Following the Rain: Climates of Opinion

Abstract

This article foregrounds La Niña’s role in establishing climate optimism in the southeastern states of Australia in the 1860s and 1870s. It examines the perceptions of climate as influenced by the cycles of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), underscored by the decadal cycles of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) and the influence in some areas of the intensity of the subtropical ridge. It finds an abundance of very wet La Niña years coincided with a key period of Australian immigration and the expansion of pastoralism and agriculture. The article concludes that this period of productivity and expansion substantially contributed to a false sense of optimism. It suggests nineteenth-century ideas about climate can illuminate contemporary cultural understandings.

The author would like to thank Assoc. Prof. Alison Holland, the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions and comments on the original manuscript. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Jenny Lee, ‘A Black Past, a Black Prospect: Squatting in Western NSW, 1879–1902’ (MA thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1980); A. Barnard, ‘Aspects of the Economic History of the Arid Land Pastoral Industry’, in Arid Lands of Australia, eds R.O. Slatyer and R.A. Perry (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1969), 209–28.

2 Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 102–3.

3 Rainfall statistics sourced from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology weather station directory for selected sites in the area under study. See http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/?ref=ftr

4 The subtropical ridge is part of the global circulation of the atmosphere. When it moves over inland Australia, usually in winter, it brings southwesterly winds and showery conditions. Bureau of Meteorology, ‘Sub-Tropical Ridge’, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/about. For its impact on South Australia see Mandy Freund et al., ‘Multi-Century Cool- and Warm-Season Rainfall Reconstructions for Australia’s Major Climatic Regions’, Climate of the Past 13 (2017): 1751–70.

5 See Julia Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism: Remembering Rain (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7.

6 Belich, 205.

7 Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism.

8 Tom Griffiths, ‘How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia’, Australian Journal of Botany 50 (2002): 375–89; Tom Griffiths, ‘The Nature of Culture and the Culture of Nature’, in Cultural History in Australia, eds Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003), 67–80; J.M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 59.

9 R.L. Heathcote, Back of Bourke: A Study of Land Appraisal and Settlement in Semi-Arid Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965), 166, 196–7.

10 Powell, 59.

11 ENSO as an agent of change has been discussed by Mike Davis who described El Niño as an agent of British imperialism. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001).

12 Belich, 89.

13 Stuart Macintyre, Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian Society (New York: Routledge, 2020), 33.

14 Ibid., 28–31.

15 Grace Karskens, People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2020), 76.

16 Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism.

17 Richard Grove, ‘Revolutionary Weather: The Climatic and Economic Crisis of 1788–1795 and the Discovery of El Niño’, in A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, eds Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2005), 128–40.

18 Don Garden, Droughts, Floods and Cyclones: El Niños That Shaped Our Colonial Past (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009).

19 Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism.

20 Madeleine Miller, ‘Regenerating the Australian Estate’, The Institute of Australian Geographers Conference, Curtin University, Perth, 5 July 2023.

21 Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism.

22 Tim Sherratt, ‘Human Elements’, in Sherratt et al., 2.

23 Mike Smith, ‘Paleoclimates: An Archaeology of Climate Change’, in Sherratt et al., 176–80.

24 Sherratt, 1–17.

25 Joelle Gergis and Anthony Fowler, ‘A History of ENSO Events since AD1525: Implications for Future Climate Change’, Climatic Change 92 (2009): 343–87.

26 Grove.

27 M.J. McPhaden, A. Santoso and W. Cai, ‘Introduction to El Niño Southern Oscillation in a Changing Climate’, in El Niño Southern Oscillation in a Changing Climate, eds M.J. McPhaden, A. Santoso and W. Cai (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119548164 (accessed 25 April 2024).

