Abstract
Weather happens in time yet disregards calendars. However, calendrical time—especially the month—structures how modern meteorology examines and narrates atmospheric dynamics. Using almanacs and historical weather records, this chapter examines how European settlers came to be structurally blind to the variable climates of Australia’s far north, how in effect cultural constructions overrode the reality of weather events and climate. It focuses on the region now defined by the city of Darwin in the period from 1869 to 1942.1 This region is located on the coastal fringe of the Northern Territory and is part of what is now understood as Australia’s monsoon belt. Taking up William Cronon’s imperative to “tell stories about stories about nature,”2 it unmasks the “natural” as copiously cultural and reveals how dominant understandings of time have led us to misunderstand weather.
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Notes
William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78 (1992): 1375.
J. A. G. Little, quoted in Griffith Taylor, The Australian Environment (Especially as Controlled by Rainfall) (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1918), 70.
Stephen Davis, Hunter for All Seasons (Millingimbi: School Literature Production Centre, 1984), vii.
Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 97–99.
Ben Orlove, “How People Name Seasons,” in Weather, Climate, Culture, ed. Sarah Strauss and Orlove (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 133.
For more on Indigenous Seasons in the Top End, see Stephen Davis, Hunter for All Seasons, (Milingimbi: School Literature Production Centre, 1984)
and Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 97–99.
Michael Kammen, A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 39.
Hesiod, Works and Days, trans. Dorothea Walker (London: Penguin, 1973), 71.
Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 15, 17.
R. G. Collingwood, Idea of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), 3.
Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 27.
Otto Neugebauer, cited in G. J. Whitrow, Time in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 26.
W. M. O’Neill, Time and the Calendars (Sydney, University of Sydney Press, 1975), 73–74.
Virgil, “Georgics,” in The Eclogues, The Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis, intro. and notes R. Lyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 59.
Word limits prohibit discussion of the historical dimension of knowledge production, including of the modern scientific method and production of facts. On which, please see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. A. Motte (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 7.
Paul Davies, About Time (London: Penguin, 1995), 31.
Maureen Perkins, Visions of the Future, Almanacs, Time and Cultural Change, 1775–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 3–17 (statistics, 14), (quote, 3).
Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 62.
Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 93.
Alan Powell, Far Country: a Short History of the Northern Territory, 4th ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000).
Josiah Boothby, Adelaide Almanac and Directory for South Australia, 1880 (Adelaide: J Williams 1880), vii.
Little, “Climate and Temperature of the Northern Territory,” in Northern Territory Times Almanac and Directory, 1893 (Palmerston: NT Times and Gazette Office, 1892), 3.
N. Nicholls, J. McBride, and R. J. Ormerod, “On Predicting the Onset of the Australian Wet Seasons at Darwin,” Monthly Weather Review 110 (1982): 15.
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© 2014 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry
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O’Brien, C. (2014). Imported Understandings: Calendars, Weather, and Climate in Tropical Australia, 1870s–1940s. In: Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (eds) Climate, Science, and Colonization. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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