Good to be Here

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5, 1 February 1906, Page 1

Good to be Here

Our new year enters oft in cape and fur upon the scene. As these' lines are being penned, we of the South wear crape for & sickly summer thiat isieems to have died in the midway of its career. We bewail the exasperating coolness from which there is a ready retreat. But there are worse things in life. One of these is to be held— as 1 our Australian neighbors are— in the grip of a heat-wave and toasted with temperatures that are high enough for a convention of salamanders. Our cousins over the way opened their new year with one of those glows of tropical heat that sometimes drop in unexpected and uninvited upon the Southern States of the Commonwealth ' In lang, lang days o' simmer, When the clear and cloudless sky Refuses ac wee drap o' rain To Nature parched and dry.' Then came a lucid spell. People revelled in fresh breezes that came from the far-off bergs in the south, and were ' suffering a recovery ' from temperatures that had soared to 124 in the And then, lo ! another tidal wave of heat broke from its moorings in the tropics and tonce more submerged our neighbors in a glowing atmosphere fit only for a coolie. And this time in Victoria, as during the previous visitation in New South Wales, there have been keener sufferings (including loss of life) than those that arise from unpleasantly high temperatures. For vast areas have been de-

vastated by fires that recall the agony through which Victoria passed on the day known in its history as black Thursday. On that wild day almost the whole colony was ablaze. Ashes from the burning forests and fields fell thick on the decks of vessels sixty miles out to sea ; the smoke impeded navigation ; and many of the scared inhabitants fancied that the world's last day had come. * Through the thick blue haze the people look out over the smoking grasslands— waiting patiently the time when the welcome rain patters upon the hot earth, and ' The genial night, wi' balmy breath, Gars verdure spring anew, An' ilka blade o' grass Keeps its am drap o' dew.' Meantime, newspaper philosophers are patching the sufferers' grief with proverbs. Meteorologists and wea-ther-prophets (they are not necessarily the same thing) tell them, for their comfort, that those recurrent heatwaves are due to antarctic depressions, and that they usually advance in a rotary spiral, varying in width - from a hundred to several hundred miles. It is fortunate that these sultry spells are not usually either frequent or of long duration. For the narratives of some of the exploring expeditions— such as, for instance, that of Sturt>— give a terrible picture of the physical" prostration, and worse, that a thorough-going heatwave is capable of producing, especially in the uninhabited interior. The dryness of some of our legislators' dreary periods is the thing that kills. But the dryness of the Australian heat is its saving quality. And that, (too, is >what takesi the sting out of the winter cold? "of Canada, ' the Lady of the Snow,' so that it shall not ' bite so nigh ' as the low temperatures that are moist and clammy.