great historical figures as Macarthur, Farrer, Greenway, Lawson and Kingsford-Smith is endorsement enough’. Helen Gray died a few months later in April 1966. Her father’s memory at last seemed secure.

A want of patriotism

‘The further you delve into the records it seems to me the worse the Museum looks’, remarked J L Willis to Hudson Shaw in 1966. Shaw was trying to document the convoluted series of events that had allowed Hargrave’s models to be lost to Australia for almost 50 years. Although the museum ultimately prevailed in ‘the fight for the models’, the casualties were severe. More than 70 models left Australia in 1910; only 16 returned. ‘Wherever the blame lies’, Willis added, ‘the loss of so much precious material is heart-breaking’.

In 1901, the needs of a growing family forced Lawrence Hargrave ‘to curtail the lavish expenditure of time and labour’ that he had, for more than 17 years, ‘freely given for the advancement of the art of flying’. In the hope that others would continue his work, he proposed to donate his collection of models and apparatus to the Technological Museum. Included were engines of various sorts, ‘soaring machines’ and models demonstrating ‘the mechanics of animal locomotion’. ‘Any other man who takes the matter up would be saved a huge amount of useless labour if he could see my results in their consecutive order’, he explained. He offered the collection on the condition that it be given ‘suitable well-lighted accommodation’ in ‘strong carefully made glass cases’. Richard Baker, the museum’s director, replied that his institution had no more money for show cases, and suggested instead that Hargrave might wish to update the existing display of his earlier models. It was a half-hearted effort that even managed to misspell the inventor’s name. Instead of seeking to maintain his goodwill, Hargrave’s resentment was allowed to fester.

For the next eight years Hargrave searched for a home that would provide his creations with the care and attention they deserved. The University of Sydney baulked at the cost of cases; the University of Liverpool only wanted the ‘principal things’; the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain promised to keep his ‘generous offer in mind’; and while the Smithsonian was more enthusiastic, it could do nothing for two or three years until its new building was complete. ‘I once more lay myself open to be snubbed’, an exasperated Hargrave informed readers of the Daily Telegraph in September 1909. Offering the people of Sydney ‘no less than 13 tons measurement of models and apparatus’, he declared, ‘I cannot lay these models on the curbstone, neither can I build a hall to hold them’. As options dwindled, Hargrave repeated the offer to H W L Moedebeck, a respected German colleague. On the 13 January 1910 a cable arrived from Moedebeck: ‘Accepted’. Within a few weeks the models were on their way to the Deutsches Museum.

‘It is a regrettable thing’, noted the Sydney Morning Herald in 1915, and ‘indeed something of a disgrace’ that the government of NSW could find no room for Hargrave’s models. In the years following his death, the ‘indifference’ of museum authorities was taken as a sign of the ‘open ridicule’ with which the people of Sydney greeted Hargrave’s endeavours. He was treated as a ‘crackpot’, writers claimed, a ‘crazy kite flier’. When Hargrave had tried to donate his models to the museum, the Bulletin explained in 1940, he was ‘dismissed as a crank’. The fate of the models reflected Hargrave’s status as a neglected visionary.

But as Richard Baker was ever eager to point out, the models actually were accepted by the museum late in 1909. Even as Hargrave was putting his case before the Germans, the wheels of government were slowly turning in his favour. Did he receive the news too late, or had the embittered inventor simply given up any hope that the museum would ever meet his requirements? Hargrave believed that his first offer in 1901 had been ‘declined with scorn’, and in November 1909 wrote to a friend in England that the local authorities were ‘mean + ignorant and not at all likely to offer suitable accommodation’. Such niggardly nonsense seemed in contrast with the enthusiasm of the Germans, who had ‘nobly’ stepped in to solve ‘an old man’s dilemma’. In any case, wherever they were, the models would at last be accessible to all interested members of the public. ‘If there is anything in the world of universal interest, it is “Flying”‘, Hargrave explained to the editor of the British Aeronautical Journal, ‘and that art must not be checked in any way by keeping people in ignorance of what others have done, tried, or failed to do’.

Baker viewed the matter rather differently, and lost no opportunity to defend his museum and the people of Sydney against any accusation of prejudice. Inside the case displaying the earlier monoplane models, Baker arranged photographic copies of official correspondence which, he argued, ‘conclusively prove … that the New South Wales Government did accept Hargrave’s offer’. In spite of this, Baker maintained, Hargrave ‘was persuaded by the German Government to send his models to Germany’. Baker recounted these events a number of times, both in public and private. The details became more elaborate with time and the telling, and Hargrave’s actions appeared more questionable. As critics returned again and again to the museum’s supposed failure, Baker, like Hargrave, became mired in bitterness. In 1940, some 30 years after the event, Baker described his ‘personal and official connection’ with Hargrave as ‘the only and most unhappy incident of my scientific career’.

Baker portrayed Hargrave’s actions as a personal betrayal. He had no doubt that the inventor knew of the government’s intentions and claimed to have discussed developments with him personally. News that the models had instead been ‘dispatched to Germany’ thus caused him ‘great surprise, shock and indignation’. ‘I cut his friendship after that’, Baker explained to Mrs J Hamilton-Marshall, though there is little evidence that such a friendship ever existed. But the idea that Hargrave had been ‘persuaded’ by the Germans hinted at an even greater disloyalty. Mrs Hamilton-Marshall informed Baker that two Germans had visited Hargrave and convinced him that if the models were given to their government ‘they would be open to the world’. ‘How they must have gone round the corner to laugh’, Baker replied, ‘Germany was a closed book and a closed country and Lawrence Hargraves [sic] should have known it’. The two mysterious Germans featured in Baker’s later accounts, and in the 1940 version they were said to have paid for the dispatch of the models ‘in English gold’. According to Baker, Hargrave had given the Germans exactly what they were after, displaying ‘a want of patriotism almost unbelievable in an Australian’.

Even those who blamed the museum for the loss of the models were wary of Germany’s motives. Hargrave’s research, it was claimed, contributed to the country’s aerial power in the early years of World War I. What was perceived as the calculating nature of the Germans’ generosity encouraged a belief that the models remained Australia’s possessions by right. As World War II neared its end, J F Meehan wrote to Arthur Calwell suggesting that the models now be retrieved. ‘Other nations today are tearing from Germany every item looted from their particular country’, he argued, ‘if we have any national pride in the achievements of our own people, we should insist on this material being restored to Australia’. The Illawarra Historical Society similarly called for the models to be returned to their ‘rightful owners, the people of Australia’. The Commonwealth government pursued the matter, but American administrators quashed their hopes. The models were a gift, not loot – Australia had no claim. It was only through the generosity of the Deutsches Museum that the surviving models were finally returned in 1960.

Where did Hargrave’s loyalties lie? He was a free-trader, a New South Welshman, an Australian, a Briton, who accepted with pride a medal from Prince Luitpold of Bavaria and sought vice-regal permission to wear it in public. But he was also a pioneer, an inventor, a thinker and a dreamer, who was inspired in his work ‘by the thought of the great benefit artificial flight would be to our proud and scattered species by bringing about a knowledge of one another, and so dispelling the dark clouds of prejudice which keep us at enmity’.

Hudson Shaw observed the tension between Hargrave the idealist, who foresaw an end to national conflict, and Hargrave the realist, who volunteered for battery duty and farewelled his only son, Geoffrey, to war. Hargrave understood the irony only too well. Responding in 1915 to criticism of a plan to use the German Concordia Club as a hospital for wounded soldiers, Hargrave insisted ‘it shows a mean and petty spirit if we refuse a figurative drop of water from the foe’. His letter to the Daily Telegraph is pasted in his journal. Next to it he wrote: ‘Geoffrey Lewis Hargrave killed in action on the morning of May 24th – about the time I was prompted to write this letter’. Geoffrey, who shared his father’s passion for engineering, was killed at Gallipoli. Other than a received letter and an index of expenditure, Hargrave’s journal ends at this point. He died of peritonitis six weeks later on 6 July.

‘I have always regretted Lawrence Hargrave’s action in this matter’, Richard Baker wrote to the Royal Society of Arts, seeking to correct their account of the museum’s ‘indifference’ towards the models, ‘and I am afraid a writer at the time accounted for his death in the words “but I know that the German bullet that killed his only son, killed Lawrence Hargraves” [sic]‘.

A prophet without honour

D M Dow, a publicity officer in the Prime Minister’s Department, was inspired. In December 1923, an article in the Argus lauded Lawrence Hargrave as the man who made the ‘air age’ possible. What particularly impressed Dow was the claim that, in August 1884, one of Hargrave’s monoplane models had become ‘the first inanimate thing to fly with its own power’. Dow wrote excitedly to the controller of civil aviation, suggesting that the 40th anniversary of this ‘great event’ be commemorated by an aerial display, in which Australian aviators would pay ‘homage to the memory of the Australian who made aviation possible’. In Hargrave’s home town of Sydney, he thought, fliers might ‘drop wreaths from the air over his grave’. Sadly, such a colourful, if risky, tableau was never to be enacted-Dow’s scheme failed to ignite official interest. But this was not the only attempt to have the inventor admitted to the pantheon of Australian greats. In 1915, obituary writers proclaimed Hargrave to be a ‘prophet without honour’, an ‘unappreciated genius’. For the past century, familiar reminders of his ‘forgotten’ status have introduced efforts to memorialise Hargrave’s achievements.

The museum’s Lawrence Hargrave Memorial Court benefited from one of these earlier efforts, inheriting its commemorative function and more than £1200 from a fund established in 1920 by the NSW Section of the Australian Aero Club. Colonel Oswald Watt, a much-honoured aviator, argued that celebrations surrounding Ross Smith’s ‘epoch-making’ flight from England to Australia provided an opportune moment to recognise Hargrave, the ‘father of flying’. A suitable memorial would assist in ‘perpetuating the memory’ of this ‘pioneer of aviation’, who had persevered against ‘prejudice, disbelief and apathy’. Watt launched the fund with a donation of 50 guineas, but though a good number of worthy citizens followed his example, the proposed monument was never built. Watt drowned in 1921, and was duly honoured with his very own memorial. Ross Smith was killed the following year as he prepared for another airborne adventure. With so many dashing, young aviators risking their lives to push the limits of their art, the claims of the inventor, with his models and kites, might have seemed less pressing.

But it was Hargrave himself who had moved to stymie earlier plans to win him tribute. In 1909, when the newly formed Aerial League of Australia professed its aim ‘to secure best recognition for Australian efforts’, Hargrave understood that he was intended to be the major beneficiary. What was needed was not ‘recognition’, he argued fiercely, but dedication and ideas. ‘If my old work gives you a lead in any direction’, he declared, improve upon it’. Hargrave also remained wary of the ‘scorn and ridicule’ that he felt had greeted his early efforts. Public plaudits and self-congratulation would only open the way for further envy and derision. ‘You cannot read Australian sentiment as I can’, he warned the secretary of the Aerial League, ‘You cannot understand the bed-rock feelings of Sydney people to one who has lived among them for 42 years and yet is not of them’.

Perhaps the ageing inventor was also uncertain of his supposed success. For all his models and experiments, he had not built an aircraft capable of manned flight. Even as the Aerial League was looking to him for inspiration, Hargrave was wondering how ‘at the age of 59, with slow and crystallized methods ingrained in me, and somewhat maimed’ he could continue to contribute to the unfolding revolution. His ideas had won him praise, but little money, and he was increasingly unable to meet the financial needs of his family. In 1910 Hargrave drafted an advertisement for publication overseas, which offered the benefits of his ‘considerable technical constructive ability’. Lawrence Hargrave, the ad announced, ‘wants to know if his services are of value to anyone, and if so, what is their value’. Hargrave’s success was contained in the possibilities of flight, in the dreams and ambitions of others. What kind of success was this? ‘Mum has lost all faith in me as an engineer owing to my long list of failures’, he admitted in a letter to Nellie.

Hargrave’s feeling of isolation from the people of Sydney was mirrored within his own family. Only Nellie (Helen) and Geoff seemed to understand the significance of their father’s obsession. Hudson Shaw surmised that ‘family bitterness and division’ had left a shadow on Helen Gray’s memories. She was ‘inclined to have an inferiority complex with regard to her Father’, he wrote to Helen’s daughter Grizel Gray, ‘she has allowed the negative aspects of his life … to almost push out the picture of the real Lawrence Hargrave’. Until Shaw’s arrival at her doorstep, Helen Gray had refused to cooperate with biographers, and had sought to prevent publication by ‘various journalists who had never seen him’.

On 3 August 1940, local boy scouts flew box-kites in tribute to Hargrave as a memorial was unveiled on Bald Hill, overlooking the beach at Stanwell Park where the inventor had conducted many of his experiments. Hargrave had died during World War I, fearful that his legacy might be turned solely to destructive ends. By August 1940, with the Battle of Britain in its early stages, the horror of war in the air was becoming all too familiar. ‘We are here in respect to the memory of this man’, proclaimed the governor, Lord Wakehurst, dedicating the memorial, ‘and to show what Australia has given towards gaining mastery of the air and winning the war’.

But the memorial on Bald Hill was due less to the thanks of a grateful nation than to the enthusiasm of the Bulli Shire Council, which was keen to promote the local connections of the man ‘on whose models the modern aeroplane is patterned’. Although stung by the ‘indifference’ of the people of Sydney, Hargrave had been adopted by citizens to the south. The Wollongong region has proudly associated itself with the inventor’s memory and achievements, although, in 1963, the ‘tragic’ siting of a toilet block next to the Bald Hill memorial seemed to hint at a certain lack of respect – ‘It looks like a monument itself’, commented one observer. Local tourism authorities now boldly declare Stanwell Park to be ‘the birthplace of flight’, and kids with kites are a feature of an annual festival celebrating their neglected pioneer. A documentary pushing Hargrave’s claim to recognition opened Wollongong’s ‘Innovation Week 2004′. The director hoped the film would ‘help re-educate a nation’, while the general manager of the Wollongong Image Campaign claimed that Hargrave’s work ‘was historical validation that Wollongong had always been an innovative city’.

The Lawrence Hargrave Memorial Court was closed in the early 1980s as the museum prepared its move to the Powerhouse. Most of the models were placed in storage, much to the annoyance of Hudson Shaw, who accused the museum of ‘hiding the collection and denying the public an opportunity to view a significant part of Australia’s heritage’. In 1994, as enthusiasts planned a re-enactment to commemorate the centenary of Hargrave’s famous kite ascent, the $20 note was replaced – the inventor’s familiar grey-bearded visage disappeared from public view. Once more it seemed the prophet was to be stripped of his honour, once more to be ‘forgotten’, neglected and unrecognised. According to a recent ABC television program, Hargrave has been ‘left out of the history books’. For over a hundred years, Hargrave has been commemorated most powerfully by admissions of ignorance and neglect. For someone to whom the idea of ‘recognition’ was problematic, it is perhaps appropriate that Lawrence Hargrave is most often remembered as a man too often forgotten.

Knowledge without words

‘Come boys’, Hargrave exhorted in 1907, ‘make things that fly’. In person, Hargrave was a man of few words, well aware of his inadequacies as a teacher. Replying to a request to deliver a lecture before a group of engineers, Hargrave demurred, ‘I think I am a mechanic. You call me an authority. I know I am not a lecturer’. He was, as he explained to a journalist, ‘very slow at conveying information’. And yet he would happily invite the public to inspect his workshop, and spend a Saturday afternoon showing a group of school boys how to ‘make and fly cellular kites’. Information flowed more easily when he was surrounded by his models. Hargrave looked on his models, one colleague remarked, ‘as his very soul’s work’. Here were his ideas, here were his mistakes – visible to any young person who might learn and improve. Offering up his life’s work to the people of Sydney, Hargrave explained that the models conveyed ‘knowledge without words’.

Hargrave refused to patent his work, on grounds both of principle and practicality. ‘Even if I had patented’, he wrote to George Crossland Taylor, ‘there was no possibility of collecting revenue from the users of my invention’. The life of a patentee, he wrote elsewhere, was spent ‘in a ceaseless war with infringers’. Any ‘loot’ was merely ‘squandered’ – ‘broadcast among shoals of sharks’. More importantly, patents served to ‘block progress’ by taxing future development. ‘When man ceases to invent his doom is sealed’, Hargrave warned, ‘he must sink to brute level’.

Competition unhindered by artificial barriers offered the only true guarantee of progress. For Hargrave this was not merely an economic doctrine, but a law of nature. His opposition to patents and his support of free trade stemmed from his commitment to social darwinism. In 1903, Hargrave wrote to the newspapers criticising plans for old-age pensions as a ‘hopeless attempt to alter by legislation the eternal law of the survival of the fittest’. Individual misfortune, he argued, should be borne ‘English fashion in silence’, until by using ‘our inborn energy we push again and again to the front’. Hargrave’s belief in competition led him to oppose all attempts at ‘protection’, from the prohibition of drugs and alcohol to the White Australia policy. ‘Races’ were, after all, only the products of isolation and would ‘disappear as the facilities of travel increase’. Competition bred individual character and national strength. ‘Throw down our artificial barriers’, he proclaimed, ‘admit all and everything in free competition; if we have not the strength to hold our own and advance in civilization we are a superfluity’.

The models were Hargrave’s gift to competition, to the progress of civilisation. Whether they were in Munich, Washington or Sydney, as long as they were available to inquiring minds, they would spark further ideas and inventions. However, when the surviving models returned from Germany in 1960, they spoke not of the future but the past. Instead of inspiring young minds to ‘make things that fly’, the models were offered as a long-overdue memorial to ‘one of Australia’s great aeronautical pioneers’. This shift in meaning of course reflected dramatic developments in aeronautics itself – the days of timber and fabric were long gone. But the museum which welcomed them home had also changed. In 1891, Hargrave’s monoplane models were gratefully accepted by an institution with close ties to technical education. A decade later, Baker’s careless rejection came as he sought to develop the museum’s own research activities, while, in the 1960s, it was the collections that J L Willis was working to expand. The significance of the models varied according to the museum’s aims and emphases.

In 1966, Hudson Shaw was worried that Hargrave’s original intentions were being ignored. The inventor was concerned, Shaw explained to Willis, ‘that the models should be … visible for all to see that they might learn how they were constructed and operated’. Damage and deterioration had made this impossible, he claimed, so that ‘even an Engineer might be surprised that they worked at all’. This was an ‘old argument in Museums’, Willis replied, whether to preserve or restore. In this case technical clarity was deemed less important than maintaining the models ‘exactly as when Hargrave last touched them’. The models were a record of the man, rather than a repository of ideas.

The meaning of the models began to shift once again as they lay in storage in the late 1980s. The museum initiated a program to collect and document examples of Australian innovation – from the stump-jump plough to the Hills hoist and beyond. Successful innovators, according to the museum, were those able to protect their ideas, and to develop and market their product. Walter Hume, for example, Hargrave’s contemporary, used his idea for a new casting process for concrete pipes to create one of Australia’s largest manufacturing companies. By 1939 they held over 500 patents. Amidst this catalogue of Australian innovation, Hargrave seems an ill-fit – almost a case study of how not to succeed. He sought no patents, and was driven not by the needs of the market but his own standards of perfection and progress. In a world which seeks to harness innovation to economic growth, where ‘free-trade’ agreements reinforce protection of intellectual property, the lessons contained within the models remain difficult to discern.

