By Dominic Cadden 

It is sometimes said that the only thing that Australia and England have in common is that they both have weather.

Australians, like the Brits, often use the weather as an inane and harmless topic of conversation that diverts us from more serious discussions – you know, the type that might lead us to bloody popular uprisings or over-zealous, right-wing xenophobic border skirmishes. In the case of both nations, we see this occur all too frequently across the sea from us in those places where the genteel custom of enquiring, “Is it hot enough for you?” is deemed wasted time that could be better spent starting a riot.

It is true, though, that in Australia there is a lot more weather to talk about, and Aussies will always tell you that theirs is better and more impressive. In the UK, there’s not a wild climatic difference between London and Birmingham, yet while most foreigners have a general picture of mild, temperate weather when they think of Australia, it’s not that way everywhere. You could be growing fungus in Waratah, Tasmania, which averages 314 rainy days a year, or live out fantasies of ye olde London in Canberra, which is fogged out an average of 47 days each year. Extremes of heat in the Australian deserts won’t surprise, but you may not realise that it can get down to minus 23˚C at Charlotte’s Pass in the Australian Alps. Even the capital cities vary, with Melbourne, for example, having the dubious honour of being Australia’s least sunny capital with an average of 5.7 hours of sunshine each day, compared to Darwin’s 8.5 hours a day.

Weather anomalies upset the stereotypical picture of sunshine and pleasant warmth, especially away from the flat and largely unvaried landscape of the West that helps create the stable weather patterns there. For example, in 25 years of living in or just north of Sydney, I have experienced three hailstorms that dumped stones bigger than cricket balls*, and have narrowly been missed by at least another four. (*For the record, hailstones, when pumped up to gargantuan scale, are not spherical. They are more the shape of a Cornish pastie with the mark of Beelzebub roughly hewn into their surface). On another occasion, there was such a dump of fine hail one summer afternoon that it appeared my yard had been completely buried in snow.

Ice bricks falling from the sky is one thing, but fish is another. Waterspouts are tornado-type winds that usually occur over seas in the tropics, and they rarely make it near land in temperate zones – but this happens more than you’d care to imagine on the East coast. That might explain why in 1966, Father Leonard Bourne was dashing through a downpour across a courtyard in North Sydney, when a large fish fell from the sky and landed on his shoulder, or how in 1989, in Rosewood, Queensland, Harold and Debra Degen's front lawn was covered with about 800 sardines that rained down during a light shower – actually, there were probably more, but the Degens reported that kookaburras swooped down and had a feast. Ipswich police said that the fall was confined to a mere two acres. Then in November 1996, a town in southern Tasmania was slimed during a night of violent thunderstorms. Residents woke to find a strange, white-clear jelly-like substance on their properties ­– it was believed it had rained either fish eggs or baby jellyfish.

In typical fashion, Perth has the Fremantle Doctor, a wind that’s as regular as a bran-fed obsessive compulsive. Each day in summer, between noon and 3pm, the cooling wind comes in from off the coast due to the large temperature differential between the sea and the land. I’d like to tell you that there’s something wild and a startling background to the name of this wind – like it was named after a doctor who would load up his hang-glider and fly to nursing homes in the Eastern suburbs when old people suffered heatstroke during the summer months. But like the wind itself, the real story is a bit ordinary – the wind used to take away the smoke from crematoria around Fremantle, thus ‘curing’ the area of the stench of burning bodies.

Further east, there are wild winds that can have dire consequences. Last September a dust plume 500km wide and 1000km long and holding some16 million tonnes of dust from the deserts of Central Australia spread. The cloud travelled across the width of the state and on September 23rd, Sydney had an apocalyptic red dawn as the city was covered with fine silt. I jogged up to the shops that morning and by the time I got home I looked like a red panda. A similar thing had occurred in Melbourne 16 years earlier, after a dust-storm extended across the entire width of Victoria and dumped 1000 tonnes of topsoil on the city.

The regular tropical cyclones hitting the north and north-east of the country read like a list that might have come straight out of Tiger Wood’s phone contacts folder – Heidi, Tatjana, Bianca, Raquel, Yvette. While these always do their real damage far north of the sensibly located major cities, their effects are still felt. This was the case when cyclone Larry (a confirmed female-to-male transvestite) nearly wiped out the banana industry and Australia’s favourite fruit was scarce. For six months ‘The Great Banana Famine of 06’ made a social impact on Australians. Bananas became a status symbol, with high rollers replacing the silk handkerchiefs in their suit jacket breast pocket for a banana. Corporate powerbrokers went into business negotiations with a banana tied around their necks, while men ditched the roses and treated their ladies to a bunch of bananas tied with ribbon (although not the Lady Finger or Sugar bananas – they sent the wrong message).

El Niño is much more than just a Facebook friend to Australia. If the whingeing about drought and water restrictions seems to be all too frequent, then that’s because in Australia, which is considered the driest inhabited continent, any 10-year span will generally see three years of good rainfall and adequate water supply, then three years of decreased rainfall and a water shortage. This is why weather presenters commentate on dam levels with all the earnestness of a rabid football fan talking about his team’s latest signings.

