THE first settlers in Australia might have been whingeing Poms — but according to the first climate reconstruction of the colony's weather during the first four years, they had good reason to moan.
The weather was rotten. The first two years were marked by cool temperatures and violent summer storms. Rain flooded trenches on building sites, roads were made impassable and lightning felled trees, which killed livestock.
By 1790, settlers were learning that Australia was a land of extremes. In the summers of 1790 and 1791 water supplies dried up and temperatures reached scorching highs of 41 degrees. Flying foxes and small birds reportedly fell from the trees and crops failed.
"History has downplayed the environmental factors affecting the First Fleet settlers," said Melbourne University climatologist David Karoly. "There was a perception that these were whingeing Poms and they weren't used to it … but they had good reason to whinge about the hot summers because it was very hot and they were in a drought."
According to the first reconstruction of weather patterns for the four years to 1791, published today in the The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal, the new settlers weren't overplaying it.
Contemporary reports are backed up by an analysis of the meticulous weather journal kept by Lieutenant William Dawes, a scientist who sailed on the First Fleet.
That journal was rediscovered in the archives of the Royal Society in London in 1977. It, along with First Fleet logbooks and diaries, has been used by Professor Karoly, Joelle Gergis and Rob Allan to plot the daily temperatures and barometric pressure between September 1788 and December 1791.
The data was then compared with modern measurements taken from Sydney's Observatory Hill weather station — located just 500 metres from the site where Dawes worked. "He gets the right seasonal variations, the right sort of maximum and minimum temperatures and very accurate pressure variations," Professor Karoly said.
He said studying Australia's climate variability before the 20th century was vital work, as it allowed present changes to climate trends to be viewed in a broader historical context.
"We want to understand natural weather and climate variations, so that we can set recent variations like the drought in Victoria and the Murray-Darling Basin into a longer-term context. Then we can work out whether the dry spell of the past 10 years is outside the current range of variability."
The paper is part of preliminary work on a broader three-year project, funded by a $340,000 Australian Research Council Linkage grant, looking at reconstructing south-east Australia's past rainfall and temperature trends.
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