The Powerhouse Museum marked the centenary of powered flight, in December 2003, with the opening of a new exhibition- ‘Lawrence Hargrave: Australia’s pioneer aviator’. A hundred years earlier Hargrave had learnt of the Wright brothers’ success while suffering from a bout of typhoid (his health never fully recovered). But whatever doubts there might be about the nature of Hargrave’s achievements can be resolved by focusing on his place in the lineage of aviation. Whatever his frustrations or disappointments, there is no doubt that he hastened the development of manned flight. For all the ‘scorn and ridicule’, he was right. And to make certain of the point, biographers and enthusiasts continue their quest to prove a connection with the Wright brothers’ design. In the models we can see the foundations of flight, the evidence of Hargrave’s place in history.

In May 1908, Hargrave eagerly awaited the visit of the United States’ ‘Great White Fleet’. He admired America’s inventive abilities and commitment to competition, and imagined the fleet to be well-endowed with budding engineers-bright, young men keen to pursue recent developments in aeronautics. Hargrave issued an invitation to the fleet, unpacked as many of his models as could be displayed within his workshop, and waited. No one came; ‘not even a boy’, he wrote to his American colleague, Octave Chanute.

How should we remember Lawrence Hargrave? Is he waiting still, surrounded by his models, for us to grant him fulfilment? Does his life gain meaning only through our attempts to win him widespread recognition? Perhaps it shows more respect to leave him waiting and anxious – his passions still burning, his conflicts unresolved. Surrounded by his models, ‘his very soul’s work’, Hargrave is more than a link in the chain of progress. The models may no longer educate young engineers, but they do speak of determination and creativity. Knowledge without words – the museum holds the evidence of a remarkable man and his hopes. Dreams, too, can fly.

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The glow of his campfire framed a simple tableau of pioneer life. Across this ‘untenanted land’, Edwin Brady mused, ‘little companies’, such as his own, sat by their ‘solitary fires’. ‘They smoked pipes and talked, or watched the coals reflectively’. Around them, the ‘shadowy outlines’ of the bush merged into the dark northern night, and ‘the whispers’ of this ‘unknown’ land gathered about. It seemed to Brady that this camp, this night, represented the ‘actual life’ of the Northern Territory as he had known it. But the future weighed heavily upon that quiet, nostalgic scene. The moment would soon fade, Brady reflected, as the ‘cinematograph of Time’ rolled on. It was 1912, and something new was coming.

Staring into the flames of the campfire, Brady imagined he heard ‘the whistle of the Trans-continental Express’. The ‘rumble of freight trains’ followed, and the sound of water churning in the wake of ‘fast coastal steamers’. The night was filled with movement as Brady perceived an end to the north’s crippling isolation, the conquest of its ‘lonesome distances’. New industries too! The ‘chug-chug’ of sugar mills, ‘the buzzing of cotton jinnys’, ‘the clinking of harvesters’, ‘the hissing of refrigerators’—as Brady listened, ‘the thousand homely sounds of human progress’ joined in a triumphant ‘hymn of the Future’. The night’s subtle whispers were lost amidst the clamour of technology on the move. Not mere campfires, but ‘young cities’, electric lit and alive with enterprise’, would soon arise to defeat the darkness. This was Brady’s dream. This was progress.

Edwin James Brady, poet and journalist, visited the Northern Territory in September 1912, gathering material for his ambitious compendium of Australian developmental opportunities, Australia Unlimited. Brady was travelling the country, charting the outlines of Australia’s future with his typical optimistic zeal. His trip north was drawing to a close and, as he relaxed by his last campfire, he began to ponder the transformation of the Territory. The sounds and images conjured from the night reveal much about the spirit that invigorated his work. He imagined an end to isolation and emptiness, the growth of both population and production. The future was rising like a flood, lapping at the frontiers of settlement, ready to redeem Australia’s waste lands with the regenerative flow of human ingenuity and enthusiasm. Australia’s unlimited prospects lay both in the conquest of space and the fulfillment of time. Plotted against these two axes, the upward course of progress was clear.

The ‘cinematograph of Time’ was an apt metaphor. It portrayed the unfolding story of Australia’s national progress as a product of the latest technology, presented with an assured sense of inevitability – frame follows frame follows frame. In the early years of the century, confidence in the transforming power of science and technology was high. ‘The wealth of today’, Brady argued, ‘is but a beggar’s moiety of the unlimited wealth of the future which will be won by the application of modern knowledge to local conditions’. His optimism is echoed still in the slogans of ‘knowledge nation’ and ‘new economy’. Science and technology remain as engines for change, cascading revolution upon revolution. The weight of inevitability that threatened to extinguish Brady’s isolated campfire continues to press upon our visions of the future –invigorating our hopes and intensifying our fears. We are all familiar with the story of progress, a compelling tale of growth and improvement that entwines national ambition with individual longing. But how are our journeys through life framed within this unrolling narrative? What choices do we have, and how do we make them?

For Brady, progress was measured in miles and acres, a story of continental conquest. Land figures less prominently in contemporary calculations of achievement, nonetheless, we continue to imagine progress in terms of distance travelled, as a journey, ever onwards through time. In a landscape of metaphors, amidst metaphors of landscape, the meaning of progress eludes easy analysis. Our future is constructed within the shifting space of time. This essay imagines an alternate journey, one that explores the terrain that separates the life of an individual from the destiny of Australia Unlimited; a journey that carries us from science, to nation, to citizen, venturing unsteadily along the boundary between hope and fear. If the topography remains unclear, the scale awry, we might at least hope to chart a few reference points along the frontiers of the future.

all this paraphernalia

In July 1909, the Minister for External Affairs, Littleton Groom, introduced legislation for the Commonwealth takeover of the Northern Territory. Groom, a methodical and well-educated liberal MP from Queensland, briefly surveyed the history of the Territory and presented to the House ‘a few opinions of practical men’, all of whom were optimistic about the region’s potential. ‘[W]e have there’, Groom concluded, ‘some of the finest land in Australia’. Nonetheless, it was clear that the Territory’s ‘latent resources’ would not be extracted without effort. The investment of capital and a dramatic increase in population were essential, but so too was an increase in knowledge. ‘We are every year acquiring a better knowledge of our natural conditions and a better understanding of the laws of production’, Groom argued. It was through such an understanding, he continued, that ‘much of the land which is now despised will ultimately become very productive’. Where would this knowledge come from? Groom looked to a scientific agency whose establishment he had advocated since his entry into politics—a Federal Bureau of Agriculture.

Littleton Groom embodied much of the spirit of ‘new liberalism’, or ‘progressive liberalism’ as he termed it. By the late 19th century, traditional laissez faire policies seemed increasingly impotent in the face of growing threats to social cohesion and unparalleled opportunities for accelerated development. Responding to this challenge, new liberals sought to wield the power of the state to claim progress as their own, to enrich the character of their citizens, and to ensure the prosperity of their nation. ‘I want to see the individual and individuality developed to the full’, Groom argued, and wherever the state ‘can be used for the purpose of doing good for the people as a whole, then I believe in the State exercising its powers accordingly’. It was a creed carried into the first federal parliament under the banner of protectionism, defended most eloquently by Groom’s friend and colleague, Alfred Deakin.

The idea of a federal bureau to foster agricultural improvement was emblematic of the new liberals’ cause, a clear example of how government could employ ‘direct agencies’ in the manufacture of progress. Fashioned after the US Department of Agriculture, the proposed Australian bureau was expected to coordinate scientific investigations and collect ‘the very best and latest information’ for dissemination to primary producers. Such ‘intelligent legislation’, Groom maintained, brought ‘greater liberty’ to the farmer, while also boosting the country’s productive capacity. Both individual and nation would grow. Deakin, who himself had made a special study of irrigation, was a keen supporter of the measure, as were a number of other prominent protectionists. Isaac Isaacs argued passionately: ‘All this paraphernalia … is only the gold lace of the Constitution, unless we can make of it an engine for the promotion of the material, moral, and social welfare of the people’.

The Bureau of Agriculture was invested with many of the attributes of an ideal, progressive society. Scientist and farmer would work together, melding knowledge and practice, intellect and endeavour. Their cooperative efforts promised both an enlightened citizenry and a wealthy nation. This presumed interdependence and its implicit sense of balance was at the core of Groom’s liberalism. He quoted approvingly the Victorian Director of Education’s assessment that an ‘ideal education’ concerned itself with ‘physical fitness’, ‘mental fitness’ and ‘moral fitness’. ‘So it was with national life’, Groom added, ‘Industrial and intellectual capacity must be developed’. The nation’s greatest resources, he argued, lay in ‘the hand power, the brain power and the heart power of our manhood and womanhood’. There was no simple formula for progress. It was a property both of individuals and of nations. In a good society the two were closely linked, proceeding apace. But this could be achieved only through a complex set of balancing acts, by constantly tweaking the levels of authority and freedom, duty and reward, ideals and practice, knowledge and control.

the modern hayseed

The life and work of Littleton Groom was memorialised by his widow Jessie, in a biography she compiled under the title, Nation Building in Australia. A tad grandiose, but the title perhaps speaks more of Groom’s compelling sense of duty than it does of posthumous puffery. ‘Nation building’ was a commitment, an act of service, a life to be lived, not a victory to be won. However, the title also makes reference to one of the most significant periods in Groom’s political life. From 1905–8, he served as a minister in Alfred Deakin’s protectionist government. Although they were a parliamentary minority with a fragile hold on power, Deakin’s protectionists nonetheless embarked upon an ambitious legislative program that did much to define the nature of Australian federalism. The achievements of this administration were eulogised by Groom himself in a pamphlet also entitled ‘Nation Building in Australia’. It was a phrase that linked the personal and the political, a citizen’s duty and a country’s destiny.

As Minister for Home Affairs, and later Attorney-General, Groom contributed significantly to the government’s tally of ‘practical legislation’. But his achievements in areas such as meteorology, statistics and bounties were intended as part of a broader system of institutions and legislation, designed to manage Australia’s productive resources through the rational application of scientific knowledge. At the heart of this system he imagined his Bureau of Agriculture. With Australia’s economy heavily dependent upon primary industry, Groom argued that the establishment of such a bureau could ‘be justified on financial considerations alone’. Not only would existing farms be made more efficient, the frontiers of land settlement would be advanced. Immigrants would be rallied to Australia’s great nation-building crusade, inspired by the government’s support for small landholders.

But there was also a moral dimension to the promise of agricultural improvement. ‘We may trust the cupidity of mankind to develop our mineral resources’, Deakin remarked pointedly, ‘but agricultural, pastoral, and kindred pursuits need the superintending and assisting help of the States and of the Commonwealth’. Agriculture was not just about profit. Isaac Isaacs had argued for the need to ‘liberalise’ agriculture, ‘to raise it to a level higher than it has ever occupied before, to give it a dignity, a worth and a profit which may raise the Australian nation in the whole scale of civilization’. The application of science promised to ‘elevate’ agriculture and its practitioners. No more would the farmer be figure of ridicule, a ‘clodhopper’, a ‘hayseed’. On the contrary, Deakin argued, ‘The modern “Hayseed” is an up-to-date, keenly alive businessman, whose study is how to make the best of a small area with limited means but unlimited intelligence’.

Science was a potent addition to the regenerative elixir of frontier life. The idea that a new ‘type’ of man was being created at the nexus of European civilisation and Australian environment had gained considerable currency, infused by progressive assumptions about the benefits of rural living and the role of the frontier in the formation of national character. Edwin Brady warned that the land’s ‘ancient lineage forbids the familiarity of the unworthy’, and welcomed its ‘paradoxes and difficulties’ as a test of Australia’s physical and mental prowess. The establishment of a Bureau of Agriculture was a response to this continental challenge, offering further improvement of the Australian type through a reinvigorated assault on the vicissitudes of frontier existence. Groom quoted approvingly US President Roosevelt’s assessment, that as well as creating wealth, his own department must aim ‘to foster agriculture for its social results … to assist in bringing about the best kind of life on the farm for the sake of producing the best kind of men’.

But in the transfigurative furnace of frontier life, both man and land were forged anew. Just as Groom had looked to a future when the ‘despised’ lands of the Northern Territory would be revealed in their true productive glory, so other supporters of the Bureau of Agriculture believed that the accumulation of knowledge would ultimately redeem lands now defamed as ‘desert’. Deakin described the transformation wrought upon the desert plains of the United States, arguing that the answer was not simply irrigation, but intelligence: ‘Brains pay better than water, and brains are making farming pay to-day’. Australia’s ‘hope’, he continued, ‘lies in those enormous tracts which have yet to be brought into the service of man and made productive of wealth for the whole community’. Australia’s ‘Dead Heart’, Brady proclaimed memorably, was in fact a ‘Red Heart’ destined to ‘pulsate with life’. Brain and heart, mind and matter, man and nature – the golem of progress would arise, moulded from the continent’s red soil, in the image of the ‘modern hayseed’.

Groom imagined a nation made strong through the accumulation of knowledge and the occupation of land. The frontiers of science and of settlement would be brought into alignment by his Bureau of Agriculture, thence to move forward in their inexorable conquest of the continent. Australia’s ‘emptiness’ was no longer simply a location for scientific research, it was itself an object for study and transformation. ‘Altogether, a great realm of exploration lies open to us’, proclaimed Prime Minister Joseph Cook, introducing legislation for the Bureau in 1913: ‘A whole vista of duties and potentialities opens up when inquiry is made as to what there is to be done in Australia’. A new wave of discovery and possession was gathering momentum. ‘Little now remains for the geographical explorer to do’, Brady argued, ‘but for the scientific investigator there is still an almost limitless field in Australia’. Time and space were traded along the frontiers of the future. Science gained space, a ‘vista of potentialities’ to explore and conquer. The land, in return, won a sense of inevitable fulfilment – the gift of time, the power of destiny.

the battle of Australia

The campfire was slowly dying, as was the dream. Edwin Brady continued to ponder the Northern Territory’s future, but the sounds of progress filling his thoughts gradually yielded to the insistent ‘tramp of young Australian feet at drill’. Instead of ‘clinking’ harvesters, he now heard ‘the wireless keeping watch by night and day’; instead of rumbling freight trains there was the sound of ‘scouting aeroplanes coming home to their military hangars’. As the embers crumbled to ash, Brady concluded his campfire devotions, looking up at the stars ‘glittering like bayonet points’ and offering a prayer to the ‘God of Nations and of Battles’ that ‘this Northern State-to-be might put her young feet upon the paths of Destiny … in peace’. Brady’s hymn of the future was scored to a martial beat; Australia’s unlimited future could be assured only through determined vigilance and resolute defence.

Australia Unlimited was a ‘Book with a Mission’, not merely to sell Australia, but to save it. ‘A mere handful of White People’, perched uncomfortably near Asia’s ‘teeming centres of population’, could not expect to maintain unchallenged ownership of the continent and its potential riches, the book’s prospectus warned. Even as Australia was beginning to enjoy the first fruits of nationhood, its legitimacy, its very existence, seemed imperilled. Australia’s ‘empty north’ was widely perceived as an open door to potential Asian aggressors. The Deakin government was keen to remedy this vulnerability, and its move to assume control of the Northern Territory was justified both in terms of development and security. ‘We have in the north a rich, fertile country’, Groom argued, introducing the legislation, ‘and … that Territory, as it is to-day, especially in relation to other nations, is a menace to the Commonwealth’.

Offering both the promise of riches and the threat of invasion, northern Australia revealed the complexities of nation building – development and defence were closely entwined. The problem with the Northern Territory, Groom explained, was that it remained ‘unmanned’. But ‘manning’ the country was not simply a matter of numbers. What was required was ‘effective’ occupation, ‘by a people who are applying their energies and industry to developing the resources of the country’. Only when settled by sturdy, hardworking landholders would the north be made both productive and secure. With its promise to improve the quality and efficiency of rural life, science appeared ready and able to bulwark the nation’s defensive frontiers. The Bureau of Agriculture was an essential part of a system aimed at developing a strong, self-contained nation. Moreover, as part of a well-balanced civic education, science rounded out the armoury of Australia’s ‘citizen soldiery’. The nation’s best defence, Groom argued, lay in ‘the ideal of the intelligent proprietor of the land defending his own country’.

But defence meant more than just preparedness. Australia’s progress had to be won in an ongoing contest of legitimacy, with battles raging along the frontiers of race, land, identity and occupation. Groom’s 1901 election campaign was energised by his detailed and passionate advocacy of the principle of ‘White Australia’. Quoting C. H. Pearson on the dangers of Asian immigration and the threat of racial degeneracy, he warned his electors ‘we are not fighting the battle of Australia alone, …we are fighting the battle of civilised Europe’. Australia was seeking to defend, not only its land, but its integrity as a civilised nation. Fears of infiltration, contamination and degeneration constantly pricked at the confidence of White Australia, reflected in Commonwealth action to enforce quarantine and eradicate topical diseases. Groom’s Bureau of Agriculture was justified as a means of defence against the pests and diseases, which ‘have no respect for the border lines marked on our maps’. It was in the denial of borders, the negation of boundaries, that Australia’s dissolution threatened. The battle for racial integrity was both personal and national, moral and martial. ‘Can you allow your children to blend their blood with that of the alien races?’, Groom asked, ‘Can you imagine anything more pathetic than sad-looking almond eyes peeping out of the Caucasian faces?’

But the very notion of integrity, the fearfully imagined borders of White Australia, were themselves a denial of Aboriginal presence. The ‘waste’ and the ‘emptiness’ that Groom hoped to dispel through the application of science, were constructed out of a lingering sense of unease and illegitimacy. With its offer of life and renewal, science helped to legitimate possession, demonstrating the inevitability of civilised conquest. There was a place for Aboriginal people in this modern world, but it was not on the land. Opening the science section of the Austral Festival in Toowoomba, Groom noted that while the region’s ‘native tribes’ were virtually extinct, some of their weapons remained. He suggested that ‘out of love and respect for the black races that were passing away’ such implements should be preserved ‘as an historical lesson … as to the weapons of those who preceded civilisation’ and as a ‘permanent memorial’. With Aboriginal people apparently consigned to the museum showcase, it was the land itself that had to be subdued. Brady imagined the coming breed of farmers, ‘with library and laboratory behind them’, as a ‘silent conquering army’: ‘Led by the shining spirit of William Farrer, this Army of Invasion is preparing its assaults upon the outstanding citadels of Nature’.

