Abstract
The complex relationship of Australians with their climate is evident from the beginnings of European settlement. While, in the main, historians have focused on the negative of climate, outlining the ways in which droughts and floods have tested settler ingenuity, forged character and been an impediment, at times, to progress, this chapter gives voice to climate optimism. Promoting the climate is often described as boosterism. Yet this is far from the whole story as the trust in nature went far deeper, particularly as Australian settlers gained experience of the continent. More broadly, the tendency to assume that the Australian climate could support a British system of agriculture, and a sizeable population, rested with a foundational belief in the climate itself due to its material nature—its natural high variability, the cycles of wet and dry periods. This chapter explores how good seasons promoted a trust in climate in the period up to the late nineteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
Grace Karskens, “Floods and Flood-Mindedness in Early Colonial Australia”, Environmental History, 21, 2016, 315–342.
- 2.
Claire Fenby, Don Garden, and Joelle Gergis, ““The Usual Weather in New South Wales is Uncommonly Bright and Clear…Equal to the Finest Summer Day in England”: Flood and Drought in New South Wales, 1788–1815”, in James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry, Climate, Science and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
- 3.
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- 4.
Tom Griffiths, “How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia”, Australian Journal of Botany, 50, 2002, 375–389.
- 5.
Grace Karskens, “Floods and Flood-Mindedness in Early Colonial Australia”, Environmental History, 21, 2016, 315–342.
- 6.
Joelle Gergis and Linden Ashcroft, “Rainfall Variations in South-Eastern Australia, Part 2: A Comparison of Documentary, Instrumental and Palaeoclimate Records, 1788–2008”, International Journal of Climatology, 33, 2013, 2973–2987.
- 7.
Lachlan Macquarie, Letter to Earl Bathurst, 28 June 1813, “Papers Relating to his Majesty’s Settlements at New South Wales, 1811–1814”, House of Commons, State Library of NSW.
- 8.
Letter from Governor Macquarie to Earl Bathurst, April 28, 1815, Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Governor’s Despatches to and from England, Series 1, 8, July 1813 to December 1815, Sydney, William Applegate Gullick, 1916.
- 9.
Assistant Surveyor Evans’ Journal, 1813–1814, Enclosure 4, Macquarie’s Despatch, 3, 1814, in Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Governor’s Despatches to and from England, Series 1, 8, July 1813 to December 1815, Sydney, William Applegate Gullick, 1916.
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Joelle Gergis, David J. Karoly, and Rob J. Allen, “A Climate Reconstruction of Sydney Cove, New South Wales, Using Weather Journal and Documentary Data, 1788–1791”, Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal, 58, 2009, 96.
- 13.
Joelle Gergis, Don Garden, and Claire Fenby, “The Influence of Climate on the First European Settlement of Australia: A Comparison of Weather Journals, Documentary Data and Palaeoclimate Records, 1788–1793”, Journal of Environmental History, 15, no. 3, 2013, 502.
- 14.
Much of the discussion in this section on the relationship of colonisers with their environment relies on Megan Edwards, Beyond Sylvan Chaos: Cultural Identity and the Foundations of an Australian Environmental Sensibility, unpublished PhD thesis, Sydney, Macquarie University, 2012, 22.
- 15.
Robert Dawson, The Present State of Australia: A Description of Country, Its Advantages and Prospects, with Reference to Emigration: And a Particular Account of the Manners, Customs and Conditions of Its Aboriginal Inhabitants, London, Smith, Elder and Co., 1831, 49, 51.
- 16.
Elizabeth Macarthur, “Mrs John Macarthur to her Friend Miss Kingdom”, 1 September 1795, in Sheila Macarthur Onslow, ed, Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of Camden, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1914.
- 17.
For a discussion of the British preoccupation with weather as a topic of everyday conversation and its influence on early Australian settlers see, Megan Edwards, Beyond Sylvan Chaos.
- 18.
Jan Golinksi, “Time, Talk and the Weather in Eighteenth-Century Britain” in Sarah Strauss and Ben Orlove, eds, Weather, Climate, Culture, Oxford, New York, Berg Publishing, 2003. Vladimir Janković, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000.
- 19.
R.J. McAfee, “William Dawes: Australia’s First Meteorologist”, Australian Meteorological Magazine, 26, no. 3, 1978, 83.
- 20.
Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson in New South Wales, London, G. Nicol and J. Sewell, 1793, 113.
- 21.
W.C. Wentworth, A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen’s Land, London, G. and W.B. Whittaker, 1814, 41–42.
- 22.
Quoted in Neville Nicholls, 1997, “A Healthy Climate?”, in E.K. Webb, ed, Windows on Meteorology, Australian Perspective, Melbourne, CSIRO Publishing, 105–117.
