Colonial Weather Genres of Australia

In settler societies, weather recording and forecasting most often operated as a coercive instrument of colonisation. In a sense this should be no surprise, as it is a well-established fact that the colonising cultures of Europe were preoccupied with the scientific mapping, measurement and classification of natural phenomena as ways to extend their control over the alien environments in which they established themselves abroad.2 The complexity of colonial weather-watching genres, however, which attempted variously to systematize the diverse climates of the colonial world, have remained largely impervious to humanities scholarship. The reason for this is that the approach to weather history has been biographical, angled through the achievements of early scientists, weather watchers and proto meteorologists, or it has been thematic, organised according to the ideas that helped shape the field.