Frontiers are uneasy places, juxtaposing the known and the unknown, civilisation and nature, us and them. Around and through the markers of geography, the imagined borders of knowledge and possession create place from race, gender and time. The splendour of nation is revealed against the dark, looming shadow of otherness. Unthinkingly we talk about the future in terms of our fears and our hopes, rarely pausing to consider how the two are related. Groom’s vision of progress, his mission to create a prosperous and fulfilling future through the application of science, encompassed both development and denial. Progress was both a triumphant quest for improvement and a fearful battle against the spectre of degeneration and dissolution. It is this tension that gives progress its power. The oppositions and dichotomies of frontier imagining energised the process of nation building, expanding the bubble of time to create a space into which the future could unfold. But this act of creation proceeds by destruction, obliterating alternatives. For Groom and Deakin the development of the north was both a fulfillment of destiny, and a vital necessity. There was no choice. Progress uses its own internal tensions to make itself seem natural, necessary, inevitable.

blast the bush

Len Beadell was leading a survey party through the mulga scrub of central South Australia, when he came across something unusual, even unnerving. ‘It was almost like a picket fence’, he described, with posts made from ‘slivers of shale’. Being in such an isolated location, he decided ‘it was obviously an ancient Aboriginal ceremonial ground built by those primitive, stone-age nomads in some distant dreamtime’ – an Aboriginal ‘Stonehenge’. As he scrabbled in the dust, searching for a piece of charcoal that might be used to fix this eerie structure in time, Beadell pondered the ‘ironic clash of old and new’: ‘only a few short miles away the first mighty atomic bomb ever to be brought to the mainland of Australia was to be blasted into immediate oblivion … and it was by-products of this very weapon which could be used for determining the age of the charcoal from these prehistoric fires’. Beadell’s expedition had set out from the British atomic test site at Emu Field, searching for a permanent testing range – one that would become known as ‘Maralinga’. It was 1953, and something new was coming.

The ‘clash of old and new’, the sense of disjunction, was a familiar characteristic of frontier experience. But with the coming of the atomic bomb, the sense of ‘newness’ seemed to have become more acute. The destruction of Hiroshima was revealed unto a shocked world as the harbinger of a new age – the ‘atomic age’. Media reports talked about ‘new vistas’, a ‘new era’ in world affairs, a ‘revolution’ in daily life. The atomic bomb, Clem Christesen wrote in Meanjin, had ‘severed the old world from the new with guillotine-like decisiveness’. Most importantly, the world faced new challenges, for the atomic age carried grave implications for the future of humanity. It was a ‘turning point’, ‘perhaps the most solemn turning point of all history’, Rev. Dr C. N. Button warned his Ballarat congregation: ‘Humanity is at the crossroads’.

The Sydney Morning Herald relayed the news from Hiroshima under a pair of significant subheadings: ‘Terrifying New Weapon’ and ‘Big Possibilities In Peace’. The ‘good’ atom/‘bad’ atom routine dominated much public understanding of this mysterious technology. It was a formula popularly represented in the image of the atomic crossroads, placing humanity at a fork in the road of destiny, with a signpost pointing one way to destruction and the other to progress. Which was it to be, apocalypse or utopia? There was no escaping; it was time to choose. The assumed imminence of the crossroads, the disjunctive dynamic of the atomic age, obscured much of its familiarity. Like the frontier, the crossroads gained its metaphorical power from the conjunction of opposites. The wonders of a techno-utopia shone invitingly amidst the menacing gloom of atomic obliteration. But there was no choice. The signpost to destruction was a warning, a lesson to be learnt. Just as it had in Groom’s plans for northern development, progress in the atomic age used the threat of dissolution to charge itself with the force of destiny. Both imagined a future fulfilled through the accumulation of space, whether by the inexorable expansion of Australia’s frontiers, or by a continuing march along the road to atomic nirvana. Both offered a journey from which there was no turning back.

In the glare of an atomic explosion, Len Beadell imagined, the mulga scrub around him would instantly ‘come to life’. At the dawn of this ‘new’ age, the image of vast expanses of idle and wasted land, silently awaiting the transforming power of science, continued to evoke enthusiasm. As Britain’s readied its big bang at Emu Field, the Sunday Herald keenly anticipated the moment when the ‘inland silence that remained unbroken for ages’ would be ‘shattered’ by the bomb. Australia’s desert lands had found a new destiny, for ‘the very poverty of these areas in surface resources made them valuable in the atomic field, either as a storehouse of uranium riches or as the kind of waste land where experiments can be most safely conducted’. Ivan Southall described the Woomera rocket range, established some years earlier, as an ‘open-air laboratory’: ‘one of the greatest stretches of uninhabited wasteland on earth, created by God specifically for rockets’.

Even as rockets were being propelled into ‘space’ (the final frontier), science presented the land with yet another chance for renewal. Woomera and the atomic tests brought science and land together with a familiar mix of imperial loyalties and national self-interest, development and defence. The Minister for Supply, Howard Beale, sought to justify the establishment of the Maralinga range by portraying it as ‘a challenge to Australian men to show that the pioneering spirit of their forefathers who developed our country is still the driving force of achievement’. These new pioneers had the opportunity to contribute to the deterrent power of the free world, while possibly winning Australia access to the secrets of the atomic age. Distorted echoes of Deakin’s ‘citizen soldiery’ rang down the years, charged with imminence of the crossroads challenge.

Australia Unlimited Ltd

In June 1957, the Sydney Morning Herald published the first in an annual series of supplements surveying ‘the great endeavours and achievement of Australian commerce and industry in the postwar years and the fabulous promise of future national development’. The supplements were titled Australia Unlimited. Edwin Brady would have been pleased by the overwhelming sense of optimism that suffused every page. ‘Confidence’, the supplement declared, was the ‘theme for the future’. It was a confidence born of postwar reconstruction, economic expansion, and a rise in the standard of living, but it was nourished also by a belief in the generative power of science and technology. The Chairman of CSIRO, Ian Clunies Ross, provided something of a keynote in his observation that ‘there are no problems so great that they cannot be solved once we marshal our resources for a resolute and sustained attack on them’. Clunies Ross’s ‘faith’, the supplement concluded, ‘articulates the endeavours of the planners and makers of Australia’s future’.

The Minister for Primary Industry, Billy McMahon, praised the work of Australia’s ‘modern explorers’, the ‘scientists and scientifically minded farmers’, who were ‘rolling back our farm horizons’ and revealing our ‘unlimited’ opportunities. He invoked a familiar catalogue of hopes, but one that was charged with an increasingly powerful sense of expectation. Attempting to define the ‘newness’ of the atomic age, the nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton suggested that ‘the funeral pyre of Hiroshima’ was ‘the symbol of an era in which science has become so important in our lives that all decisions, including political ones, must be made with scientific considerations in mind’. No nation, it seemed, could afford to ignore the implications of science. The power of science was the power of the bomb, the ability to change the world, to bring down the guillotine on the past, to erect the signposts at the crossroads of destiny. Progress, science and atomic energy were virtual analogues, each brought the promise of a future transformed.

Old dreams were invested with new hope. Atomic energy would power the reclamation of Australia’s ‘great spaces’. The Chairman of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, J. P. Baxter, described the possibility of ‘package power stations’ to serve ‘the remoter parts of the continent’, particularly those whose mineral wealth ‘will demand exploitation’. Uranium offered a solution at last to Australia’s ‘empty north’, propelling the nation into a new phase of ‘pioneering’. The mining and processing of this mysterious metal, it was argued, would give ‘the economic life of the Territory the transfusion of new blood it needs’. Progress was represented not only by the Rum Jungle uranium mine, but by the modern town of Batchelor, created specifically for miners and their families. Opening the project, Prime Minister Menzies declared it ‘something of a miracle’. ‘Not long ago’, he continued, the Northern Territory had seemed ‘almost worthless’: ‘But the history of Australia is the history of converting people from despair to hope and from hope to achievement’. With the discovery of uranium, the north seemed destined to host ‘one of the great communities of Australia’.

Edwin Brady always intended to write a sequel to Australia Unlimited, and if he had lived a few years longer, one could imagine him poring over accounts of the Rum Jungle project, thinking back to that campfire and his dreams of progress. But there was something rather different about this new style of pioneering. The town of Batchelor, with its individually styled family homes and its remarkable range of ‘comforts and amenities’, had brought suburban living to the frontier. More importantly, its inhabitants were not sturdy landholders working their properties, but wage earners, employees of Consolidated Zinc Pty Ltd. The Sydney Morning Herald’s version of Australia Unlimited was not the story of hardworking individuals creating national progress out of their own instinctive drive for improvement. In the wake of the Manhattan Project, the scale of progress had changed dramatically, represented now by huge developmental projects that married government-supplied infrastructure with foreign investment and expertise. Progress was measured not in the sweat of the yeoman farmer, but in the profits of large multinational companies.

The Liberal Party went before the electors in 1958 emphasising its achievements in national development and its success in attracting foreign capital. ‘Our slogan is “Australia Unlimited”’, Menzies asserted, ‘and we pronounce it with confidence’. The campaign theme was highlighted by a tour of key projects and facilities, including the opening of Australia’s first nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. But behind the confidence of ‘Australia Unlimited’ lurked a new fear. Electors were urged, not to make, but ‘to conserve the forces of progress’. As the security enclosures at Rum Jungle and Lucas Heights demonstrated, while individuals had seemingly lost the power to create progress, they had somehow gained the ability to threaten it.

a change of heart

The war, when it came, only lasted for a month, but that was long enough. All life was quickly extinguished in the northern hemisphere, and the clouds of deadly radioactive fallout gradually diffused to shroud the whole globe. For the people of Australia, it was a lingering, drawn out journey to oblivion. Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel On the Beach was published the same year as the first Australia Unlimited supplement. Its theme was not confidence, but fear, resignation and confusion. There was a new threat from the north, invisible and unstoppable. ‘It’s going to go on spreading down here, southwards, till it gets to us?’, Moira asks, ‘And they can’t do anything about it?’ ‘Not a thing’, replies Commander Dwight Towers, ‘It’s just too big a matter for mankind to tackle. We’ve just got to take it’. All they can do is wait helplessly for their own death. In this final act of surrender the people of Australia are united with the rest of humanity: one world or none.

Just as atomic power promised to conquer Australia’s vast spaces, so the bomb seemed poised to obliterate national boundaries. There would be no winners in an atomic war. G. V. Portus from the University of Adelaide argued that the ‘only defence of the world against the threat of atomic warfare is political defence’, and called for the ‘abandonment’ of the ‘out-of-date’ concept of national sovereignty. Some looked with hope to the newly formed United Nations and its attempts to negotiate a system of control, but the UN Atomic Energy Commission soon descended into deadlock. Others sought more radical solutions, inspired by Einstein and his declaration in favour of world government. But the political fallout from our atom-bombed world soon settled, and the divisions became clear again. In this new age of oxymorons, war was cold, and the bomb was a weapon of peace.

The Cold War pushed Australia’s defensive frontiers ever northward, as the concept of ‘forward defence’ emerged to contain the threat of communism. ‘We must, by peaceful means extend the frontiers of the human spirit’, Menzies proclaimed, ‘We must, by armed strength, defend the geographical frontiers of those nations whose self-government is based upon the freedom of the spirit’. Menzies invoked the prospect of a looming third world war to justify his government’s defence preparation program, but increasingly Australia sought security in treaties and alliances, rather than men and guns. The nation’s defence was to be assured through the graces of its powerful friends, rather than the character of its citizen soldiery. Just like the characters in On the Beach, Australians were left to ponder a threat that they barely understood, and against which they could do very little.

But even as the frontiers of Australian security expanded, so they rebounded inwards, enclosing hearts and minds in an ever tighter grip. Long-held fears of infiltration were revived, with communism identified as a domestic as well as an international threat. Agents of the enemy were amongst us. The circumstances of the bomb’s creation and use focused much of this anxiety on the myth of the ‘atomic secret’. The CSIR, with its modest atomic energy program, proved a favourite target for political opportunists. Not only was it believed to be harbouring communists, its Chairman, David Rivett, had the temerity to suggest that good science entailed the free and open interchange of information. To prove their security credentials at home and abroad, both Labor and Liberal governments cranked up the legislative apparatus, providing new levels of protection for defence ‘secrets’, and creating new agencies to monitor the threat within. The common citizen was no longer the nation’s guarantee of security, but a potential weak link in its defensive perimeter.

It was, perhaps, human weakness that was most glaringly exposed by the bomb blast over Hiroshima. Even as the world marvelled at this new conquest of the forces of nature, they wondered if humanity had the maturity and wisdom to control it. ‘It is a challenge to the conscience of man’, the Argus considered, ‘to ponder gravely whether his intellectual achievements have not outrun his moral perceptions’. The ‘crossroads of destiny’ had brought a ‘moral test’ upon the world; science demanded ‘a change of heart’. And there was no time to get your breath back. Bomb tests followed bomb tests, and then the Russians had it, and so the Americans built the H-bomb, and there were more tests … The frontiers of science were running ahead, pushing ever deeper into unknown territory, leaving the world gasping, trying to catch up. In April 1954 a distinguished panel of speakers considered the latest menace under the title ‘The H-Bomb – A Challenge to Humanity’. Canon E. J. Davidson proclaimed: ‘Our civilisation stands at the point of decision … It must conform to the moral order of the universe or perish’.

Each new challenge brought its own sense of urgency, its own restatement of the crossroads choice – change or die. There was no ‘turning point’, no critical juncture on the road to progress, only constant reminders of our own fallibility and the apparent disconnection of science from the ethical life of humanity. The crossroads offered not the chance to change the future, but to conform to it. We were the ‘other’, able to occupy the future only through the courtesy of science. The destructive sense of inevitability that the frontier wreaked upon the land and its original inhabitants was turned upon us all. It was humanity itself that threatened progress.

a hapless mess of wreckage and misunderstanding

In May 1999, The Australian invited a range of ‘well-informed and influential’ speakers to examine the question: ‘How can we continue to build an open, competitive international economy while ensuring we develop a progressive society?’ The resulting conference was entitled – yes, you guessed it –‘Australia Unlimited’, and focused on the dangers and opportunities wrought by the latest in revolutionary forces – globalisation. Something new was here. The forum’s major sponsors provided a convenient summary of its themes in their half-page advertisements. Ansett offered ‘a world of destinations’, Foxtel brought the news of the world to you 24 hours a day, while IBM described the ‘treasure trove of products’ available on the Web. ‘Now it really is a small world’, they told us. But globalisation is simply progress rebadged, measured still in the conquest of distance, the colonisation of space. Science and technology continue to bolster its imagined momentum, pushing time beyond its limits, creating the fault-lines of the new.

Within each Australia Unlimited, there was an attempt to articulate the balance of forces that will ensure continued progress: the interplay of nation and citizen, knowledge and capital, freedom and control. In the latest version it was the balance between the ‘two competing imperatives’ of ‘economic growth and social harmony’ that most concerned the movers and shakers. Stuart Macintyre was the only contributor to comment on the link to Brady and Deakin, noting that ‘the principal object of Australian policy in the early years of the century was not the economy or social justice but the nation’. It was a point lost on most forum participants, who imagined progress to be found in the maintenance of a healthy, global economy. Nations are not built; they grow in the rich and fertile environment of globalisation – just keep piling on the manure. But all is not well in this garden of plenty, for the disintegration of social cohesion threatens continued reform. ‘Even at a terrible cost to themselves’, Dennis Shanahan wrote in his summary of the forum, ‘individuals and single nations have the potential to turn the advantages and underpinnings of globalisation against globalisation itself’. Unless governments and corporations can persuade individuals of the benefits of this new age, their ‘resistance … has the potential to … set off a chain reaction threat to general progress’. The danger is not ideological, resistance derives not from political commitment, but from ‘a sense of alienation, envy and resentment’. The problem is in being human.

In traversing these three versions of Australia Unlimited, it is tempting to imagine a linear narrative, to trace the progress of progress. That is the lie at the heart of this paper. Concepts such as the individual, the nation, even science, are never simple, and are always contested. There is no single stream of progress meandering through time, there are many countercurrents, eddies, backwaters and divergences. The point is not what progress has become, but that it has become, and is becoming still. Progress is not a belief, a hope, a naïve aspiration; one that we can in our supposed sophistication simply reject or deny. Within the meaning of progress there are many balances to be negotiated and boundaries to be drawn: a continuing process of accumulation and disjunction that shapes our perceptions of time and our awareness of change.

The process of future-making leaves its traces, and this brief, inconclusive sortie has tried to find the chisel marks in the smooth, worked surface of the new. Who makes the future? Groom’s idealised citizen seems to have been overtaken by the scientist, and both by the forces of global change, but all are fictions drawn from the battlefields of identity and authority. Where is the future made? Spatial metaphors are commonly invoked to illuminate the meaning of time, and so it is that progress is seen to be forged at the frontier, the crossroads, or in the networks of globalisation. Movement is taken for granted, we are on a journey, ever onwards. Is there a choice? Images of a future under threat, of a menacing otherness, of the imminent danger of annihilation, all work to deny alternatives. We are warned to keep to the main road for our own safety, for the safety of the future. But to understand our options, we have to explore the meaning of our journey, to chart its origins, to look again at the signposts. We have to find the frontiers of our future in our past.

In one of his last journal entries, Alfred Deakin struggled to stay within time: ‘Why babble more … I have shed, once and for all, my past as a whole – my present fruitless – my future a hapless mess of wreckage and misunderstanding’. His memory was almost gone, so too his words, his life. Groom lived on, but also battled to keep pace with progress. So thoroughly modern in his nation-building enthusiasm, he suffered the ultimate humiliation of being remembered by Robert Menzies as ‘old fashioned’. And Brady? Edwin Brady died in 1952, just short of his 83rd birthday. He spent most of his later years at his camp in Mallacoota, sandwiched between the bush and the sea. He was, he reflected ‘perhaps the most successful failure in literary history’. Barely able to make a living, he nonetheless persisted ‘in asserting that Australia is the best country in the world’. Most of his plans had come to nothing. There was no sequel to Australia Unlimited, no film version, his hopes for the economic development of East Gippsland had been thwarted, his utopian farming community had failed. ‘Should I end up, therefore, on a melancholy note?’, he asked. Brady’s journey along ‘Life’s Highway’ was coming to an end, but he would not submit to the inevitable, he would not surrender to time. ‘I decline to become mournful’, he answered, ‘I refuse to grow old’. There is no turning back. Is there?

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‘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 do not bear this out’, he added defiantly. ‘You can do anything with statistics, but no statistics will convince me that the climate has not changed radically.’

It’s hard not to have some sympathy for Mr Hodgson, for even as we express our concerns about global warming and educate ourselves about the characteristics of Australia’s variable climate, there remains a nagging feeling that somehow he was right. Think back to the boiling-hot Christmases of your youth, to those long weeks spent at the beach, and answer honestly – do you remember summer as being hotter?

If you do, I have some bad news for you – it means you’re getting old and slow.

The assistant director of the Bureau of Meteorology, W. S. Watt, unsurprisingly rejected Mr Hodgson’s assessment. It was largely a trick of memory, Watt suggested, quoting W. I. Milham’s judgement that such misconceptions were due in part ‘to the fact that the attitude towards life, the amount of energy, and the daily occupations and responsibilities of old people are different from what they were when they were younger’.

The heat has drained from us, it seems; our thunderstorms have all dried up.

