South Canterbury Times. THURSDAY, JANUARY 24, 1889.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 4914, 24 January 1889, Page 2

South Canterbury Times. THURSDAY, JANUARY 24, 1889.

Mb Russel, of the Sydney observatory, has supplied an interesting paper on droughts in New South Wales to the Argus. He says that the first thing which struck the pioneers of New South Wales was the fact that the country seemed dried up, as by a prolonged rainless period. In one of his earlier explorations along the coast, Bass in many places found the forests mostly dead, evidently from drought. When the first settlers went to the Hunter river in 1821, the country was suffering from drought, and the blacks told them ;a more terrible one had befallen them some time before, when 1 the Hunter river,—so they stated—was completely dried up, a thing which has never occurred in the history of the settlement; though it has once ceased to run, and the little water left in it became quite salt. As near as could be made out the groat drought the blacks spoke of occurred sixty or seventy years before the settlers were told of It. It was a drought in 18.13 which drove the settlers to try the country over the main range, and led to the settlement of the Bathurst plains. Other bad droughts were experienced in 1827-8, and 1837. The latter must have been one of the worst yet experienced by the whites, for Lake George, the largest fresh water lake in New South Wales, on a branch of the Shoalhaven river, dried up for the first and only time on record, and the drought produced a disastrous effect on the general prosperity of the colony. Among single years 1819 was remarkably dry, and stock were even dying on the banks of the Murray. Another dry year was ’62, and’6s 6, and’76 7 were also droughty; after a spell of wet years dry ones set in with ’BO, ’B4 being extremely dry. “ The most severe drought of the whole series, as far as intensity is concerned is that of 1888. We have never had a year before in which the drought was so general or so intense. So far as I can gather from the reports of the whole colony 1888 is the worst year we have ever had to record.” As to the cause of the droughts in Australia,upon which he had been iuvited to express an opinion, Mr Bussell speaks with caution. “ It is a very vexed question.” Nevertheless he has no doubt at all that “ the real cause is a variation in the position of the monsoonal winds, or dry wind belts,” on the margins of which belts the precipitation of rain takes place. “Owing to some cause which has not yet been ascertained fully, the position of this rain belt shifts about, and as a rule when it is very dry in this colony—New South Wales—it is wet in Victoria and South Australia. That is the general rule, but now and then years occur, as in the present case, when the dry winds extend over the whole of Australia.” This is not very clear. If there are such “ belts,” indigenous, so to speak, to the contfnent what becomes of them in the years when the whole continent is favoured with copious, and even excessive rains ? Farther on Mr Russel refers the continuance of dry weather to a continuance of high barometer over Australia, but to the question, Why should there be such a continuance of high barometer ? there is as yet no answer. “The opinion has been expressed by some leading men, and with some show of reason, that these barometrical conditions travel gradually and slowly round the earth, so that, assuming that law ~to be true, the high barometer

would'gradually pass to thj eastward from us, and bring a return of favourable weather. At present this does not solve the difficulty.” The knowledge so far obtained of the meteorology of Australia appears to be of no present value in the prediction of wet or dry years, but patient working at the problem may produce the desired knowledge which is power, the knowledge which would enable the inhabitants to make some provision for a foreseen contingency, which in the absence of such provision becomes calamity. Mr Russell referred to the results of similar work in South Africa, as if he more than suspected there is some truth in the idea that there are areas of persistent high barometer in the atmospheric ocean, and that they travel eastward. To have this point thoroughly settled in the affirmative would be of great advantage to Australia. It would seem, however, necessary to seek elsewhere than among the ordinary and generally recognised meteorological agents, for the cause of a meteorological phenomenon so constant in form as supposed, while slowly traversing wide expanses of land and sea.