Introduction
On August 10, 2015, the independent think tank on climate change in Australia, the Climate Institute, released its Climate of a Nation 2015 report, based on a survey of national attitudes. Its major finding, that there was growing concern about government inaction on climate change, was an inconvenient truth for the Abbott Federal Government.1 Almost four years later, Tony Abbott’s successor as the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, faced a similar problem heading into a Federal Election. A poll of voter attitudes on the environment found only a small minority (13 per cent) thought the Federal Government was doing a good job of tackling climate change.2 It demonstrated that Australians were putting more faith in the message delivered by scientists and environmentalists that climate change was one of the major challenges facing human society in the twenty-first century. Australia’s inaction on climate change mitigation has seen growing public and official alarm both domestically and internationally. Australia seems out of step with other nations, such as the European Union members and China, on implementing policy to deal with what is a global problem.3
As this suggests, our response to climate has reached a new level of importance in the twenty-first century. Shifting rainfall patterns and rising temperatures indicate a permanent change and one that connects Australians to a global system. The consensus among climate scientists is that anthropogenic climate change will result in more frequent and more severe droughts, heat waves, wild fires and floods, rising sea levels, loss of biological diversity, including the decimation of marine life due to ocean acidification, the bleaching of coral reefs and the likely increase in the frequency of severe storms.4 Much of this is already in evidence. In Australia a change in rainfall patterns is seeing the drying out of the south-west and the south-east of the continent with a reduction in streamflow levels which is particularly concerning in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s breadbasket. Changing seasonal patterns are accentuating rainfall in the tropical north in summer while areas in the south are losing critical cool season (April to October) rains. Climate change is driving more frequent high-intensity rainfall events, causing major flooding. Droughts are more widespread and of longer duration and intensity.5 Governments and tourism operators have joined environmentalists and marine scientists in their concern about coral bleaching episodes on Australia’s World Heritage–listed Great Barrier Reef.6 In the first two months of 2019, Australians experienced wild fires in Tasmania, unprecedented flooding in Far North Queensland, and losses due to drought in southern Queensland and New South Wales. Reduced river flows in the Darling River saw a 40-kilometre stretch near the New South Wales town of Menindee clogged with dead fish due to low oxygen levels. When a hailstorm ripped through Sydney in late December 2018 with hailstones the size of tennis ball that damaged houses and smashed cars and accompanying 140 kph winds that brought down trees and power poles, the immediate impact of the prediction of more frequent intense storm activity became abundantly clear.7
Yet, as recent studies of Australian attitudes to climate change verify, while the majority of Australians want action to mitigate the impact of climate change, many are still confused about its origins. The national study of Australian attitudes to climate change by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in 2015 found that almost half of the Australians surveyed believed climate change was the result of either natural cycles or both human causes and natural cycles combined.8 A follow-up survey by the Climate Institute in 2017 found that the scientific consensus about climate change had not been matched by public opinion, which was characterised by uncertainty and confusion. While most Australians (71 per cent) thought Australia was already seeing the impact of climate change, a significant minority (43 per cent) were unsure of the role of human activity.9 By April 2019, only 13 per cent thought the Australian Federal Government was doing enough to tackle climate change and, in coal-dependent Australia, 64 per cent wanted a high priority put on increasing energy generated from renewable sources. Yet one-third of Australians still thought climate change was partly caused by human activity and also partly caused by natural processes. If the 11 per cent who thought climate change was as a result of natural forces only is added, in Australia in 2019 just over half of those surveyed thought climate change was primarily due to human activity.10
This book asks why the confusion? How do we explain the tension between the appreciation of climate change as an extenuating factor in changed weather patterns and yet an attachment to nature for explanations of the same? This book considers the pivotal role of La Niña in shaping human reactions to, and perceptions of, the physical nature of the eastern half of the Australian continent. It links the cycles of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), underscored by the longer-term cycles of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), to notions of abundance. It puts forward the idea of climate optimism to explain how the experience and memory of good seasons led to a misreading of climate and a mismanagement of the environment. Further, it relates climate optimism to a lack of political will in twenty-first-century Australia to combat human-induced climate change.
As such this book contributes to a decade-old literature on Australian climate history that began with the 2005 edited collection A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia. As historian Tim Sherratt argued in its introduction, “the Australian climate has proved both inhospitable and welcoming, rich in its promise and profound in its terrors”.11 Many environmental histories focus on the terrors, painting the plight of settler Australians as one long struggle against a hostile and adverse environment. Highlighting the negative of climate, historians outlined the ways in which drought and flood have tested settler ingenuity, forged character and been an impediment, at times, to progress.12 What has been overlooked is that climate optimism has had a far greater impact on Australian political and environmental history and this optimism has been an overriding facet of the Australian understanding of climate. In contrast to the focus on terrors, this book gives light to the rich promise of climate by exploring popular and official accounts of weather in newspapers, diaries, journals, oral histories, rainfall records, scientific papers and government reports, from the beginning of the European Settlement of Australia in 1788 to the second decade of the twenty-first century. It teases out the ways in which this rich promise coloured a colonial, then national, mindset that saw wealth and abundance, fertility and potential in the life-giving rains.
In her study of the Mallee farmers in Victoria, journalist Deb Anderson, for example, tells a tale of the Aussie battlers—the practical men and women who remain on the land, through difficult droughts and hard times due to their rugged stoicism.13 For historians Katie Holmes and Kylie Mirmohamadi, the Mallee lands are emblematic of the broader Australian struggle with the land and a founding narrative of the pioneer legend. Anderson’s battlers had their genesis in the soldier settlers of the early and mid-twentieth century wh...