Exchanges such as these occurred regularly across the twentieth century. Bouts of unusually hot or cold weather brought forth claims that the climate was changing, despite persistent denials from the meteorological experts. ‘Almost every person in Melbourne who is not a meteorologist is certain that this is the coldest, wettest, and windiest winter that he remembers’, noted the Argus in 1935. But even if, as the Bureau maintained, this was more a matter for psychology than meteorology, such climatic contretemps raise interesting questions about the relationship between memory and statistics, between climate and weather.

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get. A detailed knowledge of climate is derived from averages and statistics, expressed most meaningfully in terms of probability. What is the chance of rain? Accumulated experience guides our expectations. But more than just the available data, perceptions of climate reflect our broader aspirations – our powers of imagination as well as observation. In 1744, even before its boundaries were known, Dr John Campbell argued that the mysterious Terra Australis was located ‘Precisely in the richest Climates of the World’. It was, he noted, ‘impossible to conceive a Country that promises fairer from its Scituation’ (sic). Assessments of Australia’s climate have veered between optimism and anxiety. To some the climate promised health and vigour, to others it meant only hardship. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as David Walker describes, the supposed dangers of a ‘tropical’ climate nagged at the ambitions of White Australia. The climate derived from years of observation and abstraction continues to be shaded with climates of opinion and emotion – climates of fear and climates of hope.

Weather, on the other hand, is the shower of rain that catches us unprepared, the gust of wind that whips the fallen leaves about our legs, the unrelenting heat that leaves us drained and irritable. Weather is immediate, local and personal. Weather ‘doesn’t just happen’, argues David Laskin, ‘it happens to us’. Weather is ‘around us and inside us’. Weather is the daily experience of nature, it affects the way we feel and the way we act. In its most dramatic moments – in storms, in heatwaves, in cyclones, droughts, or floods – the weather changes lives. Confronted once again by the violence and cruelty of nature, the nation unites in shock and sympathy, politicians mouth familiar promises, and insurance companies dither. The weather becomes a matter for comment and concern, as each event is catalogued and compared – the biggest in fifty years, the worst for a generation, perhaps even a turning point in the nation’s progress. Such events provide markers in the histories of individuals, communities and nations. They serve as points of reference and meaning – they stick in the memory.

Herein may lie an explanation of Mr Hodgson’s (and our own) delusion. In 1950, a long wet and cold spell led many Sydneysiders to conclude that the climate was changing for the worse. John Hogan, deputy director of the Bureau of Meteorology, ventured once more to dispel such fears, and offered a useful simile. ‘Old people who complain about the changing climate, remember only the peak periods’, he explained. ‘Looking back over their lives, these periods of exceptional weather merge together like the telephone posts down a long road.’ As a result, ‘outstanding events’ were mistaken as ‘normal’.

So not only are we old and slow, but our memory is buggered as well.

But no matter how complete our recollection, climate and memory will never coincide, simply because memory is not an average of the past. Memory is built upon the particular and exceptional. High points and low points may be blunted over time, but they retain their individual significance. Memory generates meaning, not statistics. In a similar way, climate is not just an accumulation of weather. We experience the two differently, our lives lurching constantly between expectation and event, between the idea of climate and the reality of weather. And yet we experience them together, locked in a process of negotiation and transformation – through the weather we know the climate, through the climate we know the weather.

This book aims to explore the cultural space between weather and climate. Sections alternate between the elements of weather – rain, sun and wind – and climatic outlooks that survey limits, patterns, connections and change. The divisions are meant to be suggestive, rather than exclusive, shifting perspective from the individual to the global, from the past to the future – reflecting the process by which weather itself is parlayed into climate and back again. In between each section a series of interludes, featuring collection items from the National Museum of Australia, offer other ways of connecting to the book’s main themes. The interludes illustrate the ‘human elements’, the ways in which Australians have learned to understand their climate, to live with each change in the weather.

a backdrop to history

‘The influence of climate on our history is still largely unstudied’, Geoffrey Blainey observed in 1971. There seemed no doubt, however, that such an influence existed. As Blainey noted, the Australian climate had been ‘a vital determinant of the prosperity and location of the wool industry, dairy farming, and every rural industry ranging from sugar to wheat’. Climate ‘helped to dictate the site and size of cities’, while drought had ‘shaped some of the most dismal eras of our history’. Climate had suffered the neglect of historians simply because its effects had been taken for granted. It was too obvious.

Like the environment, the landscape, or nature itself, climate is often imagined as the backdrop against which history is played out. Climate provides colour and context, but it also frames the limits of the drama. Upon its stage, history is enacted through scenes of achievement and failure. Individuals and nations battle the cruelties of climate, or are blessed by its generosity. Some seek conquest, proclaiming that the climate itself must submit to civilisation. Others adapt to its challenges, and are themselves changed. Such sagas are familiar in a settler society like Australia, where progress was expected to be won in an ongoing confrontation with nature. Like the frontier itself, the climate has wrought its own sense of opportunity and anxiety.

The sun, for example, could be a dangerous foe, or a symbol of new life. From the broad-brimmed cabbage tree hat to the familiar, shady verandah, European settlers fashioned means to escape its unfamiliar heat and glare. But the Australian sun also offered a new source of light and energy, an escape from the gloom of Britain. In the early twentieth century, as David Walker describes in Chapter 8, ‘climatic patriots’ seized upon the sun as a symbol of Australian vigour and promise. Blessed with abundant sunshine, Australia is still portrayed as a nation whose life is lived out of doors – on the beach, on the farm, on the playing field – even as we grapple with the highest rates of skin cancer in the world. Like the early colonists, we have returned to the protection of the broad-brimmed hat. The Prime Minister declares his love of this ‘sunburnt country’ peering out from beneath the ample shade of his Akubra.

‘Droughts and flooding rains’ have wrought a similar mix of threat and self imagining. The vagaries of the global marketplace have combined with the irregular cycle of drought and flood to chart the limits of Australia’s economic ambitions. But the brutal uncertainty of the country’s climatic variations has also provided the background against which the resilient character of its people could be celebrated. C. E. W. Bean, the chronicler of the Anzac legend, argued that the qualities of the Australian fighting man were forged in the battle against the elements. ‘The Australian is always fighting something’, he argued. ‘In the bush it is drought, fires, unbroken horses and cattle.’ In times of drought we marvel still at the heroic forbearance of the typical rural ‘battler’.

The wind, as Tom Griffiths reminds us in Chapter 13, has also borne both health and disquiet – the bracing freshness of a virgin land and an unsettling whiff of alien climes beset by desert or ice. It was also the wind that brought settlers, explorers and invaders, swept along by the ‘Roaring Forties’ in a dramatic transition from old world to new. Wind powered the early development of the colonies, providing means of transport and communication without which they could scarcely hope to survive. But as European settlement moved north into lower latitudes prowled by tropical cyclones, white Australians also came to know the wind’s destructive power.

The Australian climate has proved both inhospitable and welcoming, rich in its promise and profound in its terrors. It has also been prone to miscalculation, confounding European expectations from the time of the Dutch traders, who misjudged the winds and were blown upon the coast of a seemingly barren land. On the eastern side of the continent, Blainey recounts, Cook and Banks arrived at Botany Bay in the midst of a wet autumn and were impressed by lush meadows and a swiftly flowing stream. Their encouraging report strengthened plans for occupation, but when the First Fleet landed they found a dry and difficult land. They had arrived, as Richard Grove explains in Chapter 11, in the midst of one of the most significant El Niño events in recorded history.

A new climate cannot be mapped and comprehended like a new continent. It can only be known through time, through averages and extremes, through experience and expectation. Over the years we have become familiar with the patterns and trends, we know when the frosts come, when the temperature soars, when the winds are at their strongest. But we have also invested these patterns with meanings that cannot be read from the thermometer or rain gauge. Temperature is cross-indexed with race and health, drought provides an indicator of destiny. Our efforts to understand the climate have merged with the imagining of nationhood, with the construction of an Australian identity. Just as the boundary between society and nature is always on the move, so climate and culture create each other across a shifting, permeable frontier. The backdrop is repainted again and again, as each new actor takes the stage. Climate does not simply shape history, for it can only be known through history.

meteorological events

In 1788, as a major El Niño event affected weather across the globe, Australia’s first white settlers watched, with increasing desperation, as their crops withered and streams dried to a trickle. If all efforts to resupply the colony had failed, if the drought had continued a little longer, whose history might we be writing now?

The influence of climate on history is read not only through patterns and perceptions, but also through events. Droughts, floods and storms intervene in our lives, in ways often dramatic and unexpected. They puncture the confidence of our predictions, temper the arrogance of our plans; they fracture relationships, reinforce communities; they provide moments of collective shock, resolve and recrimination; they divide history into periods both ‘before’ and ‘after’. No doubt most of us could, without too much difficulty, begin to compile our own catalogue of events – Cyclone Tracy perhaps, the dust storm that blanketed Melbourne in 1983, the 1999 Sydney hailstorm, the 2003 drought and bushfires? And yet, although they seem so easy to identify, such events are not always easy to isolate.

In July 1995, the city of Chicago in the United States suffered under record high temperatures. Day after day the heatwave smouldered on, its effects measured, most tragically, in the hundreds of corpses piled up in refrigerated trucks outside the overwhelmed medical examiner’s office. Over 700 people are estimated to have died as a result of the heat. An official investigation described the heatwave as ‘a unique meteorological event’. It was a ‘freakish disaster’, city leaders argued, a brutal whim of nature whose effects could have neither been predicted nor prevented. But heat could not alone explain the dimensions of this tragedy. What seemed to be an act of nature was, Eric Klinenberg suggests, ‘a social drama that played out and made visible a series of conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive’. Poverty and isolation left many elderly residents vulnerable. Their experience of the heat could not be understood solely through the temperature on a particular day; it was an experience many decades in the making, brought on by government policy, urban development, and a society that seemed to care little for its weakest and most disadvantaged members. The heatwave was a ‘cultural event’ whose conditions did not simply ‘disappear when the temperatures moderated’. ‘We have collectively created the conditions that made it possible for so many Chicago residents to die in the summer of 1995’, Klinenberg argues, ‘as well as the conditions that make these deaths so easy to overlook and forget’. We are all implicated in such events – the weather does not kill alone.

Meteorological events seem to offer simple lessons in cause and effect. We can track their progress on weather maps and radar screens, we can measure their results with rain gauges and thermometers. Even though a sudden storm might remind us of our vulnerability before nature, it is an event, nonetheless, that comes with its own explanation. The suffering and destruction it wreaks might seem unexpected and unfair, but it is still understandable. Meaning and responsibility are contained within the boundaries of the event. But even as we find comfort in the certainty of markers and maps, our experience of weather refuses to be explained away. As Janet McCalman demonstrates in Chapter 9, heat alone could not account for variations in infant mortality amongst poor immigrant populations in nineteenth-century Melbourne. Women and their babies did not merely suffer the heat of an unfamiliar climate, they suffered the heat of an overcrowded, unventilated slum. They suffered a heat which challenged their understanding of child rearing and health. They suffered a heat whose meaning is to be found both in collective experience and individual life history.

Australia’s emergency management authority estimates that in the last hundred years heatwaves ‘caused more deaths than any other natural hazard (except disease), yet they remain one of the least-studied and most-underrated’ phenomena. As Klinenberg notes, heatwaves do not generate the spectacular images of destruction favoured by the media. When the temperature soars, it is images of crowded beaches we see on the news, not the elderly and the poor dying alone. Unlike floods or fires, heatwaves fail to inspire a sense of community concern. They are ‘silent and invisible killers of silenced and invisible people’, rarely figuring in our catalogue of national disasters. In 1939, massive bushfires raged across much of south-eastern Australia, culminating in the horror of ‘Black Friday’. Seventy-one people lost their lives. Amidst the grief and recrimination, a Royal Commission was called to investigate the causes of the disaster and prevent its recurrence. And yet, in the heatwave that helped fuel the fires, it is estimated that more than 400 people died. These deaths brought no inquiry, no demands for action. The circumstances which claimed their lives were too diffuse to be named, too complex to grab attention. Instead of being remembered as a traumatic moment in the nation’s history, the heatwave and its human toll merely blurred into the flow of time.

Meteorological events have beginnings and ends determined not only by our observations, but also by our systems of classification and measurement, by our values and priorities. Of course, such definitions themselves have a history – their own beginnings, their own ends. In 1896, H. C. Russell, the New South Wales government astronomer, noted that the word ‘drought’ was used differently in Australia from in England. Instead of being defined as ‘a period of a few days or weeks in which not a drop of rain falls’, a drought in Australia was understood as ‘a period of months or years during which little rain falls and the country gets burnt up, grass and water disappear, crops become worthless and sheep and cattle die’. A recent survey catalogued 150 definitions of drought worldwide, reflecting the variety of climatic and cultural conditions in which the definitions were framed. In Australia, as Russell observed, drought has tended to be defined in an agricultural context. With the nation’s economic health heavily dependent upon its rural industries, drought has loomed, not just as a climatic oddity, but as a serious threat to progress.

Recent years, however, have brought a further shift in the definition of drought that informs government policy. No longer is drought regarded as a natural disaster, instead it is accepted as an inevitable characteristic of Australia’s variable climate. It is a risk that the successful farmer must learn to manage. This seems a rather overdue acceptance of the reality of drought, a sign that we are seeking to work more within the limits of our environment, rather than waging war against it. But what does this mean to those struggling with the immediate effects of drought? Is it any less of a disaster to a farmer forced to shoot his stock, to a community steadily drained of its population, to a woman who watches her lovingly-tended garden wither, or to a young child who has never known the land to be green? Like the suffering of an elderly person in Chicago, or an immigrant mother in North Melbourne, the lived experience of drought is not contained within the event itself.

Daniela Stehlik and her colleagues have tried to develop an understanding of drought as a lived experience by interviewing farm families in New South Wales and Queensland afflicted by drought in the early 1990s. Their study found that the idea that drought was a recurring phenomenon whose effects could be mitigated by careful management was hardly new to farmers. But even if the principles of risk management were scarcely controversial, the implications of the policy shift added considerably to the emotional burden of farm families. A farmer in need was now portrayed as a ‘bad manager’, proudly independent folk were being lectured on the benefits of self reliance, government policy and the attitudes of urban dwellers seemed to be hardening against the bush. The cumulative effects of political, economic and social change made farm families feel as if they were being abandoned.

Attempting to define drought, one female beef producer commented, ‘It is a long period without rain. It is the stress and the hardship. We had a financial drought … prior to going into the climatic drought’. Climate was only one component in the experience of drought which included short-term market fluctuations, long-term economic adjustment, the steady withdrawal of services from rural areas, and the growing fragmentation and dislocation of rural communities. For these families, at this time, the experience of drought was one of increasing isolation.

Even under a risk management regime, uncertainty remains. The vagaries of the global market can wreak havoc upon the most carefully thought out plans. But there is a more fundamental uncertainty at the heart of the drought experience. One New South Wales sheep and wheat producer remarked in an interview:

So to try to manage the ups and downs of not knowing are we really in it, are we facing a really severe drought or is [this] just a dry period? I think that is one of the things we have found hard in this.

When do you know a drought has started? Another sheep and wheat producer commented:

… the drought just doesn’t change [things] overnight does it? It comes on slowly and the country here has changed [even] in the last three weeks. After that green tinge we had from that rain in February, it is all gone now so it is continually changing and you can’t really pinpoint a period of time I don’t think. It’s not like one day it’s hot and the next day it’s cold. The drought is not like that …

Droughts are easy to define in retrospect, though it might be noted that the process of drought declaration involves a number of political as well as climatic calculations. But a drought is also made up of a seemingly endless succession of days, each bringing its own weather, each met with a combination of hope, anxiety, resignation and disappointment. Somewhere along the line the disappointments are all gathered up and the word ‘drought’ is uttered. And yet, even then the days continue, each offering still the prospect of change – perhaps it will rain today? The experience of drought is of a thousand hopes dashed, a teetering balance between expectation and despair. Uncertainty becomes a way of life.

the national outlook

Cyclone Tracy was an event that changed lives. In Chapter 14 Bill Bunbury lets us listen to some of the ‘voices on the wind’, to the recollections and reflections of those who lived through the terror. The experience of Darwin residents, he suggests, reflects the cyclic movement of the cyclone itself, with the initial swathe of destruction followed by phases of dispersal and renewal. What was left at the end of the cycle was a new city, full of old and difficult memories.

For the local Larrakia people, as Deborah Rose explains in Chapter 3, the cyclone carried a different meaning. Darwin did not suffer through some arbitrary whim of nature, the cyclone was a strike against those who were reluctant to grant land rights to the Larrakia people: ‘it came to a particular place – Darwin – because that was where the problems were’. Amongst Aboriginal people in the Kimberley, on the other hand, the story of the cyclone is remembered as ‘a warning to keep their knowledge and culture strong’.

Cyclone Tracy had specific, local meanings, but, as Brad West points out, it was also the first cyclone to be ‘interpreted as a national event’. While droughts, floods and fires had long found a place in the national mythology, cyclones had previously been accorded only regional significance. The scale of devastation, the involvement of the military, and the dispersal of Darwin residents around the country, all helped to ensure that Cyclone Tracy would be understood differently – as a symbol of the defining battle between nation and nature. Cyclone Tracy joined the landing at Gallipoli as an imagined moment of unity and clarity, calling the supposed characteristics of our national identity to the fore.

Meteorological events can be invested with meanings both personal and political, but they also exist on a geographical scale that positions them locally, regionally and nationally. In his social history of English weather, Vladimir Jankovic describes how meteorology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was focused on the reportage of unusual local phenomena. Descriptions of unexpected or remarkable visitations were reported at scientific gatherings and disseminated through a variety of publications. These eyewitness reports were not merely accounts of the weather, but commentaries on specifically local circumstances infused with ideas about politics, aesthetics and spirituality. By the late eighteenth century, meteorology was beginning to take a more quantitative turn – shifting from colourful descriptions to carefully collected data, from local curiosities to global systems. The ‘meaning of locality changed’, Jankovic argues, from ‘an exclusive end of investigation to a specimen in a larger entity, a point on a grid’.

This change in emphasis coincided with the European settlement of Australia, challenging the fledgling science with an immense task of coordination. Vast networks of volunteer observers were assembled to gather local data, while new technologies such as the telegraph, radio, radar and aircraft were deployed against barriers of distance and isolation. The need for cooperation figured prominently, as meteorologists sought to gather the sprawling continent within the ken of science. By the 1870s, observatories around the country had established an intercolonial framework to aid in the setting of standards and the sharing of information. As Australians began to consider the possible benefits of Federation, meteorology offered an example of the efficiencies to be gained through a coordinated national system. At the 1897 Federal Convention, Sir Joseph Abbott successfully argued that the Commonwealth be granted power over meteorological observations to ensure ‘uniformity throughout Australia’. ‘If there is anything which ought to be the subject of a Commonwealth law’, he continued, ‘it is these observations’. The study of meteorology was a national obligation.

This theme was elaborated by the Minister for Home Affairs, Littleton Groom, as he introduced legislation to create a federal meteorological department in 1906. National coordination offered improvements in efficiency and accuracy, but also, he noted, the opportunity to extract a broader understanding from fragmented, local experience. ‘Under a Federal system’, Groom continued, ‘we hope to become thoroughly acquainted with the climatic conditions of the continent’. Knowledge of the Australian climate would develop alongside the fulfilment of Australian nationhood.

