“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding plains.”
Dear old global warming is merely entrenching these erratic patterns of torment. The English, the first non-Indigenous inhabitants of this continent, took a long time, if at all, to adjust to their new physical surrounds. Mackellar loved the place, but her references to the ‘pitiless blue sky,’ ‘The hot gold rush of noon’ and the ‘thirsty paddocks’ are all revealing. The English came here, and they pondered, and mostly they cursed the place for not being England.
Mackellar’s poem contains a first verse that has been largely erased from the national recollection. She chides her fellow colonials for clinging to fond memories of the Mother Country’s gentle climatic ways:
“The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft, dim skies –
I know but I cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.”
Underneath it all, the English brought with them a language that is now used to describe this country, but which is eternally inadequate, and often wrong. A fine example can be given in the application of the word ‘river.’
Here’s a river:
It flow steadily and prettily from gently rain-soaked slopes to seaside.
Now, here’s an Australian “river,” in this case the Ashburton, in the north of Western Australia:
Forty nine weeks of the year, it lies a dry sandy bed, then a cyclone passes by the upper reaches, and in three weeks it empties an equivalent amount of water as sixty-two Sydney Harbours into the Indian Ocean (for those not metrically-inclined, this can also be explained using Planck’s Number: a shit-load of liquid to the power of three):
The word ‘drought’ is another misnomer. It means, obviously, the absence of expected rains, but when the rainfall pattern is by nature erratic, as it is across much of Australia, rain cannot confidently be expected, so how can there be ‘droughts?’
The inadequacy of the English language to describe the Australian environment is best illustrated with the continuing reference to the Northern Hemisphere seasons. ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ are words regularly invoked here as though they had some rational meaning. In truth, ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ are both dry and hot-but-not-quite-as-hot-as-mid-summer. They are not, respectively, times of gentle showers and budding flowers, nor of softly falling leaves. In the South-West of Western Australia, the Nyungar divide the year into six seasons, based in part on temperature and rainfall, but each defined by a wind direction (when one lives between the desert and the ocean, one really, really ought to pay particular attention to wind direction). The Nyungar season equating with mid-winter is Makuru, when the cold fronts begin crossing the coast further and further north, bring increased rains (right now, it's Bunuru; nasty hot and scorching north-easterly winds).
Well, that’s how it was. Our old friend G. Warming has caused the Makuru cold fronts to retreat further and further south. The south west of Australia, known as a great producer of wheat and wine, is now, seemingly, in the permanent grip of ‘drought.’ In the continued endeavour to make the Australian environment more English-like, some of our finest politicians have proposed solutions like a building a canal to bring water down from the north. It harks back to the great nineteenth century notion of turning the rivers inland (cf, oh, I don’t know, some article or other about the great nineteenth century notion of turning the rivers inland).
Check this out, in reference to the cold fronts retreating southward: it’s today’s weather chart (oh, BTW, last winter was the driest on record &c.):
See that front sweeping south of the South West? Wasted rain.
The answer is clear: we need to move the continent about 200 kilometres to the south. Shouldn’t be too hard – this state is home to a populous of the finest diggers of holes ever assembled in human history.
Politicians, are you listening?
