‘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?

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