But what is an ‘Australian climate’? In a continent that ranges from rainforest to desert, from temperate to tropical, we still imagine ourselves as somehow united in an expression of climatological nationalism. Our climate may be something to be celebrated or cursed, but it is still our climate – advertised to the world as the symbol of our distinctiveness. Meanwhile, confidence in the idea of a single ‘Australian identity’ has begun to wane. We have become rightly suspicious of blanket terms such as ‘Australian culture’, seeking instead a more sensitive approach to issues of class, gender and power. What about climate? What fractures and conflicts are obscured by our continued desire to create a sense of unity from a diverse range of meteorological experiences? Is the sun that warms a homeless man in Hobart the same sun that tans a parade of Gold Coast pleasure seekers? Is the wind that lifts the topsoil in western New South Wales the same wind that flutters the flag atop Parliament House?

There are obvious divisions, of course, as cities snipe and skirmish over the quality of each other’s weather. Who has the most ‘liveable’ climate? Whose is the driest or sunniest? Sydneysiders can barely mention Melbourne without passing judgment on the fickleness of its climate, while Queensland claims the sunshine as its own, extolling an idyllic lifestyle where the weather is always ‘perfect’. Within the idea of an Australian climate exist a series of regional stereotypes, deployed in the service of parochial politics and tourism marketing boards.

But there are subtler tensions as well, focused on the continuing significance of locality. Describing the operations of the Weather Bureau in 1922, an article in the Argus likened it to ‘a huge nervous system, having its centre in Melbourne, with its ramifications stretching to all parts of Australia and contiguous countries’. The organisation prided itself on being the only weather service in the world to encompass an entire continent. However, this mastery of space had its limitations, particularly when it came to delivering useful and timely information to regional areas. At a conference in 1964, the Bureau admitted the need for greater ‘regionalisation’ of its services. ‘The Gippslander feels his needs are not met by a forecast from Melbourne’, noted the meteorological officer in charge of the RAAF station at East Sale. ‘In hill country such as this’, he added, ‘the changes in climate from one valley to another are too great to be covered by general forecasts’.

This was not just a question of size or scale, however; it was also a matter of where useful knowledge was generated. W. M. Prescott, a dried fruits and citrus grower from Red Cliffs, told the conference how growers had organised themselves into a ‘frost club’. With the assistance of the local weather office, club members closely monitored conditions, sending out an alarm when frost seemed likely. ‘Farmers can read the immediate weather signs’, grazier A. R. Johnston remarked, ‘often with surprising accuracy’. What was needed from the Bureau, he argued, was a complementary picture of what lay beyond the horizon. Rural producers were not merely seeking detailed regional information, they were looking for ways to integrate their local knowledge and experience within the centralised systems of the meteorological experts.

The shift, that Jankovic observes, in what counted as meteorology, did not mean that older forms of observation and reportage simply stopped. Instead, they were gradually squeezed out of the metropolitan literature. The cataloguing of local phenomena and meanings continued, and continues, but is only deemed to add to science if its methods are standardised and its results collated. Folk wisdom is not tabulated, cautionary tales are not compared. In the new meteorological networks that developed in the nineteenth century, knowledge was generated at a distance; meaning and authority flowed from centre to periphery. But we do not experience weather as simply a scientific phenomenon.

The stresses of drought, Daniela Stehlik reports, are often exacerbated by the ill- considered advice of outside experts. Perceived as coming ‘from what is effectively a foreign culture’, experts and policy makers offer little respect to local experience. It seems they do not come to listen. Scientific expertise is assumed to be concentrated in centres of learning or power. As in the centralised networks of modern meteorology, knowledge is gathered, sorted and tested, before being redistributed as truth. Mere experience is devalued in favour of controlled observation, received truths are displaced by experiment. We accept such changes in the name of progress, while clinging to the belief that there are other ways of knowing – there are truths to be found in place, people and self that cannot be deduced from the canons of science. Into this uneasy truce the weather introduces a daily challenge. Every day we venture out into the world equipped both with forecasts and feelings. To the experts’ predictions we bring our own repertoire of signs, memories, and intuitions. Is the breeze warmer than yesterday? Is that rain I can smell? Meteorologists gather data from around the globe, running it through computer models of great complexity. They watch from space as cloud masses dance and twirl across the continent. All this information is collated and processed to tell us what to expect in our own region, city or suburb. But it does not tell us what to feel – at the end of all these transformations and shifts in scale, the weather remains something immediate and personal.

Even our understanding of the global climate is coloured by local concerns. After surveying residents in Newcastle, Harriet Bulkeley concluded that public understanding of climate change could not be measured solely in terms of the spread of scientific information. Just as seventeenth century observers had framed their reports of meteorological phenomena within a broader social commentary, so inhabitants of Newcastle drew upon ‘local knowledges, values and moral responsibilities’ in piecing together their understanding of global environmental concerns. Climate change was located within a broader critique of humanity’s interaction with nature, but it was also related to the coal-burning furnaces of the local BHP plant. In a similar way, regional variations in the uptake of solar hot water systems cannot be explained by economics alone. As Ian Lowe comments in Chapter 10, the acceptance of such technologies is dependent upon a number of social and political factors. And so even as Queensland proudly celebrates its sunshine, the state lags behind others in utilising this source of renewable energy.

We are frequently reminded that communications, economics, and culture – perhaps even life itself – are becoming increasingly globalised. National boundaries are giving way to the flow of ideas and money. Weather and climate seem to be following the trend: demanding world attention as never before, uniting nations in concern. As Tony McMichael and Clive Hamilton remind us in Chapters 12 and 16, global warming brings a new perspective to Australia’s understanding of its climate. Questions of national development have to be reframed within the context of global responsibility. In Strange Weather, Andrew Ross argues that the debate about global warming generates ‘contradictions in the way people think about the natural world’: ‘Instead of feeling the weather as we have felt it historically, as part of a shared local, or even national, culture, we are encouraged to think of it globally’. Once a symbol of our distinctiveness, the Australian climate now also reminds us of our obligations to the world.

Even the cycle of drought and flood, so central to Australian experience and identity, is now shared with the world through a massive system of ocean-atmosphere interaction. The farmer in Queensland despairing of drought, feeling isolated from sympathy and support, might yet be linked through El Niño to weather events more than an ocean away. From local to global, from feeling to knowing, the experience of weather presents us with dramatic shifts in scale and meaning. Such shifts connect our choice of clothes for the day with the onrolling of immense oceanic currents. A decision about when to plant our backyard tomatoes might reflect the imagined destiny of the nation, while the opening of the ski season could wait upon our decision about whether to drive or walk to work.

strange weather

Weather ‘is the last thing we leave behind’ when we move, David Laskin writes, ‘and the first thing we find when we arrive’. As we travel, we carry a sense of ‘our’ weather amongst the baggage of memory and emotion. The weather we grew up with, the weather we know, provides us with a basis for comparison, encouraging us to declare ‘all weather that departs from it strange’. Newspaper headlines betray our continuing fascination with ‘strange weather’ or ‘freak weather’ – weather that is unseasonal, unusual or unexpected. Like seventeenth century English observers, we greet such visitations with curiosity, and sometimes alarm. Perhaps, like Mr Hodgson, we read such events as evidence that the climate itself is changing; or maybe they warn of the dangers unleashed through human interference with nature. The statistical analysis of climate may often reveal ‘freak’ occurrences to lie well within the bounds of probability, but their ‘strangeness’ is also measured against our perceptions of history, memory, place and politics. ‘Strange weather’ exists in the gap between weather and climate, between hope and fear, between expectation and event.

For Mr Hodgson, it was the present that was strange. Alienated from his imagined past, uncomfortable with the encroachments of age, he looked to the weather as a sign of what had gone wrong – what he had lost. For Cook, Banks, and those who followed, it was the land that was strange. Carrying the weather of home in their memories and expectations, they found it hard to read the southern skies. To European eyes, Australia seemed a place where all things were ‘queer and opposite’. The seasons were upside down, of course, but they also behaved less predictably. Rainfall could vary dramatically from year to year, particularly in the arid centre. In Chapter 4, Libby Robin explores the way in which assumptions about seasonality influenced understanding of Australia’s desert regions. The experience of the northern hemisphere led naturalists to expect regular, seasonal cycles in the breeding habits of birds. However, the Banded Stilt refused to conform, only breeding when floodwaters create suitable wetlands in the arid zone. Like many other birds and animals, the Banded Stilt had found a way to adapt to Australia’s variable climate. Instead of regularity or seasonality, there was opportunism.

As early as the 1850s, Neville Nicholls notes in Chapter 2, William Stanley Jevons had characterised the Australian climate as ‘one of irregular rains’. But the significance of this observation has been difficult to grasp. While periodic droughts were reluctantly accepted as features of Australian life, the idea that variability of this sort was not an aberration, but a defining characteristic of the climate, seemed to conflict with ideas of natural order and balance. This feeling of unease can be observed in the reception of the well-known ‘Goyder’s Line’. In Chapter 5, Janis Sheldrick describes how George Goyder, surveyor general of South Australia, sought to map the limits of reliable rainfall, which he recognised as crucial to the colony’s agricultural development. Nonetheless, his line has been commonly misunderstood as representing something quite different – average rainfall, rather than its reliability. Averages offer the reassurance that peaks and troughs even out over time; they convey a sense of underlying uniformity. Reliability, on the other hand, provides a measure of doubt.

The meaning of variability was perhaps even harder to comprehend at a time when science seemed destined to reveal nature’s deepest mysteries. Surely Australia’s curious climate was but another puzzle to be solved? As nineteenth-century scientists worked to reduce the complexity of the natural world to a series of fundamental laws, so European Australians began to suppose that their climate’s capricious character might disguise some long-term pattern or regularity. A thorough knowledge of these climatic cycles, it was suggested, might allow droughts to be forecast months, if not years, in advance. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the public was entranced, as various schemes for long-range forecasting were offered up by scientists and enthusiastic amateurs. Some believed that sun spots held the key, or perhaps planetary motions. Others canvassed terrestrial influences, arguing that a greater knowledge of Antarctic meteorology was crucial for the development of accurate long-range forecasts. A feature article in the Argus in 1938 argued that the study of both sun spot and Antarctic cycles would allow meteorologists ‘to set a time-table for our weather’, bringing Australia ‘wealth and prosperity in boundless measure’.

Most celebrated amongst the ranks of Australia’s ‘weather prophets’ was Inigo Jones. For thirty years until his death in 1954, Jones issued long-range forecasts based on a complicated series of cycles linking planetary movements and sun spots. His prognostications won a devoted following, particularly amongst pastoralists in Queensland and New South Wales. Through his own experience of drought and flood, Jones claimed he ‘saw clearly the inner meaning of the problem’: ‘something told me that I was called to find the answer’. The solar system was, he argued, ‘a vast electro-magnetic machine’. Once its cycles were properly understood, weather patterns both past and future would be revealed in their regularity. Within three years, Jones asserted in 1929, ‘correct long range forecasts can be made giving definite areas which will be affected by drought, the period of duration of such drought, as well as giving the definite areas which will benefit by good rainfalls’. Weather Bureau officials were less confident in Jones’s abilities, suggesting that he submit a detailed statement of his theories for proper scientific scrutiny. H. A. Hunt admitted that some cycles showed ‘encouraging’ coincidences, but there comes a point, he argued, ‘where the bottom falls out of any theory’. The public, he warned, ‘is always at the mercy of any theorist who chooses to quote statistics’.

The possibility of uncovering the ‘timetable of nature’ tantalised a nation that was largely dependent on its rural industries – no more crop failures, bad seasons could be predicted and planned – but did it also appeal to our sense of rhythm? Since the Renaissance at least, the nature of time, and of existence itself, has been increasingly understood in linear and cumulative terms. The embrace of progress in western societies has dulled our awareness of the natural cycles and rhythms that underlie our onwards journeying. Yet still we find comfort in the return of spring, and stop to gaze at the moon’s familiar faces.

In Chapter 3, Deborah Rose explains how Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District have developed a complex system of environmental cues foretelling the change in seasons. It is a system based not on time or a linear sequence of causation, but on connections, communication and significance. There is no norm or average against which conditions can be compared. Instead, difference, absence, variability and patchiness are embraced within a rich array of local messages and meanings. The weather is never strange to those who live with it in country.

Western meteorology, however, has generally preferred causes to correlation. In the 1970s when Neville Nicholls began to examine the involvement of El Niño in Australian droughts, he found the suspicion of cycles and statistics still lingered within the meteorological community. The available evidence was ‘patchy’ and empirical, with limited theoretical understanding of the physical processes involved. Moreover, the very idea that climatic changes could be predicted months ahead seemed at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy. The gradual acceptance of El Niño into the meteorological mainstream has not only brought legitimacy to the field of climate prediction, it has also loosened the grip of theory and modelling over what counts as useful evidence.

Like the planetary cycles of Inigo Jones, the idea of El Niño has been embraced by the public as a sign that drought is not random or arbitrary. There is no ‘timetable of nature’, perhaps, but many serious droughts can be located within a recurring, natural cycle that is, to some extent, predictable. However, El Niño varies in its onset, length and severity. It is not governed by the calendar, nor read from the astronomical charts. It is a cycle that offers the possibility of prediction, even as it commits us to the fundamental variability of the Australian climate. It confronts us with a different kind of certainty, in which only constant monitoring can attune us to the global rhythms of ocean and atmosphere.

As Neville Nicholls notes, the media and the public have been inclined to overestimate the predictive power offered by El Niño. Probabilities are difficult to communicate, and the lure of certainty remains strong. Despite the occasional nod to chaos theory, we expect science and technology inevitably to increase our ability to predict and control the natural world. Certainty is assumed to be the most desirable basis for rational planning. Daniel Connell describes in Chapter 7 how even a resource as obviously dependent on climatic variability as water, is fought over by primary producers demanding greater certainty in their allocations. Instead of correlations we seek causes, instead of possibilities we demand predictions. We face the challenges of variability with the expectation of certainty. And the weather continues to seem strange.

change in the weather

The climate of the newly established colony at Port Jackson was ‘changeable beyond any other I ever heard of’, Watkin Tench observed, ‘clouds, storms and sunshine pass in rapid succession’. The weather is always changing, of course; the atmosphere is never still. Change seems natural, while unbroken spells of hot or cold weather tax our patience and understanding. At the height of summer, we scan the synoptic charts for the jagged lines that indicate a cold front is on its way – a change is coming, we sigh with relief, perhaps some rain this time. We celebrate the signs that mark the passage from one season to the next. We live our lives amidst shifting winds, varying temperatures and humidity. Change in the weather surrounds us in a way that is familiar and reassuring.

Tench was grappling with change on two fronts. While the weather continued to play its games, the colonists sought to understand and adapt. It was not the changeability of the climate that concerned him so much as the lack of reliable indicators. Without some means of prediction, without experience gained over many years, change seemed arbitrary, whimsical, perhaps even dangerous. Only with a growing knowledge of the climate could European settlers derive an understanding of the limits within which change could operate. We are comfortable with the many changes our weather brings because we have a system of prediction that moulds our expectations to the range of likely outcomes. But what if the reverse were true – if the weather itself could be changed to meet our expectations and desires. As we congratulate ourselves on the gradual acceptance of our continent’s variable climate, we might ask ourselves: would we change it if we could?

Although white Australians reluctantly resigned themselves to the reality of drought, still they wondered whether the climate might somehow be changed for the better. With settlement proceeding apace in the mid-nineteenth century, it was optimistically asserted that ‘rain followed the plough’. A series of severe droughts prompted second thoughts, and some proposed that rainfall might actually be improved through the planting of forests. The twentieth century brought many and varied solutions, from the expansive nation-building vistas of the Bradfield Scheme, which planned to modify the climate of Central Australia by diverting water from coastal rivers inland, through to a score of would-be rainmakers targeting recalcitrant clouds with rockets, kites, balloons and guns. ‘Still the weather remains unconquered’, the Argus concluded in 1944, after surveying various rainmaking attempts: ‘The grim spectre of drought is one of the few enemies which man can see but cannot destroy … with all his scientific knowledge he is powerless to kill it’.

But science emerged from the Second World War with a renewed sense of potency, and, as Rod Home describes in Chapter 6, the battle against climate was taken up anew by cloud seeders in the CSIR/O Division of Radiophysics. Richard Casey, the responsible minister, proclaimed that the Australian program was ‘in the forefront of research into weather modification’. As the researchers prepared for a large-scale experimental program in the Snowy Mountains, the Sun-Herald wondered, ‘Is this the year of the pay-off?’ If the tests succeeded, the article concluded, ‘then 1957 may go down in history, not as the year of the A-bomb, the H-bomb or the guided missile, but as the year Australia gave rainmaking to the world’. A suitable gift from the world’s driest inhabited continent.

Cloud seeding failed to fulfil its promise, though it has its supporters still. Neither has the vision of great nation-building projects faded from the public imagination. Variations of the Bradfield Scheme maintain popular appeal, both as an effort to thwart the menace of drought, and a symbol of national unity and achievement in the mould of the Snowy Scheme. In 2002, as Australia suffered the effects of one of the worst droughts on record, media pundits led yet another chorus of ‘turn the rivers inland’. Discussion focused on possible means of ‘drought- proofing’ the country.

The experience of change raises the question of control. Do we submit to the whims of nature or resist? Do we find ways of adapting our modes of living or do we mount a technological counter-attack? In an era in which even our cars come equipped with ‘climate control’ and the use of air conditioning in our homes continues to spiral upwards, the answers are far from clear. In any case, the ability to effect change does not guarantee the power to control. We now know it’s easy to change the weather, we’ve been doing it for years, perhaps since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. After all the failed rainmaking devices and plans for drought-proofing the continent has come the reluctant acceptance that changing the climate is as simple as flicking on a light switch or driving a car – anyone can do it. Unfortunately, global warming, fuelled by the profligate generation of greenhouse gases, may well bring Australia more droughts, more heatwaves, and more ‘freak’ weather.

However, as Mike Smith reminds us in Chapter 15, climate change is nothing new. For many thousands of years, human beings have adapted to shifts in the climate and conditions of the Australian landmass. Nor, as we have seen, is the idea that the climate might be changing totally unprecedented – Mr Hodgson and his fellow travellers have been issuing their warnings for decades. Why then, as Clive Hamilton asks in Chapter 16, have we been so reluctant to address the implications of global warming? Part of the answer may lie in our experience of time. Both the study of palaeoclimates and Mr Hodgson’s anxieties illustrate the difficulty we have in grappling with change over time. Locating our own meagre spans within the sweep of deep time stretches our powers of imagination, just as the lessons of memory ill fit the analysis of long-term data. We remember our summers as being hotter, and yet we know that they were not. We know that the consequences of our inaction will be borne by future generations, and yet we imagine that they will still have time to spare. We guard the present against the implications of past and future. We cling to denial, Hamilton argues, when what is needed is a change in our values, and our sense of responsibility – a change in the way we think.

