Unbalanced nature

March 2023

The tail end of a storm is washing over our steel roof as I write. It’s been a muggy April. The ants told us there’d be rain for sure, even if the seven-day forecast was typically tentative. Is a weather obsession all that remarkable? I don’t think so. Mine began as a kid on a farm where rain was rare and hail and snow more so. I loved thunderclaps, hail and rainbows after dry and dusty weeks and months. The seasons rolled around like chapters of an old story, but with the chance of a miracle down the track. My childhood rain god was an ancient, furtive gent, the keeper of a rusted tap somewhere near the cow bails —I thought — which regulated our showers, drizzles and cloudbursts. If only!

Clement (“Inclement”) Wragge, the subject of Rain God, thrived in the outdoors, on land and at sea, in the realm of the Earth’s mighty sun by day and the whole universe at night. Like his 19th century peers in meteorology, he visited far-flung weather stations by horseback, steam train and coastal shipping. Near the end of his long career as Queensland’s first Government Meteorologist, critics ragged him as the Rain God in contempt for what they saw as gulling the public with fanciful forecasts. By then, his practise seemed based on physics souped up with psychic insights.

But Wragge’s bread and butter — the main reason he was hired in 1887 — was meticulously recording and defining the colony’s climate. His well-trained observers on sheep runs, at railway stations and post offices left a benchmark of data for later generations to assess deviations from what seemed normal then. What about this year’s muggy, stormy April, for example? Townsville’s stats, even for the past 70 years, show steadily climbing daily maximum and minimum temperatures.

I’ve taken the liberty of calling Wragge a 19th Century meteorologist with 21st Century fears. That’s not reinventing him as a great seer, just acknowledging his misgivings about human impact on the balance of nature — in his day, evident in the ravages of ringbarking. Like most people, I hate my weather joys and sorrows being complicated by science and politics.  I can relate to the state of wishful thinking that discounts any danger from the Greenhouse Effect and assumes humanity will muddle through. All I can say is that politics and science are a bad mix. I’m at least at one with Inclement in his advice to pray for wisdom in adversity.