28 Bureau of Meteorology, El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), 2022, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate; Chiara Holgate et al, ‘The Impact of Interacting Climate Modes on East Australian Precipitation Moisture Sources’, Journal of Climate 35, no. 10 (2022): 3147–59. The Walker Circulation refers to the east–west circulation of the atmosphere in the vertical plane above the tropical Pacific. Air rises above warmer ocean regions (usually in the west) and descends over cooler ocean regions (usually in the east). Its strength fluctuates with the Southern Oscillation. During ENSO events the Walker Circulation either strengthens or weakens. Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism, 281.

29 James Risbey et al., ‘On the Remote Drivers of Rainfall Variability in Australia’, Monthly Weather Review 137, no. 10 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1175/2009MWR2861.1 (accessed 25 April 2024).

30 Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism, 280.

31 Risbey et al.; S. Power and J. Callaghan, ‘Variability in Severe Coastal Flooding, Associated Storms, and Death Tolls in Southeastern Australia since the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology 5, no. 5 (2016): 1139–49.

32 Andrew King et al., ‘The Role of Climate Variability in Australian Drought’, Nature Climate Change 10, no. 3 (2020): 177–9.

33 Bureau of Meteorology, El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), 2022, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/about/?bookmark=enso; Holgate et al.

34 Gergis and Fowler.

35 Post-1960 anthropogenic warming has altered ENSO so that the occurrences of strong La Niña and El Niño events are becoming more frequent. Wenju Cai et al., ‘Anthropogenic Impacts on Twentieth Century ENSO Variability Changes’, Nature Reviews Earth and Environment 4 (2023): 407–18. Climate scientist Scott Power argues that climate change can be expected to alter ENSO but exactly how is unknown. Scott Power et al., ‘Robust Twenty-First Century Projections of El Niño Southern Oscillation and Related Precipitation Variability’, Nature 502, no. 7472 (2013): 541–5.

36 M.J. Salinger, J.A. Renwick and A.B. Mullan, ‘Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation and South Pacific Climate’, International Journal of Climatology 21 (2001): 1705–21.

37 Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism, xiv.

38 Chand et al. argue that the IPO presents ‘only a few realisations in the observational record’ and so the extent of its impact on ENSO is not clear. Savin Chand et al., ‘Climate Processes and Drivers in the Pacific and Global Warming: A Review for Informing Pacific Planning Agencies’, Climatic Change 176, no. 5 (2023). However, while the IPO and a sister climate driver, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, are thought to be partially driven by random changes in ENSO activity from decade to decade, they are also thought to be real dynamic features of the climate system. See S. Power and R. Colman, ‘Multi-Year Predictability in a Coupled General Circulation Model’, Climate Dynamics 26 (2006): 247–72; S. Power et al., ‘Decadal Climate Variability in the Tropical Pacific: Characteristics, Causes, Predictability, and Prospects’, Science 374, no. 6563 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay9165 (accessed 25 April 2024); N.J. Holbrook et al., ‘Decadal Climate Variability and Cross-Scale Interactions: ICCL 2013 Expert Assessment Workshop’, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 95 (2014): 155–8. The PDO can be regarded as the North Pacific expression of the near-global scale decadal variability. See M. Newman et al., ‘The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Revisited’, Journal of Climate 29, no. 12 (2016): 4399–427.

39 B.M. Buckley et al., ‘Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation Reconstructed from Trans-Pacific Tree Rings: 1350–2004 CE’, Climate Dynamics 53 (2019): 3181–96. Variations in IPO chronologies make it difficult to pinpoint exact changes from a cool to a warm regime and conversely from a warm to a cool period. However, the consensus is that the 1870s La Niñas occurred during a negative IPO. Given the strength of the 1860, 1861 and 1863 La Niñas it is likely that the influence of the IPO contributed to their intensity. Jonathan G. Palmer et al., ‘Drought Variability in the Eastern Australia and New Zealand Summer Drought Atlas (ANZDA, CE 1500–2012) Modulated by the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation’, Environmental Research Letters 10 (2015), 124002, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/124002; B.J. Henley et al., ‘A Tripole Index for the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation’, Climate Dynamics 45 (2015): 3077–90; Stacy E. Porter et al., ‘Reconstructing an Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation Index from a Pacific Basin-Wide Collection of Ice Core Records’, Journal of Climate 34, no. 10 (7 April 2021): 3839–52; Linsley et al., ‘Interdecadal-Decadal Climate Variability from Multicoral Oxygen Isotope Records in the South Pacific Convergence Zone Region since 1650 A.D.’, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology 23, no. 2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.1029/2007PA001539 (accessed 28 April 2024).