The papers in this volume address our experience of weather and climate from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. They invite you to find what is human in the elements and to ponder your own change in the weather.

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, as Australia prepared to celebrate its birth as a nation, the people of Sydney looked to the weather. ‘The keenest dread is that Proclamation Day will be wet’, the Age reported, ‘“Will it rain?” is the question in everybody’s mouth’.

The storm broke shortly after 7 o’clock. Fierce winds and heavy rains battered the city’s festive finery, toppling some flags and hoardings, and making ‘rather a sorry sight’ of the buntings. As drizzle continued on into the night, the Government Astronomer, H.C. Russell, offered calm reassurance: ‘Prospects are strongly in favor of fine weather for our natal day’.

Despite Russell’s confident prediction, 1 January 1901 dawned uncertain. ‘Overhanging clouds and portending thunder’ threatened to mar the procession that was assembling in the Domain. But just before the parade marched off on its triumphant journey towards the inauguration ceremony, the cloud cover began to break. Suddenly, the sun ‘burst forth’, flooding the scene with new colour and life: ‘His beams were never before half so welcome’, remarked the Age. Soon, an ‘invigorating southerly breeze’ arose, rustling the banners and the flags, freshening the air. The weather, it seemed, had succumbed to the sense of occasion. ‘The new nation was awakening’, the Age continued, ‘and with it inanimate nature was springing into renewed beauty and life’.

The sun played the part scripted for it in many of the celebratory odes that heralded the achievement of Federation. The rising sun symbolised Australia’s youth, opportunity and integrity. But if the sun’s finely-timed appearance seemed portentous, its performance was perhaps a little overdone. By midday its rays were beating down on the closely packed crowds ‘with terrific intensity’. Sixteen soldiers collapsed due to the heat. Moreover, in a continent that had yet to emerge from a long and terrible drought, a blazing sun might equally symbolise lost hopes, failures, and ragged, desolate dreams.

Optimism that Australia’s ‘empty lands’ would readily fall to the plough was blunted by the long drought of the 1890s. Nonetheless, expectations remained strong. The new nation’s destiny was still imagined to lie somewhere amidst its ‘vast spaces’, but this destiny was as much of a challenge as it was a gift. If the land was to be won, its character had to be known, its climate understood, its extremes predicted and moderated. While all of the colonies maintained meteorological services, mostly staffed by astronomers like Russell, the value of cooperation and coordination was clear. When the constitution of the new nation was framed, astronomy and meteorology were the only fields of scientific endeavour in which the Commonwealth sought power to legislate. More than just a matter of efficiency, meteorology offered itself as a tool to the eager nation builders.

climates of opinion

It was with considerable satisfaction that Littleton Groom rose to address the House of Representatives on 1 August 1906. As the member for Darling Downs, Groom had been alarmed by the closure of the Queensland Weather Bureau in 1902, and had urged the Commonwealth to exercise its constitutional powers by establishing a Federal Bureau. In the years that followed, Groom urged and urged again, taking the matter up with Prime Ministers Barton, Deakin and Watson. But on 1 August 1906, he was no longer demanding action. As Minister for Home Affairs in the Deakin Protectionist government, it was Groom who finally introduced legislation to create a federal meteorological department.

In his speech, Groom emphasised the value of accurate weather information for primary producers and shipping. National coordination offered improvements in efficiency and accuracy, but also, he noted, the opportunity for ‘a proper study of climatic conditions… which are of importance in considering the suitability of certain localities for settlement and development’. ‘Under a Federal system’, Groom continued, ‘we hope to become thoroughly acquainted with the climatic conditions of the continent’. Groom wanted more than just efficiency; he imagined the Commonwealth Bureau as just one component in a system of institutions and legislation that would foster the settlement of Australia’s ‘empty spaces’. Speaking on the Commonwealth takeover of the Northern Territory in 1909, Groom remarked: ‘We are every year acquiring a better knowledge of our natural conditions and a better understanding of the laws of production’. Through the work of institutions such as the Bureau of Meteorology, Groom believed that ‘much of the land that is now despised will ultimately become very productive’.

The Bureau’s climatological research effort was bolstered when Griffith Taylor was appointed as ‘physiographer’ in 1910, although he promptly left for the Antarctic. Upon his eventual return, Taylor subjected Australia’s supposed ‘potentialities’ to scientific scrutiny, examining the effect of climate on settlement and the development of primary industries. Australia was ‘empty’ for a reason, he concluded, the climate could not sustain the sort of intensive settlement that Groom and others had hoped for. Taylor’s numerous publications on the topic were peppered with visually-arresting graphs and maps — climographs, hythergraphs, econographs, isoiketes — the tools of the meteorologist and the geologist were used to create a new kind of weather map, a forecast for the nation. However, it was not a picture the nation builders expected or liked. The blanks on their map foretold opportunity, sunny skies over open plains; but Taylor’s map forecast little change, a large, leaden mass had settled over the heart of the continent. It was ‘useless’.

Taylor’s Australia was beset with deserts both climatic and cultural. He was impatient with wilful ignorance and political posturing, and took as his mission to ‘tell the truth and shame the booster’. But he could also be arrogant and dogmatic, seeking to enshrine his own discipline at the core of the nation-planning exercise. For their part, the ‘boosters’ fell back on outraged expostulations, ridiculing ‘armchair experts’, and invoking the manly virtues of courage and determination as a match for any supposed climatic limits. But they were hardly as irrational or ignorant as Taylor may have imagined. Taylor’s critics were surveying a human landscape, seeking a role for the individual in the destiny of a nation. The distance between the two sides was not so great, and had the debate centred on small-scale, regional assessments, they may have found considerable room for agreement. Instead there was a battle of the maps, as each side sought to trace the boundaries of nationhood on the outlines of a continent.

Even though Griffith Taylor fled the country in 1928, his assessments gathered authority and acceptance, particularly amongst the ranks of ‘experts’ and ‘planners’. But the burgeoning power of science and technology also offered inspiration to the dreamers. New waves of optimism washed over the desert lands, hope sprouting afresh. In 1941, as Australians began to wonder about the shape of the postwar world, one of the country’s most eminent engineers presented a plan to remake the continent. J.J.C. Bradfield, the designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, advocated a massive system of dams and tunnels to turn water from north Queensland rivers inland, ultimately to fill Lake Eyre. The huge increase in surface water, he argued, would increase rainfall, permanently altering the climate of inland Australia.

Bradfield based his climatic theories on the work of E.T. Quayle, one of the Bureau’s pioneer researchers and Griffith Taylor’s former room-mate. However, the new generation of meteorological researchers questioned Quayle’s findings and dismissed Bradfield’s extravagant predictions. Only Quayle, now retired, offered any support. ‘Having… satisfied myself that it is possible by human agency to bring about very considerable local improvements in the climate of the southern half of our continent’, Quayle maintained, ‘I am loath to believe that nothing of a similar character is likely to result in the northern half’. But what government was likely to spend £30,000,000 to find out?

Bradfield’s dream may have seemed too ambitious, but another large-scale water diversion project became the symbol of Australia’s postwar development. The Snowy Scheme combined traditional values of community and hard work, with a new sense of technological potency. Rivers and mountains could now be tamed, perhaps the weather itself would soon succumb. In a world where the boundary between energy and matter could be crossed at will, what limits could remain?

Griffith Taylor returned to Australia in the 1950s, in time to observe a new swell in the rhetoric of ‘Australia Unlimited’. In his morning newspaper he could read the head of CSIRO, Ian Clunies Ross, describing how ‘poor, almost worthless soil’ was being transformed into ‘fertile pasture’; how exciting ‘new possibilities’ had emerged in the development of the north; and how rain-making experiments offered the prospect of ‘substantially increased’ rainfall. In words to gladden the heart of any ‘booster’, Clunies Ross proclaimed that ‘there are no problems so great that they cannot be solved once we marshal our resources for a resolute and sustained attack on them’.

The Australian national optimism index continues to swing between the highs of ‘possibilism’ and the lows of ‘determinism’. Even as we ponder the environmental costs of the Snowy Scheme, we revel in nostalgia for its nation building heroics. In 2000, the outgoing president of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists called for an ‘audacious water scheme’ to permanently fill Lake Eyre, thus to increase rainfall across the Murray-Darling Basin. Such a project, he argued, ‘could be a catalyst for uniting and inspiring us’. Some politicians agree. ‘In the past, ideas such as the Bradfield scheme have been dismissed as being unworkable,’ commented the Labor member for Dunkley in 1993, ‘But it has been proved that things which were considered impossible and impractical yesterday, are not so today through modern science and technology’. The Liberal member for Dickson called for ‘the determination to look at these things and make them happen’. He envisaged a new Snowy scheme, a program of major capital works that would ‘end this terrible drought-wet cycle… and provide a vision for this country’.

Edmund Barton rallied the Federation movement with the cry ‘a nation for a continent, a continent for a nation’, but the fit between nation and continent is still uncomfortable (perhaps a few tucks here… or a little off the length…). Even with our supposedly heightened environmental sensibilities, each new flood or drought awakens the nagging suspicion that the weather is somehow against us. We have inherited a ‘vision’ of nation building that imagines its fulfilment in defeat of climate, the conquest of nature.

battling the elements

As the long drought was reaching its peak in 1902, the popular Queensland poet George Essex Evans sought to evoke the suffering of those ‘fighting in the battle-line’:

Drought and ruin hold the land:
Round our homes their hosts have met;
On our hearths their thrones are builded;
On our hearts their seals are set.

But despair had not yet won, for the ‘legions of the army’ stood wearied but defiant. With ‘steadfast hand’ and ‘gallant heart’, settlers were locked a seemingly endless war against a capricious and malevolent foe — nature.

Evans was a friend of Littleton Groom, and corresponded regularly with Alfred Deakin. Like many others, he shared their dreams of national destiny. Although Federation brought a sense of unity, nationhood was still a work in progress. Australia had to prove itself worthy of a place in the vanguard of white civilisation. Even as the drought ravaged lives and landscape, Evans welcomed it as an opportunity for improvement:

In the surfeit of abundance
Lurks the canker of decay:
From the discipline of hardship
Grows the power to mould and sway
With threads of pain and bitterness
God weaves upon the loom of Fate:
In furnace-fires of suffering
He makes a nation great.

‘Iron-seared’, the mighty nations of Europe had won empires and influence through war. The character of their manhood had been tested and hardened in adversity. Lacking the same character-building opportunities, Australia declared war on the weather.

The battle against the elements, it was imagined, would strengthen both nation and race. Australia would earn full possession of the continent, and its sturdy settler stock would emerge healthy and vigorous. This was the dream of ‘White Australia’, and the battle was given urgency by perceived threats to the nation’s racial mission. Looming always was the challenge of Australia’s tropical north. If the drought-flood cycle of southern climes seemed cruel, it was at least more familiar than the heat and humidity of the tropics. The north was not just empty, it was alien. The war had to be carried deep into enemy territory.

In 1913, Littleton Groom introduced a lecture by Dr Anton Breinl, the director of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine. ‘Australians have taken upon themselves the task of settling the northern parts of their continent’, Groom noted , however, ‘it was yet to be proved’ that such a policy could be justified ‘according to the rules of nature’. Many argued that the tropical climate was not only uncomfortable for white settlers, it was injurious. Basic standards of moral and physical ‘hygiene’ were compromised, and the threat of disease was ever present. Instead of improvement, the north raised the spectre of racial degeneration. In attempting to subdue this ‘foreign’ land, white settlers might themselves become more ‘asian’. Australia was ‘faced with one of the most far-reaching experiments of modern times’, Breinl argued, ‘an experiment which certainly justified the application of unlimited effort’. For only in meeting this challenge, he continued, could the nation be certain of ‘the possession not only of Northern Australia, but also of the whole of a united Australia by a white community’.

Groom, of course, was optimistic, and imagined the settler venturing northwards into battle ‘accompanied by the best scientific brain that could be sent with him’. But the tropical climate was doubly threatening. It presented both a test of character for White Australia, and a reminder of the nearness of Asia. If Australians were unable to master the heat and undertake ‘effective occupation’ of their empty northern frontier, how could they hope to repel invasion from Asia. Indeed, could they legitimately claim to own a land in which they could not live?

Knowledge of Australia’s tropical climate and its effects on white settlement seemed vitally important for the nation’s growth, integrity and security. And yet, when an attack finally came, Australia was unprepared. The Pacific War revealed the limitations of the country’s meteorological systems and prompted a rapid overhaul in organisation, method and theory. As they have throughout history, science and war formed a fruitful alliance.

With the first use of poison gas in 1915, the wind became a weapon of war. Weather had always played its part in the outcome of military campaigns, but, in World War 1, with gas and the increasing use of aircraft, meteorology found itself promoted to the battle front. Indeed, as European meteorologists began to pay close attention to the boundaries between air masses, the term ‘front’ was borrowed from the battlefield to play an important role in forecasting, eventually to appear as the bumpy lines on our weather map.

When war threatened again in 1939, Australian authorities were quick to appreciate the potential value of meteorological services and arranged for control of the Bureau to be transferred to the Department of Air. A vast network of observing and forecasting stations was established across Australia and the Pacific. But the problem of the tropics remained. As new data flooded in, the inadequacy of existing forecasting methods was revealed. The techniques of frontal analysis, developed originally in Norway, had to be modified to suit the rather different climatic conditions. A new tropical research unit was charged with the task, its work receiving international recognition. As a result of such successes, meteorology emerged from the war with new confidence, new abilities, and a growing weight of public expectation. The tropics had been robbed of some of their mysteries and dangers, but new threats had arisen. The wind had once again become a carrier of death.

Brighter than the sun, with its mushroom cloud, rushing winds, and rain of deadly fallout, the atomic bomb invaded public consciousness through the metaphors of meteorology. The weather had changed for the worse. As the effects of radioactive fallout became more widely understood, civil defence planners and military strategists placed increasing value on accurate meteorological data. One of Australia’s civil defence chiefs returned from an overseas briefing in 1955, emphasising ‘the need to get our meteorological experts together to give special study to the behaviour of winds at varying altitudes’. ‘It is these winds’, he continued, ‘that move “fall out” material across incredible distances’. The head of the Bureau, L.J. Dwyer, sought to keep his staff informed of fallout studies, stressing that ‘meteorological factors play an important role in both the peaceful and hostile uses of atomic energy’.

When Australia agreed to host British atomic bomb tests, meteorologists were enlisted as guardians of public safety. As talk of drifting clouds and radioactive rain began to alarm the populace in 1956, the Minister for Supply, Howard Beale, outlined the meteorological precautions to be taken at the test site in the Monte Bello Islands: ‘the forecasting of suitable weather conditions’, he stressed, ‘ is a vital factor in ensuring that the actual firings only take place when weather conditions are satisfactory’. Thirty years later, the Royal Commission investigating the tests noted that according to available climatic data the chances of obtaining ‘satisfactory’ conditions were slim. Political imperatives outweighed meteorological assessments.

With the coming of the atomic bomb and the prospect of global annihilation, some argued that national boundaries had become irrelevant. The wind knew no borders. And yet, as the world rushed into a new ‘cold’ war, divisions were heightened, frontiers were reinforced. Distance is measured in many units, from the spatial to the cultural — from angstrom and metres, to prejudice and fear. In the early years of the twentieth century, Australia seemed vast, but Asia was oppressively close. Throughout our history, weather and climate have served both to bridge the distances and emphasise the gaps, enabling us to imagine both a nation and its enemies.

forecast: 1 January 2001

On the last day of the twentieth century, as Sydneysiders prepared for yet another fireworks spectacular, the weather threatened once again to intervene. ‘A strong diagonal wind across the harbour would spoil the picture’, worried the artistic director, ‘the weather forecasts this year are not promising’. The concerns may have been familiar, but much had changed in a hundred years. Anyone preparing to go to fireworks or the ‘Journey of a Nation’ parade, had access to a surfeit of up-to-date meteorological information: bulletins on radio, television, the internet, or even their mobile phone; not just forecasts either, but detailed climatic data, satellite photos and radar images of approaching storms.

The history of meteorology has been a history of collection, coordination and integration. The telegraph revolutionised forecasting in the nineteenth century, prompting increased cooperation between the Australian colonies, and leading ultimately to the establishment of the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology. Radio enabled the observation network to extend beyond Australia’s shores, while aeroplanes provided access to the upper atmosphere. The realm of meteorology expanded, bureaucratically and geographically. As we watch the nightly weather forecasts on television now, we can see the weather moving across the country. Satellite images show the spirals of cyclones, the cloud band of an approaching front. All this superimposed over the familiar outline of the Australian continent. At last we see the big picture. Or do we?

In 1910, E.T. Quayle began to speculate on the relationship between monsoonal patterns to Australia’s north and rainfall distribution across the continent. Could the air pressure in Darwin tell you something about the possibility of rain in Victoria? Answers were a long time coming, and it was not until the 1980s that detailed analysis was able to confirm some of Quayle’s correlations. He had been observing the workings of what we now call El Niño, part of ‘a global-scale system of ocean-atmosphere interaction’. Major floods and droughts in Australia were no longer simply continental events, they were linked via ocean currents to conditions half a world away.

Since the Second World War, the focus of Australian meteorology has become increasingly international, both through participation in organisations such as the World Meteorological Organisation, and through a greater understanding of global systems like El Niño. Even as our knowledge of the continent increases, its boundaries blur. Perhaps the idea of an Australian climate is as much a construction as the nation itself.

FEDERATION & METEOROLOGY »

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 them drift on, merely taunting with the possibility of relief. But this time the people of Charleville had science on their side. They were going to make it 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 the direction of the Mayor, ten shots were ‘fired from each in quick succession’. A few drops of rain fell, but nothing more until two o’clock, when there was a light shower. The drought had not been broken, but it seemed an encouraging start. Perhaps, it was suggested, the prevailing strong winds had ‘interfered with the force of the vortices’.

Later that afternoon, the experiment was repeated. This time there was no rain. Nothing. Moreover, two of the guns exploded, rendering them unusable. No-one was injured, but the experiment had clearly failed. There would be no more rain. The clouds again moved on, while the would-be rainmakers succumbed to disappointment and recrimination.

Charleville’s assault on the weather was marshalled by Clement Wragge, Queensland’s energetic, but irascible meteorologist. On a visit to Europe in 1901, Wragge had investigated the use of the Stiger Vortex to disperse hailstorms over Italian vineyards. His research led him to believe that the guns might be usefully employed against ‘the heavy “dry” cloud masses of continental Australia’, those ‘which so often promise rain and then pass away without any precipitation’. Discharging a Stiger Vortex battery into the clouds would ‘probably result’ in a ‘downpour’, Wragge suggested. In any case, he added, ‘the experiment is thoroughly worth trying‘.

Many Queenslanders shared his enthusiasm. Public subscriptions funded the construction of the guns, and Wragge supervised their installation at Charleville. But there were no clouds on which to test them. An impatient Wragge departed after a few days, leaving the experiment in the hands of the town’s mayor. When informed of its failure, Wragge had no doubt who was to blame. ‘I could not manage to stay at Charleville until a favourable opportunity of making the experiments occurred’, he explained, ‘and, of course, if the Charleville people will not carry out my instructions, I cannot help it’.

