SYDNEY SHIVERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23542, 4 July 1938, Page 16

SYDNEY SHIVERS

ANTARCTIC COLD GRIP ON HALF AUSTRALIA (From Our Own Correspondent) SYDNEY, June 24. For several days this week the southern half of Australia was in the grip of unusually severe cold. This succeeded, in Sydney at least, several weeks of weather that, for late aucumn and early winter, had been mild, and the change compelled people of this city to adopt uncommon methods to get and keep warm. Sydney was the coldest of the six capitals on Monday and Tuesday, the Antarctic depression which caused the cold seeming to reach the depth of its intensity at this latitude. On Monday the temperature fell to the lowest point registered in June for two years. It was even colder on Tuesday morning, when the minimum temperature, 38.6 degrees, was the lowest for five years, and was only 2.9 degrees above the lowest registered for all time—on June 22, 1932. Leading city stores reported a sharp increase in sales of winter clothing. Hot-water bottles were in demand; milk bars served hot drinks, and ice cream sales fell to zero. Electricity consumption showed a 10 per cent, increase over the figures for the corresponding days of last year. Hotels reported doubled sales of spirits, especially rum. . From other capitals came similar reports of cold, although Sydney, in the grip of winds from the southern Alps, suffered more severely than Melbourne, 500 miles nearer the Antarctic. In inland districts of New South Wales the cold was even more intense than in Sydney. At Mount Kosciusko and Kiandra (Australia’s bleakest town) it was only natural that low temperatures prevailed, but it was rare for towns on the southern tablelands, lower than the Alps, to record such temperatures as 17 degrees, as Queanbeyan and Braidwood did on Tuesday. It was even more rare to find Cobar, in the western division of the State, reporting a reading of 24 degrees. One victim of the snow was Michael Collins, aged 73, His body was found buried under a foot of snow at his camp about 20 miles from Delegate, in the southern Alps. Collins, who was born and lived all his life in the district, was a bushman and drover. His health had recently been failing. After an unusually heavy fall of snow, James Marriott, a friend, went out to Collins’s camp. Beside a fireplace Marriott saw the tips of Collins’s boots and the outline of his chin protruding through the snow. Death was due to heart failure following exposure.