40 Freund et al.

41 There are other influences on La Niña. Wet conditions across southeast Australia during winter and spring typically intensify when La Niña and the Indian Ocean Diopole (IOD) co-occur. Zoe Gillett and Andrea Taschetto, ‘Multi-Year La Niña Events’, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes Briefing Note 20, 2022, https://climateextremes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Multi-year-La-Nina-Events-ARC-Centre-of-Excellence-for-Climate-Extremes.pdf (accessed 28 April 2024). Reliable records of the IOD began in 1960. Bureau of Meteorology, ‘Indian Ocean Influences on Australian Climate’, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/iod/ (accessed 28 April 2024). However, in a study of the interaction of several climate variables with La Niña during 1860–64 and 1870–75 only one La Nina event, 1874, was found to have the correlation of a negative IOD. Lyndon Ashcroft et al., ‘Southeastern Australian Climate Variability 1860–2009: A Multivariate Analysis’, International Journal of Climatology 34 (2014): 1928–44. In summer a positive Southern Annular Mode (SAM) will most likely bring an increased chance of summer rain across parts of Tasmania, Victoria, NSW and southern Queensland. Australian Bureau of Meteorology, ‘Southern Annular Mode and the Australian Climate’, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/sam/ (accessed 28 April 2024). Several SAM reconstructions show it was positive from 1850 until around the turn of the century. Jonathan King et al., ‘Trends and Variability in the Southern Annular Mode over the Common Era’, Nature Communications 14, no. 2324 (2023), https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37643-1 (accessed 28 April 2024). The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) can change the odds of wetter or drier periods on weekly to monthly timescales. When the MJO brings periods of weaker trade winds over the Pacific these can help strengthen or trigger an El Niño. Likewise, it can weaken or disrupt La Niña. Australian Bureau of Meteorology, ‘The Madden-Julian Oscillation’, Australian Climate Influences, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/about/ (accessed 28 April 2024). Detailed analysis of the MJO in the 1860s and 1870s is not available due to the scarcity of the observed or assimilated global data. However, Song and Seo comment that due to climate change, the MJO has strengthened in the twentieth century. Eun-Ji Song and Kyon-Hwan Seo, ‘Past- and Present-Day Madden-Julian Oscillation in CNRM-CM5’, Geophysical Research Letters 43, no. 8 (2016): 4042–8.

42 Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History (London: Routledge, 2014).

43 Sarah Strauss and Ben Orlove, eds, Weather, Climate, Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Miller, La Niña and the Making of Climate Optimism; Garden; Grove.

44 James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 24.

45 Garden, 25.

46 Lee, 35.

47 Joelle Gergis and Lynden Ashcroft, ‘Rainfall Variations in South-Eastern Australia Part 2: A Comparison of Documentary, Early Instrumental and Paleoclimate Records, 1788–2008’, International Journal of Climatology 33 (2013): 2973–87.

48 Joelle Gergis, Linden Ashcroft and Zak Baillie, ‘La Niña Brings Flooding Rains to NSW in the Early 1860s’, Climate History Australia, 27 September 2012, https://climatehistory.com.au/2012/09/27/la-nina-brings-flooding-rains-to-nsw-in-the-early-1860s/ (accessed 28 April 2024).

49 Joelle Gergis, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), 82.

50 ‘Dapto. The Weather’, Examiner, 14 January 1860, 3.

51 Correspondent, North Australian and Queensland General Advertiser, 14 March 1863, 3.

52 ‘The Rainfall and the Floods’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 June 1864, 4.

