Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, APRIL 1, 1926. CLIMATIC DISTURBANCES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 104, 1 April 1926, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, APRIL 1, 1926. CLIMATIC DISTURBANCES.

Oxly tlie otlier day tlie cables were recording' heavy bush fires in Victoria and New South Wales. Both States had been suffering from droughty conditions. In the Mother State high temperatures were being registered inland and, in places, there had been no rain for months. But, with these extraordinary changes that are so characteristic of the Australian climate, the drought has given way to very heavy rains and floods which have affected the western, south-western and northern areas of the State, carrying a large amount of destruction in their wake, with consequent heavy losses to the farmers, settlers and others in the inundated districts. Scourged alternately by drought and fire, and then by flood, our Australian cousins have suffered ,very heavy losses during the first three months of this year. The bush fires, unfortunately, were attended with severe loss of life, and the damage to both State and private property alone runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds. That is in Victoria. In New South Wales probably the damage to propertjq and the losses in crops and stock, etc., will be on a par with the Victorian losses and much of it is due to those violent climatic disturbances which Forestry authorities tell us are almost invariably associated with the denudation of forests, and the failure to replace the des. troyed timber by planting operations. New Zealand has, in common with Australia, experienced a remarkable summer W e have missed the great Australian heat; there have been days upon whirdi it could be truthfully said we had got back to winter again, and, in some parts, there has been lii tie or no real summer weather. The rain has been very partial where it has fallen. In some districts there has been a superabundance of the watery element; in other districts--Hawke’s Bay for instance —a severei drought, fortunately broken the other day, has left tho countryside bare of pasture, and occasioned heavy looses of sheep and cattle, etc. Why these things uhould be so it is difficult to understand. In our own district of Manawatu, the rainfall has been very unevenly distributed. Itain has fallen in comparative abundance in some' places; in. others little or none has

been experienced.' On some farms in the Rangiotu district, for instance, water for household purposes lias been too scarce to permit of proper daily ablutions. Still, things have not been so bad. as they have been known to be in Northern Victoria and in the dry areas of the western country of South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, where very little rain is ever experienced. There is surely some explanation of the climatic vagat ries which bring about such extraordinary weather conditions. The late Mr H. C. Russell, Government meteorologist in New South Wales in pre-Federation days, had a theory concerning the periodicity of droughts, and the late Mr Clement Wragg, who possessed a seemingly uncanny knowledge of coming weather conditions, made it a practice to forecast the weather for months ahead,.but no satisfactory explanation has yet been given, apart from the destruction of tree life, why whole districts should be scourged at intervals- by drought and flood —visitations to which all the Australian States are more or less subject and vdiich are not unknown even in New Zealand,