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Joelle Gergis and A. Fowler, “A History of ENSO Events from AD 1525: Implications for Future Climate Change”, Climatic Change, 92, 2009, 343. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-008-9476-z.
- 24.
Illustrated London News, December 22, 1849, quoted in J.M. Powell, Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-Makers in the Settlement Process, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1977, 32, 71, 72–74.
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James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
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J.M. Powell, Mirrors of the New World: Images and Image-Makers in the Settlement Process, Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1977, 49.
- 27.
Powell, Mirrors of the New World, op cit, 55.
- 28.
Karskens, “Floods and Flood-Mindedness”, op cit.
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S. George Philander, Our Affair with El Niño: How We Transformed an Enchanting Peruvian Current Into a Global Climate Hazard, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, 47–49.
- 30.
Agata Imielska, “Understanding ENSO”, The Australian Bureau of Meteorology, http://www.bom.gov.au/watl/about-weather-and-climate/australian-climate-influences.shtml.
- 31.
Agata Imielska, “Understanding ENSO”.
- 32.
Joelle Gergis, A. Gallant, K. Braganza, D. Karoly, K. Allen, L. Cullen, R. D’Arrigo, I. Goodwin, P. Grierson, and S. McGregor, “On the Long-Term Context of the 1997–2009 ‘Big Dry’ in South-Eastern Australia: Insights from a 206-year Multi-proxy Rainfall Reconstruction”, Climatic Change, 111, 2012, 923–944.
- 33.
Descriptions of ENSO and the IPO drawn from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, www.bom.gov.au. IPO dates drawn from the Department of Science, Information, Technology and Innovation, “Australia’s Variable Rainfall: April to March Annual Rainfall Relative to Historical Records, 1890–2016”, Brisbane, DSITI, 2016, http://www.LongPaddock.qld.gov.au.
- 34.
Andrea Gaynor, “Environmental Transformations”, in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds, The Cambridge History of Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, n.d., 269–293.
- 35.
William J. Lines, Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia, Athens and London, University of Georgia Press, 1999, 70.
- 36.
Major T.L. Mitchell, Three Expeditions in the Interior of Eastern Australia, second edition, London, T. & W. Boone, 1839, 2, 171, 195.
- 37.
Lines, ibid., 65.
- 38.
Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, 59.
- 39.
Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History, London and New York, Routledge, 9.
- 40.
Richard Grove and George Adamson, El Nino in World History, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 98.
- 41.
Powell, op cit, xv.
- 42.
Lines, op cit, 82.
- 43.
Lines, op cit, 76–77.
- 44.
Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress op cit. Joelle Gergis and Linden Ashcroft, “Rainfall Variations in South-Eastern Australia, Part 2: A Comparison of Documentary, Instrumental and Palaeoclimate Records, 1788–2008”, International Journal of Climatology, 33, 2013, 2973–2987.
- 45.
Muir The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress, 10.
- 46.
O’Gorman, Flood Country, op cit, 24–25.
- 47.
“News from the Interior: Gundagai”, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 11, 1844, p. 2.
- 48.
O’Gorman, Flood Country, op cit, 31–32.
- 49.
Don Garden, Drought, Floods and Cyclones: El Niños that Shaped Our Colonial Past, North Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, 21.
- 50.
Emily O’Gorman, Flood Country: An Environmental History of the Murray-Darling Basin, Collingwood, CSIRO, 2012, 19.
- 51.
Donna Green, Jack Billy, and Alo Tapim, “Indigenous Australians’ Knowledge of Weather and Climate”, Climatic Change, 100, 2010, 337–354.
- 52.
Richard Grove and George Adamson, El Nino in World History, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 26.
- 53.
Deborah Rose, 2005, “Rhythms, Patterns, Connectivities: Indigenous Concepts of Seasons and Change”, in Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds, A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, Canberra, National Museum of Australia Press, 32–41.
- 54.
“Copy of a Letter from Mr Assistant Surveyor Larmer to the Colonial Secretary 4 February 1850”, cited in O’Gorman, Flood Country, op cit, 32.
- 55.
“Gundagai’s Big Floods”, The Gundagai Independent, December 1, 1932, p. 5.
- 56.
Brian Plomley, “Contacts with the Tasmanian Aborigines”, in Eric K. Webb, ed, Windows on Meteorology: Australian Perspective, Melbourne, CSIRO Publishing, 1997.
- 57.
For a discussion of human migration to Australia in the nineteenth century, see James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 13.
- 58.
Andrea Gaynor, “Environmental Transformations”, in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds, The Cambridge History of Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, n.d., 269–293.