53 Ibid.

54 The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 June 1864, 4. British writer Douglas Jerrold wrote: ‘Earth is here so kind that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest’: W.B. Jerrold, ed., Of Australia. The Wit and Opinions of Douglas Jerrold ‘A Land of Plenty’ (London: W. Kent & Co., 1859).

55 Stuart Macintyre, Winners and Losers, 18–38; Garden, 25; Gergis, 80.

56 Garden, 25.

57 Gergis and Ashcroft.

58 Neville Nicholls, ‘Climatic Outlooks: From Revolutionary Science to Orthodoxy’, in Sherratt et al.

59 Garden, 27.

60 George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, or physical geography as modified by human action (London: S. Low, Son and Marston, 1864), iv.

61 Garden, 28.

62 Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sorlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 75; Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11.

63 Susan Swanberg, ‘The Way of the Rain: Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Retrospective Examination of Historical American and Australian “Rain follows the plow/plough” Messages’, International Review of Environmental History 5, no. 2 (2019): 67–95.

64 ‘The Approaching Harvest’, Express and Telegraph, 12 November 1877, 3.

65 Ibid.

66 Janis Sheldrick, ‘Goyder’s Line: The Unreliable History of the Line of Reliable Rainfall’, in Sherratt et al., 64.

67 Swanberg; Janis Sheldrick, Nature’s Line: George Goyder Surveyor, Environmentalist, Visionary (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2016), 272–5.

68 ‘Agriculture in South Australia’, Northern Argus, 4 December 1874, 3.

69 Donald W. Meinig, ‘Goyder’s Line of Rainfall: The Role of a Geographic Concept in South Australian Land Policy and Agricultural Settlement’, republished in South Australian Geographical Journal, 104 (2005): 105–14.

70 Sheldrick, ‘Goyder’s Line’, 58.

71 Carly Tozer et al., ‘Temporal and Spatial Variability of the Cropping Limit in South Australia’, Climate Research 60 (2014): 25–34.

72 Sheldrick, ‘Goyder’s Line’, 58.

73 Eric J. Webb and Brian I. Magi, ‘The Ensemble Oceanic Nino Index’, International Journal of Climatology 42, no. 10 (2022).

74 ‘Country Adjacent to Lake Torrens’, Parliamentary Paper 174, South Australia, 1857–58, 1.

75 Hans Micham, The Story of the Flinders Ranges (Adelaide: Rigby, 1983).

76 ‘The Northern Explorations’, Adelaide Observer, 26 September 1857, 1.

77 Ibid.

78 Sheldrick, ‘Goyder’s Line’, 59; ‘Report of the Pastoral Commission’, Parliamentary Paper 33, South Australia, 1891, 79.

79 ‘The Wastelands Amendment Act, 1868–9’, Acts of Parliament, South Australia, 14, 1868–69; Parliamentary Debates (South Australia), 23 April 1872.

80 Gergis, 85.

81 Garden, 145.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., 146.

84 ‘Petition for New Agricultural Areas’, Parliamentary Paper 34, South Australia, 1874.

85 William Lines, Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 98.

86 ‘Report on the Disposal of Crown Lands’, Parliamentary Paper 60, South Australia, 1890, 16–17.

87 Lines, 98.

88 Digamma, ‘Our Climate’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 1870, 8.

89 ‘Climate, Soil, and Productions’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 1878, 5.

90 Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 2.

91 Arlene M. Cook, ‘The Garden of Australia: An Analysis of Resource Use and Environmental Change in the Goulburn Valley’ (PhD thesis, University of New England, 2002), 90.

92 Tom Griffiths, ‘One Hundred Years of Environmental Crisis’, Rangeland Journal 23, no. 1 (2001): 5–14.

93 Powell, 14.

94 Andrea Gaynor, ‘Environmental Transformations’, in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 1, Colonial Australia, eds Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 269–93.

95 Gergis, 86.

96 R.L. Heathcote, The Australian Experience: Essays in Australian Land Settlement and Resource Management (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1988).

