Australia’s Wild Weather

”Weather is the oldest story in the world — one we want to keep on telling each other when we meet, as though it were part of who we are, a story that wants to keep on telling itself, and affecting us, whether we like it or not. We breathe it in; we see embodied in it our fears and desires; it falls on our heads. And we’d better take care of it: our lives are in its hands.”

Marrying photographs from the collection of the National Library of Australia with an evocative and contemplative essay by poet Mark Tredinnick, Australia’s Wild Weather is a lyric field guide to Australian cloudplay and rainfall, wind and light, storm and calm, hail and snow, cyclone and duststorm, drought and flood, and fire. Tredinnick asks us to look at our assumptions about weather. We are a stable people on a stable continent, whose weather is not, in fact, uncommonly wild, and perhaps we tell ourselves stories of meteorological disaster (narrowly and bravely survived) to reassure ourselves we’re real. But Australian identity is without question an adaptation to habitual drought. Drought is in our nature. It’s in the way we speak and in the way we get about our lives —undemonstrative, dry, imperturbable. As if we had three years at best. As if emotion were a scarce resource. As if beauty were always suspect and unreliable…

These are times in which, of course, weather is no longer small talk; it is most of the news. Tredinnick contemplates with quiet urgency what it means to be living at what may be the beginning of the end of the weather we have known.