Meteorology attempts to marry Science with Mother Nature. The flaw is that if Science and Mother Nature are in a marriage, then it’s one where Science is always surprised to come home and find Mother Nature blowing the neighbour. Predicting weather is an inexact discipline, but in the interests of meeting demand for popular delusion (see ‘organised religion’), the cult of the weather presenter is alive and well in Australia. Weather presenters here receive god-like recognition. They are thanked and congratulated when they deign a fine day upon us or bless us with some much-needed rain, and they are blamed when they get it wrong or deliver a crap day for Christmas. Most aren’t even trained meteorologists, but they do have perfect teeth. 

To confuse matters even more, in January this year, official Bureau of Meteorology charts showed a weather pattern that appeared seemingly out of nowhere with the precise shape and look of an iced doughnut sprinkled with hundreds and thousands floating with its epicentre over Kalgoorlie. The formation was only visible for a few hours, and farmers in the area below it reported ‘exceptionally hot conditions’ during this time. A similar pattern of perfectly concentric circles (this time in a starburst pattern) appeared suddenly just off the north coast of WA exactly a week later. One explanation was that the US military had expanded its High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). The HAARP project involves shooting extremely high frequency radar bursts into the upper reaches of the atmosphere to see what happens after particles of the ionosphere are ‘temporarily excited’. Conspiracy theorists claim HAARP is engaged in a sophisticated form of weather modification and that testing is also being done from a secret facility near Exmouth, nearly 1300km north of Perth. So be concerned if the weather satellites show a weather formation the shape of a ‘temporarily excited’ todger – it probably means those bastard Yanks have developed the Nude Bomb.
Global warming is a great worry for Australians, since the country is located close to the massive ice caps of Antarctica and the vast majority of Aussies live within 50km of the coast.
It’s less about a concern for global ecology and more about what happens to property prices when your land is under two metres of seawater. Still, Australians celebrate the heat to such an extent that the colder seasons are almost ignored, which is a change from European and North American cultures, where there is often vast tradition, festivals and romance associated with the colder months, especially when there is snow. In many aspects, Australia is in denial of cooler weather – houses built anywhere north of Melbourne seem to have the same protection against the cold as the average gazebo. Australians have also only recently learnt about insulation, but they still stuff it up. This is why it’s not uncommon to find people from truly cold places, such as Canada or Inner Mongolia, holding hair-dryers to their frozen bollocks during the limited cold snaps when Australian homes are as cold as the outside temperature. 

Floods, tsunamis, cyclones, snowstorms – the globe has seen some weird weather in the last couple of years, and there’s no predicting which way things will go. One thing is for sure, though, and that is that the vast bulk of Australians living in temperate climes are going to have their way of life thrown into greater chaos by a plunge in temperature than a rise. You only have to go to the local shopping complex during a cold snap to see this – even the bogans start covering their midriffs.

When the days are dark, the barbeques are covered in ice and the surf breaks are cleared out because of the freezing fog rolling in, even the cold beer might remain untouched and the Aussies might just stop mocking the Brits about their climate. It’s the Aussies who will be the whingers then, but there will still be one group that feels right at home here – the expat Poms.


Weather and Aussies
Australians, even those that present the weather, have no understanding of equinoxes and solstices – according to them, the seasons start on the first of the calendar month. Aussies take this as gospel, and react accordingly, wearing overcoats on March 1 even though it might be 23˚C, and stripping down to boob tubes on September 1st, regardless of frost.

In winter, slippers are an accepted form of outdoor footwear, as many Australians don’t own anything else they consider ‘winter shoes’. These usually take the form of Ug boots, an overpriced piece of footwear that looks like you’ve turned a sheep inside out and stuck your lower leg inside.

On the East coast especially, there is a deep paranoia about anything that might be deemed ‘hail clouds’. These are usually a strange purple colour and immediately set people off checking their auto insurance policies and moving their cars under cover.

Sunshowers – this is when it is bright sunshine, but it’s raining. Oh well, it still beats being in the UK. 

When your nose bleeds for no apparent reason, it’s probably the dry, arid air – very foreign to Brit nostrils.

In heavy rain, it is the Australian custom to drive even faster in order to avoid the raindrops. The same applies on ‘black ice’ – the theory being that the less time spent on that dangerous stuff, the better.

Be aware that fresh food prices (also including bread and milk) may vary wildly due to weather around the country, especially for products that have no competition from imports due to biosecurity exclusions (e.g. bananas) or are protected by import restrictions (e.g. meat). Or your greengrocer could be making stuff up so that he and the family can vacation in Tahiti this year instead of Bali.

If it’s warm, cloudy days in Australia will still fry your skin. Australia is subject to a hole in the ozone layer that makes a mess of the British complexion – you arrive here at age 30, and by the time your next birthday rolls around, you can look 52. On cloudy days, UV rays from the sun penetrate cloud cover more than visible light, so you’re still a petri dish for skin cancer.