97 NSW wheat production fell from 191,500 tonnes in 1895 to 43,100 tonnes in 1903. Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Historical Selected Agricultural Commodities by State (1861–Present)’, 2022, https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/agriculture/agricultural-commodities-australia/latest-release#data-downloads (accessed 28 April 2024).

98 Ibid.

99 Nationally beef cattle numbers fell from just over 12 million in 1895 to 7.2 million by 1903. In Queensland, where there was the most investment in beef cattle, numbers fell from 7 million in 1895 to 2.1 million in 1903. Ibid.

100 Richard Dewney, ‘The Pastoral Industry and Pastoral Laws’, Letter to the Editor, Adelaide Observer, 29 April, 1899, 4; ‘The Pastoral Industry’, The Advertiser, 27 August 1901, 7.

101 T. Burgoyne, ‘The Gawler Range Country: Trip of the Pastoral Commission’, Adelaide Observer, 23 April 1898, 2.

102 Gergis, 90.

103 William F. Lamb et al., ‘Discourses of Climate Delay’, Global Sustainability 3, no. 17 (2020): 1–5.

104 Ibid.

105 Mark Diesendorf addressed ‘state capture’ by the fossil fuel industry in Mark Diesendorf and Rod Taylor, ‘Cutting the Bonds of State Capture’, in The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation: Technological, Socioeconomic and Political Change (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Ketan Joshi, ‘Scott Morrison’s Net Zero Modelling Reveals a Slow, Lazy and Shockingly Irresponsible Approach to “Climate Action”’, The Guardian, 13 November 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/13/scott-morrisons-net-zero-modelling-reveals-a-slow-lazy-and-shockingly-irresponsible-approach-to-climate-action (accessed 24 April 2024).

106 J.G. Canadell et al., ‘Multi-Decadal Increase of Forest Burned Area in Australia Is Linked to Climate Change’, Nature Communications 12, no. 6921 (2021); N.J. Abram et al., ‘Connections of Climate Change and Variability to Large and Extreme Forest Fires in Southeast Australia’, Communications Earth and Environment 2 (2021): 1–17.

107 Peter Christoff, ‘Election 2022: Climate and Energy. Policy Performance and Promises’, Melbourne Climate Futures, University of Melbourne, 2022, https://www.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/4113690/CHRISTOFF_Election-2022_Climate-and-energy-.pdf; Ian McAllister, ‘Party Explanations for the 2022 Australian Election Result’, Australian Journal of Political Science 58, no. 4 (2023): 309–25.

108 Tiffanie Turnbull, ‘Has Australia Cleaned up Its Act on Climate Change?’, BBC News, 7 September 2023; Lesley Hughes et al., ‘Beating Around the Bush: How Australia’s National Environment Law Fails Climate and Nature’, Climate Council of Australia, https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/CC_MVSA0367-CC-Report-EPBC-Act_V7-FA-Screen-Single.pdf (accessed 28 April 2024).

109 National Council for Fire and Emergency Services, ‘Seasonal Bushfire Outlook Spring 2023’, 23 August 2023, https://www.afac.com.au/auxiliary/publications/seasonal-outlook/seasonal-outlook-article/seasonal-bushfire-outlook-spring-2023. https://www.afac.com.au/auxiliary/publications/seasonal-outlook/s (accessed 28 April 2024); Australian Bureau of Meteorology, ‘Climate Outlook for November to February’, 2 November 2023, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/outlooks/archive/20231102-outlook.shtml (accessed 28 April 2024).

110 Eliza Spencer, ‘Doubt and Flooding Rains. How an Unusual El Niño Has Affected Australian Farmers’, The Guardian, 14 January 2024.

111 Peter Christoff, ‘Introduction’, in The Fires Next Time: Understanding Australia’s Black Summer, ed. Peter Christoff (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2023).

112 Climate Council of Australia, ‘2023 Named the Hottest Year on Record as Scorching Temps Sweep Australia’, 8 December 2023, https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/2023-named-hottest-year-record-scorching-temps-sweep-australia/ (accessed 28 April 2024).

113 Spencer.