- 59.
Donald W. Meinig, “Goyder’s Line of Rainfall: The Role of a Geographic Concept in South Australian Land Policy and Agricultural Settlement”, South Australian Geographical Journal, 104, 2005, 105–114.
- 60.
Joelle Gergis and Anthony Fowler, 2009, “A History of ENSO Events Since AD1525: Implications for Future Climate Change”, Climatic Change, 92, 343–387. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-008-9476-z.
- 61.
Don Garden, Droughts, Floods and Cyclones, 145. Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Year Book Australia”, 2008, 90, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/ee757a3d884140bdca2573d200110d50!OpenDocument.
- 62.
“The Climate in South Australia”, The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, September 18, 1875.
- 63.
For a discussion of Goyder’s Line see Janis Sheldrick, “Goyder’s Line: The Unreliable History of the Line of Reliable Rainfall”, in Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds, A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, Canberra, National Museum of Australia Press, 56–65.
- 64.
The Farmers’ Weekly Messenger, Kapunda, May 22, 1874, quoted in Meinig, “Goyder’s Line of Rainfall”, op cit.
- 65.
“Blinman”, Northern Argus, Clare, July 7, 1874, 2.
- 66.
Parliamentary Paper 72, South Australia, Parliament 1857–1858, Northern Explorations, 4, quoted in Sheldrick, op cit.
- 67.
Sheldrick, ibid.
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Tom Griffiths, “How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates About Vegetation Change in Australia”, Australian Journal of Botany, 50, 2002, 375–389.
- 69.
“Proposed State Forests”, The Argus, November 8, 1865, 1.
- 70.
Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Carlton South, Melbourne University Press, 2000, 165. The Argus printed “The report on the advisableness of establishing state forests” which was tabled in the Victorian Legislative Assembly on 25 October 1865, in which the benefits of forests to guard against moisture loss in soils and to increase rainfall is outlined. “Proposed State Forests”, The Argus, November 8, 1865, 1.
- 71.
Australasian, September 1, 1866, 688.
- 72.
“Goyder’s Line of Rainfall”, op cit.
- 73.
James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 165.
- 74.
Joelle Gergis, A. Gallant, K. Braganza, D. Karoly, K. Allen, L. Cullen, R. D’Arrigo, I. Goodwin, P. Grierson, and S. McGregor, “On the Long-Term Context of the 1997–2009 ‘Big Dry’ in South-Eastern Australia: Insights from a 206-year Multi-proxy Rainfall Reconstruction”, Climatic Change, 111, 2012, 923–944.
- 75.
“Agricultural and Pastoral Memoranda”, South Australian Register, March 27, 1878.
- 76.
The Argus, October 3, 1877.
- 77.
The Government Astronomers and Meteorologists of the colonies—William Scott and Henry Chamberlain Russell of New South Wales, Robert Ellery and Georg Neumayer in Victoria, Charles Todd from South Australia and Clement Wragge in Queensland—not only maintained local weather records but also developed observational networks across their colonies. See David Day, The Weather Watchers: 100 years of the Bureau of Meteorology, Carlton, Melbourne University Publishing, 2007.
- 78.
R.W. Home and K.T. Livingston, “Science and Technology in the Story of Federation: The Case of Meteorology, 1876–1908”, Historical Records of Australian Science, 10, no. 2, 1994, 109–127.
- 79.
Joelle Gergis and Linden Ashcroft, “Rainfall Variations in South-Eastern Australia, Part 2: A Comparison of Documentary, Instrumental and Palaeoclimate Records, 1788–2008”, International Journal of Climatology, 33, 2013, 2973–2987.
- 80.
Andrea Gaynor, “Environmental Transformations”, in Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds, The Cambridge History of Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, n.d., 269–293.
- 81.
James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety, chapter 7.
- 82.
R.L. Heathcote, ed, The Australian Experience: Essays in Australian Land Settlement and Resource Management, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1988.
- 83.
“An Exceptional Season”, South Australian Register, March 27, 1890.
- 84.
John D. Read, personal correspondence with Henry Chamberlain Russell, 3 August 1896, H.C. Russell Papers, MS7, Melbourne, Bureau of Meteorology Library.
- 85.
Julia Miller, “What’s Happening to the Weather?: Australian Climate, H.C. Russell, and the Theory of a Nineteen-Year Cycle,” Historical Records of Australian Science, 25, 2014, 18–27.
- 86.
“Pastoral Troubles at Mount Hope”, The Cobar Herald, May 5, 1900.
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Miller, J. (2019). Wastelands, Gardens, Hopes and Visions. In: La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76141-1_2
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