Making Landfall: Towards a Critical Tempestology of Cyclones in Colonial Australia to 1850

Authors

  • Sue Thomas La Trobe University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.5.10627

Keywords:

colonial cyclone writing, tropicality, weather in print media

Abstract

In paleotempestology the mapping of past tropical cyclone activity has been conducted through two principal methods: geological proxy techniques, to gauge the millennial scale incidence of cyclones, and examination of archives, for example, newspapers, ships' logs, diaries, annals, government documents and Chinese historical documentary records which date back over a thousand years (Liu 13-15). The survey of historical sources by paleotempestologists is designed to elicit information about the incidence, intensity and tracks of cyclones and the material damage they have caused. In this essay I turn to Australian colonial newspapers before 1851 digitised by the National Library of Australia for its Trove database. They carried local and overseas reports of hurricane and intense storm activity; poems, letters, and excerpts of travel narratives which represent hurricanes; and local and overseas commentary on current affairs of state.

 

Author Biography

Sue Thomas, La Trobe University

Sue Thomas, Professor of English at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is the author of The Worlding of Jean Rhys, Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in ‘Jane Eyre', Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures 1804-1834, co-author with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi of England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction, and compiler of Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952): A Bibliography. She has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers, decolonising literatures, and nineteenth-century periodicals.
cyclone poster image

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Published

2015-12-16

Issue

Vol. 5 (2015): Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (AJE)

Section

Essays

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