Wragge’s angry outburst was typical of the man and his career. Although he was well regarded by the public, Wragge had the unhelpful knack of alienating many of his colleagues and potential supporters. Styling himself as the ‘Boss weather prophet’, and promulgating Australia-wide predictions from his ‘Chief Weather Bureau, Brisbane’, Wragge sought to claim both the continent and the discipline as his own, hindering attempts to foster intercolonial cooperation. And yet, for all his arrogance and irritability, Wragge successfully focussed attention on the significance of meteorology for the developing nation. His vision of a Federal Weather Bureau would finally be achieved, but he would not be the one to lead it.

The failure of his Charleville experiment was just one of a series of disappointments that were to bring Wragge’s Australian career to a sad and bitter end. Lack of funds forced him to close his weather bureau in 1903, and his ambition to take charge of the newly-established Commonwealth service was thwarted by the appointment of H A Hunt a few years later. Rejected and seemingly unwanted, Wragge left the country to establish an observatory in New Zealand. Just as his attempt to master Charleville’s weather had ended in anger and derision, so his efforts to control Australian meteorology left him isolated and indignant – a weather prophet in the wilderness.

reading the signs

‘I am prompted by the futile forecasts of the present deluge to draw attention to the inadequacy (and often inaccuracy) of our weather forecasts’, an annoyed reader wrote to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1946. Whether through lack of funding or incompetence, the letter argued, Bureau staff seemed incapable of reading the most basic weather signs: ‘the portents of the present storm were clearly written in the sky on Saturday’. The Bureau responded a few days later, dryly noting that storm warnings issued on the basis of ‘portents’ might cause ‘unnecessary alarm or panic’. Moreover, it reassured the public that its forecasts were the work of a ‘competent academic staff’ drawing ’scientific deductions’ from the available data.

We all like to dabble in meteorology. Every day brings a new batch of predictions for us to test and discuss. We place our trust in science, but still we look to the sky, gathering our own observations, developing our own theories, offering our own forecasts – ‘It looks like rain’, ‘It’s going to be a hot one’ – each of us our own weather prophet.

Long before Europeans invaded the continent, Aboriginal people had learned to read nature for signs of change, developing a sophisticated understanding of the climatic cycles that shaped their lives. European settlers found the seasons reversed and the signs obscure. Cooks and Banks arrived at Botany Bay one rainy Autumn, but imagined themselves in the midst of a long dry season. Their optimism encouraged plans for colonisation, but left early settlers ill-prepared for the climatic hardships that followed.

Gradually white Australians compiled their own catalogue of weather indicators, drawing on folklore, observation and fancy. In 1934, Alec Chisholm asked readers of the Argus ‘what are the chief signs of rain in Australia?’ and was inundated (!). ‘Indeed’, Chisholm wrote surveying the responses, ‘I begin to wonder why Australia troubles to sustain weather bureaus when all her difficulties in point might be solved by going to the ant and the frog’. Beyond the humour, however, lies a significant question, why should we put our faith in meteorologists (and not frogs)?

The development of meteorology in the twentieth century entailed dramatic improvements in both the range of observations available and the methods used for their analysis. But it also involved the establishment of meteorology as a discipline, as a ’science’. Technical and theoretical improvements had to be matched by new levels of training, by the enforcement of professional standards and accountability. Meteorologists had to demonstrate their expertise, and garner the trust of the community. The weather prophet had to make way for the scientist.

Accuracy provided a convenient, but contentious, index of meteorological achievement. Wragge, in his typically immodest way, claimed a remarkable ‘90 to 95 per cent of accuracy in forecasting’. Such boasts, coupled with Wragge’s practice of issuing forecasts for the whole of Australia, cast doubt on the authority and expertise of the other colonial meteorologists. Senator Higgs, speaking in support of Wragge in 1902, commented that ‘although there are in the various States gentlemen who venture to make forecasts, …the question generally asked by the public regarding the weather is “What does Mr Wragge say?”‘. One of the aforementioned gentlemen, Sir Charles Todd, Government Astronomer of South Australia, took some satisfaction in compiling a score sheet tabling Wragge’s predictions against his own. Over a period of twelve years, he calculated his accuracy at 83 per cent, with Wragge trailing on 62 per cent. The figures ’speak for themselves’, Todd concluded. However, the matter at issue was not just who was right, but who was deserving of public trust and support. Who were the experts?

In 1911, the Commonwealth Meteorologist H.A. Hunt proudly reported an increase in forecasting accuracy from 81.5 percent in 1908, to 89.1 percent in 1910. Such figures not only provided evidence of the growing expertise of the recently-established Bureau, but also reflected its value to the community. A decade later Hunt noted that ‘every important industry’ looked to the Bureau for ‘essential information’. Accurate forecasts could even save lives – deaths in the WA pearling fleet had dropped from 200 in 1887 to 40 in 1910. However, as Wragge wryly commented, the job of meteorologist was ‘not one altogether to be envied’: ‘for if 99 forecasts out of a hundred turn out correctly, and the last one fails, don’t they come down on us like a thousand of bricks’.

When a deputation of fruitgrowers lobbied the Victorian Minister for Agriculture in 1935 for increased scientific assistance, the Minister took the opportunity to attack ‘meteorological scientists’ in ‘our expensive Weather Bureau’. The bureau had made a ‘glaring error’, he claimed, in failing to warn primary producers of an oncoming storm. ‘The bureau officials are not qualified men’, the Director of Agriculture Mr Mullett added helpfully, ‘they have no qualifications as have doctors and others’. Mullet’s criticism was not without substance, for at the time the Bureau’s staff included only four science graduates out of a total of nearly ninety. In the early years of the Bureau, meteorological workers were mostly trained on the job. It was only in the late 1930s that the Bureau instituted a specialised training program, and began systematically to recruit young science graduates. The meaning of ‘meteorologist’ changed in response to new demands and new knowledge, bringing increased scientific credibility and reinforcing public trust. By 1953, John Hogan of the Bureau’s Sydney office, could describe the meteorologist as ‘a science graduate of a university, with major work in physics and mathematics; after which he had a year’s training in theoretical and applied meteorology’.

Changes in training were accompanied by improved methods of analysis and a greater emphasis on meteorological research. And yet, even as meteorology confirmed its ’scientific’ status, its limits remained all too clear. Wragge blamed his his very occasional predictive errors on the fact that meteorology ‘is hardly yet what is termed “an exact science”‘. A 1934 article on ‘why forecasts fail’ made a similar admission, arguing that forecasts ‘must be regarded merely as expressions of probability’. For all its advances, meteorology seemed destined to remain a ‘confused science’ which, by the 1950s, had reached the ‘limit of forecasting accuracy’. Meteorologists were unable to indulge in the expansive rhetoric favoured by many scientists of alternate persuasions – their failures were just too obvious. Instead they faced the delicate task of managing public expectations, balancing the achievements of their science against the complexity of its subject matter.

The limitations of meteorology were revealed not just in the accuracy of forecasts, but in their length. For much of the twentieth century, the public clamoured for more from their meteorologists – what about next week, next month, next year? The prospect of seasonal or long-range predictions tantalised a nation dependent on rural industries. ‘The economic possibilities of a reliable forecast of droughts and years of plenty… are tremendous’, enthused Crosbie Morrison. But the promise could not be easily delivered. ‘All over the world, every effort is being made to find a means of making reliable seasonal forecasts’, explained the Commonwealth Meteorologist in 1934, ‘but so far without success’. The search for long-term climatic cycles ‘has been like the search for the philosopher’s stone’, he added.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Wragge was at the forefront of this quest. In the 1890s, he began to study the supposed climatic effects of planetary movements and sunspot cycles, using his research as the basis for a series of long-range forecasts. Wragge’s methods were developed by Inigo Jones, who was to become one of Australia’s best-known weather prophets.

Sun spots were a popular and enduring candidate for those wishing to unravel the deeper mysteries of the weather. But others, such as adventurer and amateur climatologist Sir Hubert Wilkins, emphasised the role of the Antarctic in determining Australian conditions. A feature article in the Argus in 1938, argued that a knowledge of both sun spot and Antarctic cycles would allow meteorologists ‘to set a time-table for our weather’, bringing Australia ‘wealth and prosperity in boundless measure’. The current forecasting system was ’scientific as far as it goes’, the article added, but ‘a meteorologist who is not also a very advanced astronomer cannot predict weather correctly’.

While maintaining an interest in the possibilities of seasonal forecasting, the Weather Bureau was skeptical of most supposed climatic cycles. H. A. Hunt admitted that some showed ‘encouraging’ coincidences, but there comes a point, he argued, ‘where the bottom falls out of any theory’. Summing up after several decades of research, E. W. Timcke concluded in 1953: ‘No basis – scientific or otherwise -has yet been discovered on which forecasts for seasons in advance can be made with the required reliability and exactitude’. Moreover, he added, ‘even with unlimited research, manpower and finance, there was no certainty that the solution to long-range forecasting would be found’.

But hope was not easily quashed, and Timcke’s pessimistic assessment was published alongside a commentary by Inigo Jones on planetary positions and the possibility of drought. Critical scientific assessments did little to dull popular interest in the pronouncements of the weather prophet. Of course, the accuracy of many long-range predictions was difficult to prove one way or the other. ‘The public’, H. A. Hunt remarked, ‘is always at the mercy of any theorist who chooses to quote statistics’. Timcke enviously noted the public’s tendency to forgive ‘the independent forecaster’, who was regarded ’somewhat like a jockey… cheered when he wins and hooted when he loses, with no hard feelings afterwards’. Perhaps it was the lure of the long-shot?

Belief in the methods of Inigo Jones, and his successor Lennox Walker, was particularly strong amongst farmers and graziers, and political pressure was brought to bear on the Commonwealth for the support of their activities. Jones, the Senate was told in 1938, was a ‘wonderful patriot’, ‘held in the highest esteem by the big man and also the small man on the land’. And yet he had been met only with ‘official scepticism’ and ‘hostility’, his methods labeled ‘unscientific’ by some unknown bureaucratic functionary. Perhaps the public’s fondness for ‘unorthodox’ forecasters grew from the feeling that they were battlers, struggling not only with the mysteries of nature, but with an uncaring bureaucracy and a haughty scientific elite. Just as the Sydney Morning Herald’s correspondent proffered his reading of the ‘portents’, we like to think that the signs are there for all to read. Despite the growing authority of meteorological science, we cling to our own ways of ‘knowing’ the weather – each our own weather prophet.

weather to order

‘For the man in the street the weather does not depend on climate or upon the weather bureau’, argued the Argus in 1918. Statements of mean temperatures or other such ’scientific pronouncements’, it maintained, ‘are meaningless because they take no heed of the state of mind which some people bring to the weather’. What of the influence of the weather on our well-being, on the connection between temperature and temperament? On matters such as these, the editorial suggested, science remained ‘extremely ignorant’.

In an era when even our cars come with ‘climate control’, we might think that the weather has little impact on our lives. But even beyond such vital questions as whether to take an umbrella when we go out, the weather shapes our daily experience in subtle and enduring ways. The writer of the Argus editorial believed that talking about the weather was a means of testing whether ‘our own particular temperament’ was ‘in tune with that of our neighbour’ – a symbolic language of sorts. Certainly the weather effects how we ‘feel’, how we interact with others, how we remember. Perhaps talking about the weather helps us to position our own lives and experiences within a broader landscape of significance – to chart our personal highs and lows, our storm fronts and our sunny spells.

Mr Henry Hodgson, aged 78, was in no doubt: ‘I say emphatically that the climate has changed, especially the summers’. ‘You can do anything with statistics’, he continued, ‘but no statistics will convince me that the climate has not changed radically’. The summers of Mr Hodgson’s youth were hotter, with more thunderstorms, but none of the cold, ‘wintry days’ of recent years. And Mr Hodgson was not alone. Despite assurances from the Weather Bureau, claims that the climate had changed were regularly reported and commonly believed. A series of headlines from a 1935 article summarised the debate: ‘”Winter not abnormal” – Cold comfort from the Weather Bureau – Officers blame psychology’. The Bureau’s Assistant Director, H. Barkley, argued that average temperatures were thoroughly normal. But ‘cloudy skies have a psychological effect’, he added, causing ‘the average citizen to place the mercury in thought much lower than it stands’.

However, the main territory in dispute was that of memory. Responding to a similar outcry in 1950, John Hogan explained: ‘Old people who complain about changing climate, remember only the peak periods. Looking back over their lives, these periods of exceptional weather merge together like the telephone posts down a long road’. ‘Outstanding events’ are mistaken for ‘normal’. Moreover, suggested one meteorological authority, such preoccupations are ‘due to the fact that the attitude towards life, the amount of energy, and the daily occupations and responsibilities of old people are different from what they were when they were younger’. Were Mr Hodgson’s missing thunderstorms, merely forlorn reminders of lost vitality?

Memory is not an average of the past. The statistical transformation of weather into climate is one of the foundations of meteorology, but it is not something we directly experience. We cannot expect our weather memories to provide a reliable guide to climate change, but perhaps they do help us make sense of other changes in our lives and our world. In a similar way, the attraction of long-range forecasts may lie not in their accuracy, but in their certainty. Just as averages bear little relation to our remembered past, so probabilities are difficult to align with an imagined future. The long-range weather prophets, armed with their periods and cycles, made the future less threatening, more orderly. Nature did not act on a whim, it was running on a timetable.

There is, it seems, but a small step between imagining we could know the timetable of nature, and believing it possible to change it. The quest for knowledge and the desire for control were, as ever, closely entwined. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many were convinced that the Australian climate could be improved, either by cultivating the soil, or by planting trees. Severe droughts in the 1880s and ’90s diminished such optimism, but in its place grew the conviction that drought itself was the enemy of progress and must be vanquished. Wragge was not the only one who answered this call to arms, though he certainly had the biggest guns. Others, perhaps less well-motivated, also presented themselves as the saviours of a thirsty continent. Just like the long-range weather prophets, the would-be rainmakers offered Australians the chance to make their own destiny.

In 1903, Broken Hill rainmakers sought to open the clouds by means of a ‘vortical whirl’ of hydrogen, generated by adding zinc to open pots of sulphuric acid. Most experimenters, however, preferred blowing things up. Captain Meaburn, for example, fired a rocket directly into overhanging clouds, and was delighted when a torrential downpour followed, despite the fact that rain had already been predicted by the Bureau. Professor Pepper’s technique, on the other hand, involved ‘tapping the clouds’ with a huge kite loaded with explosives. ‘Despite many unsuccessful experiments’, the Argus noted, ‘the belief that heavy explosions and concussions will produce rain still lives’.

The efforts of Mr J. B. Balsillie, an early radio experimenter, attracted particular attention. Balsillie proffered a more ’scientific’ approach, and disapproved of the term ‘rain making’: ‘a phrase coined by persons of inferior mental calibre’. Instead he argued that rain could be ’stimulated’ by electrical means, using a charged, metal-coated balloon connected to an x-ray tube. Balsillie claimed success for a series of experiments in the Mallee between 1915 and 1919, but an expert committee appointed by the government to investigate his technique was less sanguine. ‘Still the weather remains unconquered’, the Argus concluded in 1944, after surveying various rainmaking attempts: ‘The grim spectre of drought is one of the few enemies which man can see but cannot destroy… with all his scientific knowledge he is powerless to kill it’.

Only three years later the mood had changed with news of US cloud seeding experiments. ‘Weather to order next?’ asked the Sydney Morning Herald. Australia was quick to follow the American lead, and in January 1947 there were reports of ’secret experiments’ being carried out by the CSIR in cooperation with the RAAF. Soon it was confirmed that dry ice released into clouds from an RAAF Liberator had resulted in a brief shower of rain. Experiments were in their early stages, the scientists stressed repeatedly as the cloud-seeding program continued, but the growing sense of excitement and expectation was difficult to suppress.

At the end of the war, CSIR’s Division of Radiophysics had switched from developing radar systems to investigating the physics of clouds. These were the new rainmakers. Publicity surrounding their adventures in the clouds helped consolidate CSIR/O’s position at the heart of Australia’s nation-building enterprise. In 1955, Richard Casey summarised the achievements of the division, inspired by the ‘genius’ of its leader, E. G. Bowen. Casey proclaimed that the Australian program was ‘in the forefront of research into weather modification’. ‘Within a certain time’, he added, ‘it will probably be possible to amend the weather pattern in Australia during periods when suitable clouds exist’. As the researchers prepared for a large-scale experimental program in the Snowy Mountains, the Sydney Morning Herald wondered, ‘Is this the year of the pay-off?’. If the tests succeeded, the article concluded, ‘then 1957 may go down in history, not as the year of the A-bomb, the H-bomb or the guided missile, but as the year Australia gave rainmaking to the world’.

An age-old dream was resurrected amidst a new age of optimism. The recent achievements of science made it seem as if the weather might at last submit to the will of humankind. Edward Teller, not content with giving the world the hydrogen bomb, predicted ’scientific control of the weather’ within 10 years. ‘Once the laws are known’, he argued, ‘it will be possible to influence the weather’. The Bureau of Meteorology was rather more cautious in it pronouncements, and was at times concerned by claims attributed to the CSIRO rainmakers. Nonetheless, it was not immune to the swelling sense of power. Speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Commonwealth Meteorological service, its Director, L.J. Dwyer, spoke of the possibility of ‘tailoring’ the weather. Cyclones might be broken up, he suggested, droughts and floods prevented: ‘The control of the weather will come in the future when meteorology develops to the stage where engineering can be used’.

But with this feeling of power came uneasiness. Already there was concern that ‘freakish’ weather might be attributable to atomic tests. ‘Every time an atom-bomb goes off, people get “weather conscious”‘, noted the Sydney Morning Herald in 1956. Moreover, if the weather could be controlled, then surely it too could be used as a weapon. Reports, emanating from a US Presidential committee investigating weather control, warned of the ‘ominous threat’ that the Russians might ‘launch a vast program to change the world patterns of rainfall’. Tucked amongst the alarmist prophesies and cold war paranoia, however, was an admission that the climate might already be changing. Pointing to the rapidly increasing levels of carbon dioxide, the scientists suggested that ‘there has been a general warming of the earth’s atmosphere by vehicle exhausts and industrial pollutants’. The greenhouse effect.

Even as dreams of controlling the weather have faded, we have, it seems, finally worked out how to modify the climate. It’s easy, we’ve been doing it for years. But our reluctant acceptance of the reality of climate change offers little consolation to Mr Hodgson. The greenhouse effect is still something we know through statistics rather than direct experience. We can’t feel it, and yet these tiny, cumulative changes, beyond casual perception, might drastically alter the way we live, in this and coming centuries. The power to modify the climate has not brought us certainty. It has not delivered us mastery over nature. Instead we face the future with new doubts and fears, wondering, as always, about the coming change in the weather.

the long-range outlook

In April 1999, a hailstorm hit Sydney, its ferocity taking everyone by surprise. As the cleanup began, and the estimated repair bill climbed into the billions, the Weather Bureau was targeted for criticism. Why weren’t the public warned? ‘Yes, it is a strange fact’, Wragge commented nearly a century earlier, ‘that any single failure forms a rich subject for that cynical sarcasm and delicate irony on the part of the exceptional few who do not know the difference between an isobar and an isothermal line’. As the accuracy of forecasts has improved, so public expectations have increased. Failures may be fewer, but criticism is perhaps more intense. Uncomfortable still with our vulnerability to the whims of nature, we look for humans to blame. ”Tis human nature’, sayeth Wragge, ‘and so ’twill be till the end’.

