A clockwork climate? an atmospheric history of Northern Australia
Date
2011
Authors
O'Brien, Christian
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Abstract
Weather and climate are truly arresting in Australia's far north. They set the 'Top End' - the northernmost parts of the Northern Territory - apart; not only from 'temperate' Australia, but also from other tropical locales. Weather and climate are integral to the experience of the place. Authoritative histories of the Northern Territory, with justification, routinely discuss its weather and climate. They indicate the ineluctable physical parameters that bound human activity in this region and which also set the stage for the dramas of human history played out there.
In this study weather and climate are the drama. They are the characters, and they are the plot. Elements of the great aerial ocean in which the 'Top End' is immersed - rain, wind and heat - are studied on a variety of time scales. Events are examined: their intensity, duration, chronology and patterns in time. Just as nature and culture are inextricably entwined, so these elements cannot intelligibly be amputated from human experience. To paraphrase US environmental historian William Cronen, this is a study of stories about stories about weather and climate. The third dimension of this history is its interrogation of the cultural biases and philosophical assumptions both underlying and revealed by these stories about weather and climate.
However, this work focuses on one constellation of encounters and responses: those of the colonial invaders. The ideas and (mis)understandings of this group have determined how weather and climate have been seen since colonial times. Now, in the Anthropocene, as the effects of anthropogenic climate change unfold, this understanding is pivotal in dealing with this looming problem. This study is a history of a plausible, coherent misunderstanding.
It is also a history of the northernmost region of the Northern Territory, a history refracted through a different prism to those of its worthy predecessors. Here the subject is the colonial encounter with tropical skies, science in colonial and northern Australia and experience-based efforts to grasp something so foreign to people from temperate environs. It reveals how western ideas of time have distorted understandings of weather and climate. It demonstrates the poor fit of received ideas of seasonality and climate to historical experience. Reflecting on important contingencies of this place between 1800 and 1942, this history situates human experience in the Northern Territory firmly in the global currents of both environmental history and intellectual history.
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