Paul Turnbull and Gabriele Weichart

The Australian Experience of Living with Extreme Weather

The causes of climate change continued to be vigorously debated. But regardless of the relative weight given to human agency or natural forces in contributing to atmospheric warming, the fact is that, over the past two decades, many parts of the world have experienced an increasing number of extreme weather events, such as prolonged droughts and atmospheric wind-and-pressure systems generating winds of over 200 kilometres an hour.

Australia has a long history of extreme weather which has profoundly influenced how people have lived on the continent for some 70,000 years. Before the arrival of European colonists in the late eighteenth century,  Australia was home to over two hundred different Indigenous societies, many of which were well adapted to living through drought and other commonly experienced catastrophic weather events, as we will discuss in this paper.  The history of European colonisation has in turn been a history profoundly shaped by the experience of extreme weather.

In our paper, we discuss our research on how people have lived with extreme weather in the southern wet tropics region of coastal North-Eastern Australia.

In this part of Australia, monsoonal rains frequently cause severe flooding of a complex network of local waterways. For thousands of years the region has also experienced cyclones - atmospheric wind-and-pressure systems of varying severity - during an annual monsoonal rainy season.

As in other parts of the Australian continent, local Aboriginal societies successfully adapted to the prevailing environmental conditions. Knowledge of the local ecology and weather, including the ability to predict heavy rains and cyclones and their effects on the environment, and suitable coping strategies were necessary survival skills among Indigenous societies in pre-contact Australia. Extended social networks based on kinship, mutual obligations and land ownership further reduced their vulnerability and enhanced their resilience. Knowledge as well as relations were embedded in a religious belief system which explained and ordered the social and natural universe.

When white settlers first arrived in the 1860s, they introduced cattle farming and intensive agriculture. They were faced with needing to quickly learn about their new natural and social environment and to develop strategies of adaptation to a sub-tropical environment.

In this paper we focus in particular on how communication, consultation and knowledge transfer between Indigenous people and settlers about the weather and other environmental issues occurred.  We also discuss what lessons studying the history of human habitation of North-Eastern Coastal Australia provides for a future which seems certain to be characterised by more frequent cyclonic events of destructive magnitude.

Paul Turnbull is a Professor of History and Digital Humanities at the University of Tasmania, and an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Queensland.  He is best known for his research on the history of European scientific interest in Aboriginal Australians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His publications include Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Gabriele Weichart is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, and an Associate Researcher in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. Her current research focuses on cultural change in the wake of natural disasters in Eastern Java and several other regions of Indonesia. Her publications include the collection (co-edited with Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon) Les dynamiques religieuses dans le Pacifique: Formes et figures contemporaines de la spiritualité océanienne (CREDO: 2010), and (co-edited with Hermann Mueckler) Australien: 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert. Geschichte ind Gesellschaft (Promedia: 2011).