Meteorology is not an ‘exact science’, nor, despite Wragge’s earnest hopes, will it ever be. Responding to criticism over the Sydney hailstorm, the Bureau argued that complete accuracy was impossible ‘because of the inherently chaotic nature of atmospheric and oceanic’ conditions. As the science of meteorology has developed, so has an understanding of its limits. The complexity of natural systems is such as to deny reduction to a simple set of laws. Seeking certainty, we have instead found chaos.

We have no timetable for the weather, but our nightly bulletins do offer forecasts for the coming few days. We cannot be certain when the next drought will hit, but an understanding of El Niño enables us to monitor the likelihood of reduced rainfall. Improved modelling techniques, greater computing power, and increased knowledge of the interaction between ocean and atmosphere, all offer the hope of further improvement. But there will always be surprises.

Wragge would perhaps be disappointed in the progress of his science, and would no doubt claim to be able to do better himself. And yet, as we begin to grapple with the long-term implications of climate change, Wragge would at least have the satisfaction of seeing meteorology at the heart of debates about our global future. Who would have forecast that?

FEDERATION AND METEOROLOGY »

HISTORY OF SCIENCE in Australia is a field intimidated by its subject. Historians have been too slow to examine the local context of knowledge production and use, deferring to scientists and their uncritical catalogues of the past. Historical analysis has given way, too often, to the antiquarian plod or the celebratory frolic.

In nineteenth century Australia, ‘progress’ was a popular theme whenever the scientifically-inclined paused to reflect on their discipline. By the latter half of the century, science was developing an institutional base with the establishment of universities, societies and government posts. History helped locate this fledgling enterprise within a grand progressive tradition. Catalogues of scientific achievement provided a preface to current endeavours. Obituaries of local workers portrayed them, stuffed and mounted, within a gallery of revered pioneers; there were no Darwins or Newtons amongst them, but their lives were still dedicated to the same glorious ideals. The collecting of history parallelled the collecting of specimens – the main scientific activity within the colonies. Science progressed by the steady accumulation of plants, platypi and people.

By the end of the century, science was changing. Experimental science was beginning to displace natural history; professional scientists were edging amateurs out of the vanguard of progress. With more scientists, more societies, more publications and a never-ending parade of anniversaries to be commemorated, disciplinary and institutional studies became commonplace in the twentieth century – predominantly in scientific journals. As science fractured into increasingly narrow specialisations, history seeped in to fill the cracks, smoothing the narrative flow of scientific progress. Many of these historical efforts were of the ‘amateur-antiquarian’ variety identified by Michael Hoare (‘The History of Australian Science: Prospect and Retrospect’, Newsletter of the Australasian Association for the History and Philosophy of Science, no. 5, 1974), but some disciplines have been better-served. T.G. Vallance and David Branagan in geology, and R.W.Home in physics, have helped us to understand how disciplinary communities coalesced and changed (e.g. Vallance and Branagan, ‘The Earth Sciences: Searching for Geological Order’, The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australia 1888-1988, ed. Roy MacLeod, 1988; Home, ‘The Beginnings of an Australian Physics Community’, Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, eds Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, 1987). Astronomy has been remarkably well-endowed, with detailed institutional histories, Beyond Southern Skies: Radio Astronomy and the Parkes Telescope (1992) and The Creation of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (1990), as well as a recent general work, Explorers of the Southern Sky: A History of Australian Astronomy (1996).

Significantly, much of this work has been undertaken by scientists. Despite the oft-heard protest that scientists look forward, not backward, scientific institutions have been major supporters of historical research in Australia. In 1962, the Australian Academy of Science established the Basser Library as a ‘centre for the study of the history of Australian science’. Ann Moyal and Michael Hoare used research positions within the Library to effectively pioneer the field, creating bibliographical resources and outlining many of the broad historiographical questions. The Academy continues to publish the only specialist journal in the field, Historical Records of Australian Science. Within this journal, however, scholarly historical articles are juxtaposed with biographical memoirs of deceased Academicians, written almost exclusively by Fellows. The memoirs are far-advanced beyond the taxidermic tributes of the nineteenth century, but the relationship between the articles and the memoirs is uneasy. Such biographies, as with many disciplinary histories, do not just comment on science past, they help to define science present. Scientists writing history are helping to establish, both within the scientific and broader communities, what makes a scientist and what counts as knowledge. In a powerful sense, the history of science is science. This nexus has been largely ignored, robbing the field of much analytical insight.

A lack of access to sources has sometimes been blamed for this historical inertia. But no more. The Australian Science Archives Project (ASAP) provides details of archival and published sources through its online database, Bright Sparcs (http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bsparcs/). Few other fields of Australian history are so well served. In addition, some naturalists’ journals have been published, and collections of correspondence are appearing. A major project is under way to collect and publish the voluminous correspondence of eminent nineteenth century botanist, Ferdinand Von Mueller. Over the past few decades, tools such as these have been put in place to support an active research community, but where is the activity?

Biographies have appeared for major scientific figures, though there are notable omissions and inadequacies. The ADB has paid increasing attention to scientists over the years, and its articles remain the authoritative sources for many significant workers. Scientist-cum-explorers have fared rather better, as in E.M. Webster’s biography of Leichardt, Whirlwinds in the Plain (1980). The belated impact of women’s history has encouraged efforts to recover the names and deeds of women whose contributions to Australian science has been heretofore overlooked. However, there have been few attempts to move beyond this cataloguing process, to analyse the structures and assumptions that circumscribe participation in the scientific community, though some of the contributors to On the Edge of Discovery (1993) do raise such issues. Recent years have brought a mixed bag of scientific biographies with subjects including Macfarlane Burnet, Crosbie Morrison and Ian Clunies Ross, but none really manage to blend the scientist with the person. The dilemma is revealed most clearly in Lyndsay Gardiner’s biography, E.V. Keogh: Soldier, Scientist and Administrator (1990) – Keogh’s scientific work is dealt with separately in an appendix by a scientist. Scientists will remain divided figures as long as biographers are intimidated by science.

Science has been quarantined within Australian history – unfamiliar and forbidding territory for historians – best avoided. W.K. Hancock, however, thought differently when he emphasised the economic significance of William Farrer’s wheat breeding heroics (Australia, 1930). Ernest Scott likewise showed no qualms when he took it upon himself to lecture the Australian scientific community on their own history (‘The History of Australian Science’, Report of ANZAAS, 1939). In the 1950s and 1960s science seemed to provide healthy fodder for historians exploring the boundaries of their discipline. Geoffrey Blainey recognised its importance within economic history, Geoffrey Serle mapped its development alongside other cultural markers, while George Nadel and Michael Roe began to explore the meanings and uses of science within Australian cultural history. An exciting program of research was unfolding, and yet faltered. Why?

The 1960s and ’70s brought a loss of faith in the benevolent bounty of science. Perhaps a growing sense of suspicion served to alienate rather than inspire historians, reinforcing not revealing the mythical ‘two cultures’ divide. Significantly too, the same period saw the rapid growth of the history of science as a separate discipline. The interests of such historians generally lay in the grand themes of science, such as the Scientific Revolution. Their models and mentors were international, not local. When attention was finally turned towards the history of Australian science, it was within such an international framework; Australia became a case-study in the diffusion of scientific knowledge. International conferences in 1981 (Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, 1987) and 1988 (International Science and National Scientific Identity, 1991) explored, in a cross-cultural context, the development of the colonial scientific community and its interaction with Europe. Analyses of ‘colonial science’ extensively modified the crude diffusionist models. Roy MacLeod, for example, in his ‘Visiting the Moving Metropolis’ (Historical Records of Australian Science, 5:3, 1982), offered an alternate taxonomy, that recognised the complex trajectories of science and imperialism. Nonetheless, conceptions of Australian science have largely remained bound by the ‘top-down’ perspective assumed by the diffusionist program. Australia was a receiver of knowledge, not a creator of culture. As a consequence too much has been assumed and too little explained. The impact of isolation on the Australian scientific community, for example, has been much commented upon. Blainey’s clichéd ‘tyranny of distance’ is wielded as a causal mechanism without reflection upon the actual meaning of isolation within an Australian setting. Wade Chambers provides some antidote in ‘Does Distance Tyrannize Science?’ (International Science and National Scientific Identity, 1991), exhorting historians to challenge the ‘metaphorical power’ of ‘the myth of “tyrannical distance”‘. But his call-to-arms has brought forth few eager combatants.

Important contributions to our understanding of science in Australia have come from outside the mainstream discipline. Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific: 1768-1850 (1960) drew attention to the way the land and its inhabitants were perceived by European scientists. Tom Griffiths’ Hunters and Collectors (1996) revealed how amateur scientists and collectors were involved in the construction of Australia’s past. Environmental history has similarly explored how science is involved in the complex relationship between people and environment. ‘Australia’ is revealed as a participant in this process, not merely a receptacle for transplanted institutions. Greater awareness of indigenous knowledge systems has also highlighted the limitations of diffusionist models. Aboriginal knowledge systems, where they have been examined at all, have tended to suffer from ‘first chapter syndrome’. Used as an introduction to the history of Australian science, Aboriginal knowledge is paternalistically portrayed as containing the seeds of our ‘modern’ understanding. By implication or design, Aboriginal knowledge is embraced as familiar and then discarded as incomplete – as proto-science. Non-indigenous scholars now recognise the power and sophistication of such knowledge systems. Works such as Singing the Land, Signing the Land (1989), are beginning to demonstrate how indigenous knowledge stands alongside, not prior to, the western mode of science.

In 1988, Roy MacLeod noted that ‘we await works of synthesis… a new Hancock, who will convey and interpret for us the scientific enterprise, from colony to Commonwealth in the making’ (‘Introduction’, The Commonwealth of Science, 1988). And beyond. Only Ann Moyal, in a Bright and Savage Land (1986), has dared to move towards such a broadly integrative project. But hers is the work of a pioneer – a sketch rather than a detailed analysis. The 1988 Bicentennial prompted a surge in history of science publications. However, the main works, The Commonwealth of Science (1988) and Australian Science in the Making (ed. R.W. Home, 1988), were collections of articles – hors d’oeuvres only at the history of science banquet. The pickings are sparser still in relation to twentieth century science. R.W. Home has rightly directed attention towards the impact of World War II on the scientific community (‘Science on Service’, Australian Science in the Making, 1988), but D.P. Mellor’s volume of the Official History, The Role of Science and Industry (1958), remains the most comprehensive account. Boris Schedvin’s history of the CSIR, Shaping Science and Industry (1987), stands out as a the story of a scientific institution within its political and economic context, and also as a history of Australian science in the early twentieth century. However, the companion volume on the CSIRO has never eventuated.

While historians may have successfully occupied territory on the other side of World War II, scientists largely remain in control of the recent past. Academic interest in modern Australian science has more typically been within the realm of science policy or sociology of science, although with some interesting results. Life among the scientists (1989), for example, describes a quasi-anthropological study of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research. Such studies should give historians cause for reflection. Methodologies and insights drawn from the social studies of science can, and should, inform the practice of historians. In the same way, historians of Australian science need to explore the cultural context of their studies, moving beyond an examination of the culture of science, towards an understanding of science as culture. Our knowledge of science, as well as of Australian history, will greatly benefit.

CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) and its forbears have undergone many transformations, reflecting twentieth century shifts in the relationship between science and government.

In the midst of World War One, impressed by Germany’s technological might, Prime Minister W.M. Hughes enthusiastically declared his support for the creation of a ‘national laboratory’. An Advisory Committee representing science, government and business was set the difficult task of reconciling this vision with the realities of federalism. After softening the proposal’s supposed centralist overtones, legislation was finally passed in 1920. The Institute of Science and Industry was established.

Unfortunately the Institute, led by G.H. Knibbs, was burdened with both an ambitious research program and a severely-limited budget. While some important programs were initiated, Australia’s national research effort seemed destined to fail until Prime Minister S.M. Bruce intervened. In 1926 he introduced legislation for a new organisation, stressing its role as a coordinator of scientific research across the states. The organisation would be guided by state-based committees, and governed by a council of scientists and industrialists. The crippled Institute was replaced by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). This pre-history is chronicled by George Currie and John Graham in The Origins of CSIRO (1966).

The management of this new organisation fell to a three-man executive. Although ultimate power was invested in the council, it was the executive that shaped the programs, the structure and the spirit of CSIR. For almost twenty years this comprised just three men – G.A. Julius, a respected businessman and engineer; A.C.D. Rivett, formerly Professor of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne; and A.E.V. Richardson, an agricultural scientist.

CSIR needed to provide evidence of science’s benefit to the nation if its future was to be secured. Consequently, it was decided to focus on the problems of the primary industries, still the country’s main source of wealth. Divisions of Animal Health, Animal Nutrition, Economic Entomology, and Economic Botany, were amongst the first established. However, it was a research program initiated under the Institute that gave CSIR its first public victory – a South American caterpillar was found to control the rapidly-spreading prickly pear.

But CSIR’s ambitions lay beyond problem-solving for industry. Rivett, in particular, was frustrated by the reactive, short-term nature of much of the work that CSIR was forced to undertake. Committed to the freedom of scientific inquiry, and certain of the benefits that long-term, fundamental research would bring, Rivett continually sought ways of encouraging such research within CSIR. The diversity spawned by this balancing act helped give CSIR/O its strength.

The Depression and the demands of defence self-reliance focused attention on secondary industry. In 1936, Julius led a government committee that recommended CSIR take on a number of new responsibilities associated with manufacturing. These included research in aeronautics, maintenance of basic standards of measurement, and the provision of an industrial research service.

CSIR’s move into the physical sciences was accelerated by World War Two. The Division of Industrial Chemistry, established to provide the desired research service, was joined by the Lubricants and Bearings Section. A Radiophysics Laboratory was created in secrecy to undertake the development of radar for local use. Staff numbers quadrupled from 1939 to 1945, and by 1949 CSIR was one of the largest scientific research organisations in the world. Boris Schedvin traces the organisation’s development up to 1949 in Shaping Science and Industry (1987).

The war not only changed CSIR, it changed attitudes to science. There could now be no doubt that scientific research was valuable – indeed, perhaps it was too valuable to be left in the control of scientists! Cold War hysteria and political opportunism merged in the late 1940s as the opposition parties attacked the CSIR for its handling of secret information. Rivett, the unabashed advocate for the freedom of science, was an easy target.

Under pressure, the government excised aeronautics research, and initiated an inquiry into CSIR. In 1949 the organisation was reconstituted, its administrative structure was overhauled, and its staffing decisions brought under the purview of the Public Service Board. CSIR became the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Close to retirement, Rivett could not reconcile himself to the new order, and so resigned.

Rivett’s martyrdom was made more poignant by the fact that under a new chairman, Ian Clunies Ross, CSIRO was about to enter its golden age. With strong support from the responsible minister, R.G. Casey, the organisation was at last able to undertake a substantial program of fundamental research. The radiophysicists turned their aerials towards the sun, becoming world leaders in the new field of radioastronomy. Industrial Chemistry gained international recognition in many fields of research. The success of myxomatosis in controlling rabbit numbers brought new public prestige, and a detailed program of wool research was undertaken.

By the late 1960s, public enthusiasm for science had begun to cool. In government circles there was a demand for increased planning and accountability. Reviews and inquiries proliferated throughout the 1970s culminating in the 1977 report of the Birch Committee, which, while it recommended some structural changes, was basically content with CSIRO’s mix of pure and applied research.

Within ten years the rise of economic rationalism had changed the climate once more. A report by ASTEC, adopted by government, argued that CSIRO should concentrate on application-based research, closely linked to the needs of industry. After so long, perhaps, Rivett’s fears were finally realised.

FLOREY, Howard Walter (1898-1968), was an outstandingly-effective medical researcher who pioneered the development and use of antibiotics. Although popular mythology credits Alexander Fleming, it was Florey and his team that gave the world the miracle drug, penicillin.

Born and educated in Adelaide, Florey decided early on a career in scientific research. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he left Australia to study at the University of Oxford in 1921, expecting never to return – the opportunities for research in Australia were just too limited. In 1935, Florey was appointed to the chair of pathology at Oxford, where he energetically set about the development of an interdisciplinary team to tackle fundamental questions related to disease. Within a few years, his team had begun to investigate the anti-microbial properties of penicillin. By 1941, Florey and his wife Ethel were undertaking clinical trials, demonstrating the astonishing curative powers of the drug. Florey’s achievement earned him a share of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Florey’s attachment to Australian remained strong, and in 1944 he was asked to advise on the establishment of a medical research institute in Canberra. His guidance was crucial as the proposal developed into the Australian National University. Florey did not finally accept the directorship of what became the John Curtin School of Medical Research, however, he served as chancellor from 1965.

Florey was knighted in 1944, and created Baron Florey of Adelaide and Marston in 1965. The story of Florey’s life is enthrallingly told by Lennard Bickel in Rise Up to Life (1972), with more detailed biographies by Gwyn Macfarlane (1979) and Trevor Williams (1984).

DAVID, Tannatt William Edgeworth (1858-1934), professor of geology at the University of Sydney, was ‘well-beloved’ by scientific colleagues and the wider public for his generosity, his vigour, and his restless passion for knowledge.

Born in Wales, David arrived in Sydney in 1882 to begin field work as assistant geological surveyor. His successes included the discovery of the South Maitland coal fields. Appointed to the chair of geology in 1890, David was revealed as an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher. Enlivened by his love of language, David’s lectures were popular with both students and public. Field work was central to David’s wide-ranging research program; ‘Go and see’, he exhorted theory-laden colleagues. His efforts to obtain samples by deep bore on the coral atoll of Funafuti, received international attention, providing evidence for Darwin’s theory of atoll formation.

Inspired by his life-long interest in glaciation, David eagerly joined the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica in 1907. The oldest member of the team, David nonetheless led the successful first ascent of Mt Erebus, and with his former student, Douglas Mawson, undertook a perilous journey to the South Magnetic Pole. David returned to Sydney to wide acclaim – a popular hero.

In 1915, eager to contribute to the war effort, David organised a corps of miners and engineers to travel to the Western front. David, at 57, joined his ‘tunnellers’ as a Major in the AIF, later serving as chief geologist to the British Expeditionary Force. He was knighted in 1920. David spent his final years in an ambitious attempt to produce a comprehensive summary of the geology of Australia, publishing a detailed geological map of the continent in 1932. He died in 1934 and was accorded a state funeral. David’s daughter Mary published an affectionate and entertaining biography, Professor David (1937).