Alice and the Weather Man

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Alice and the Weather Man:

How the electric telegraph civilized Australia

By John Larkins

Introduction:

THIS book is about our Weather (her name is Alice, we've heard),and she's controlled everything, laughing wickedly, sometimesguiltily

(but rarely, if ever, we suspect)

, since white men blunderedashore in 1788 into a shrieking thunderstorm ... and now it's morethan 220 years later, and no one can tell us what will happen nextweek, or even if Alice has decided it's time for us to pack up andleave.The first British settlers were often perplexed and awed bythe extremities of the Australian climate; they adapted, more or less:it could not adapt to them. Eventually, Europeans coped largelybecause of haphazard technological and social advanceselsewhere in the world by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in Britain,Samuel Morse and the conquest of the American Wild West, andothers, including daring invaders of the stratosphere in 19th centuryballoons: they went up, up and away a mile or more to meet theweather in tweed suits and goggles.One such man (though he never dared venture into spacein a wicker basket) came to join us and help our forebearsunderstand the vagaries of our climates. His name was CharlesTodd, an astronomer and meteorologist. As every schoolchild usedto know, he came to Australia in 1855 and built the OverlandTelegraph which linked the island continent to the world. But whatevery kid didn't know was that he became Australia's first everydayWeather Man, using his far-flung network of telegraph stations topredict rain, hail or shine as the weather moved from west to east.His forecasts were published daily in the newspapers. Charles Toddfinally made sense of our continental weather ... but we've still got alot to learn and it's becoming more urgent by the day as our PlanetEarth confronts climate change.Charles had a wife, too, much younger, tall and elegant ashe was short and comical ... her name was Alice, same as theWeather, of course. When she died, he was awfully saddened; buthis work was done. She was a charming companion, but a non-conformist religious zealot who solved her problems with the duststorms of 19th century South Australia by not venturing outside theAdelaide CBD for 40 years, except to go Home to England once.

This book is edited by Patricia Jennings, who is alsoassociated with our project on the convict woman, Ann Inett.

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Alice's temper is uncertain, but suspected to be furious enough tohave the Australian weather, in all its foot-stamping vagaries,named in her honour.*She had her fondness for her adopted city, did Alice, andthe very English River Torrens that ﬂowed though it ... and she didnot take kindly to a visiting Melbourne journalist's snide remark ' ...the river is emptied at stated intervals to allow people to search fortheir friends and relatives ...' Equally, she could agree with a fellowcitizen's poetic complaint ...

I puff, I blow, to ease my pain,But none of this will do,So long as Fahrenheit remains All day at ninety-two

Or the 19th century Adelaide schoolboys' parody of CarolineCarleton's

Song of Australia

...

There is a land where summer flies Come buzzing in your nose and eyes Blended in witching harmonies Australia! Australia!

All Charles would mumble was, 'The telegraph to the meteorologistis what the telescope is to the astronomer,' and wander off upstairsto the Observatory.This book begins in 1861, when the citizens of the Colonyof Victoria were marvelling at the construction of a SouthernHemisphere wonder, the breath-taking, Brunel-inspired Malmsburyrailway viaduct, and yet, just a day's drive away in 21st centuryterms, the explorers, Burke and Wills were being poisoned slowlyby kindly aborigines (a curious juxtaposition in view of whatEuropeans were doing to the aboriginal diet elsewhere) at CooperCreek to the northwest; meanwhile, their celebrity rival, JohnMcDouall Stuart, the 'Wee Scot' (and there was rarely a thirstierone) pressed on gamely to the north coast of Australia, promptingthis cry from Melbourne

Punch in

January, 1860 ...

'A race! A race! So great a one The world ne'er saw before ...'

Well, the race was won ... they were going out to collect the bodiesof the losers ...* Alice would have been far too discreet to mention that the ﬁrstEuropean

officially

killed by the Australian weather was a seamannamed John Fisher who died on 25th March, 1788, from exposureafter romancing a convict girl, Ann Morton,

all night

on the wet grassat Sydney Cove.

Search the Collections of the State Library of South Australia(http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au) for photographs and drawings ofthe people and places mentioned here.

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1. The world on a summer's day in the winter of 1861

After dawn on Tuesday, 25th June, 1861, in the Australian desert,the dying explorer William John Wills, aged twenty-seven, wrote inhis journal of the hours just passed: 'Night calm, clear and intenselycold, especially towards morning. Near daybreak, King reportedseeing a moon in the east, with a haze of light stretching up from it;he declared it to be quite as large as the moon, and not dim at theedges. I am so weak that any attempt to get a sight of it was out ofthe question; but I think it must have been Venus in the ZodiacalLight that he saw, with a corona around her.'At that moment, in the Ottoman Time Zone 13,000kmnorthwest, the gracious reformist Sultan Abdulmecid, aged thirty-eight, was breathing his last in his palace overlooking the aromaticrose gardens of Gulhane Park, Istanbul. He was said to have beenan enthusiastic and generous consumer of alcohol but, alas,tuberculosis nailed him ﬁrst. A further 9000km west, in the U.S.Eastern Time Zone, compositors at the

Daily Advocate

, in BatonRouge, Louisiana, placed this gentle exhortation to Confederatewomanhood:'The ladies of the vicinity are respectfully notified thatMessrs McHatton, Pike and Co. have deposited at the office of thePenitentiary a bale of spun yarn for socks; all of those whose sons,fathers are in the army are entitled to yarns for two pairs of sockseach, for winter use, and are requested to call and get the supplyand prepare it for use. A plan will be devised for transmission toeach company before winter sets in.'Sadly, we don't know what happened to that devotedknitting. Union troops seized Baton Rouge on its commanding bluffoverlooking the Mississipi shortly thereafter, quartered men in theLouisville State Penitentiary, and bloodily repulsed Confederateattempts to take the city back. News of the last two events wouldnot reach Australia for three months, a situation that one youngman, Charles Todd, had announced his determination to remedy.It was a day of grim portent for many young men, that25th June, 1861, but it was a good day for some with assuredfutures. Charles Todd, who was thirty-four, probably climbed thesteps to the stone tower look-out at his new Adelaide Observatoryto glimpse the cold pre-dawn phenomenon of Venus in the ZodiacalLight. In all likelihood, he was joined in the tower by his well-ruggedwife, Alice, who had been wakened in the residence below by theirrestless third child, Hedley Lawrence.'Dear little Hedley must be excited at the prospect of hisfirst birthday in two days time,' Alice might have told Charles. Shewas only twenty-four, a nonconformist Cambridgeshire flowerwhose fragrance, good temper, fertility and virtue provoked bothadmiration and envy in Adelaide's overwhelmingly English provincialsociety. Charles and Alice weren't aware of the impending fate oftheir countryman, William John Wills, on that chilly mid-winter'smorning; but they were only 900km south of his location onCooper's Creek in the far northeast corner of the colony of SouthAustralia, a piddling distance in brave colonial terms.

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