Justin of Archenland wrote:Oh man, I totally forgot about that.. Combined with Corona, I can imagine Australia being in quite the disarray still
I agree that it was quite a blow to a country which has endured at least two years of ever deepening drought, which made the bushfires so much worse than usual last summer. That very sharp drought was mainly due to an Indian Ocean Dipole which had also reduced Cape Town's water supply so very drastically that they were really suffering a year or so ago. That very powerful Indian Ocean Dipole was also delaying the monsoon cycle between the Northern & Southern Hemispheres. On the Pacific Ocean side of the country we had an El Nino effect as well, which finished in August last year.
The bushfires were really horrible, & we were really very grateful not only for the eventual rain which finally put them out, but also for the assistance other countries sent us, not only New Zealand, but also Papua Niugini, Singapore, Japan, Canada & USA, all fellow Pacific Ocean nations. But Australia for a long time has been known for "
droughts and flooding rains". An enquiry has been launched to see how we could have managed better, at both State & Federal level, & to decide how we could avoid something similar or worse happening again next summer. Though the underlying drought has eased somewhat, since January, we still need more rain inland before our inland areas recover completely to what they were in 2016. Our longest river is the Darling (named after a New South Wales governor, Ralph Darling), & it has only just recommenced its flow, completely down to its confluence with the Murray River, which defines the New South Wales border with Victoria.
Justin of Archenland wrote:I find these stories very interesting! I actually remember a history class in which my teacher proudly told the tales of the Dutch reaching Australia and being responsible for the names of Tasmania (after Abel Tasman) and New-Zealand (Zeeland is a Dutch province).
Yes Abel Tasman was a very important explorer down here. There is a town on the west coast of Tasmania, called Zeehan, after the name of Tasman's ship. But he originally called the island of Tasmania, Van Dieman's Land, after the then Dutch governor of Batavia (Jakarta, now), who commissioned his explorations. Before Australia's Federation, in 1901, it was the Tasmanians, themselves, who, on becoming a state, in itself, wanted a change of name, to separate themselves from a rather grim past as a convict settlement. One of my own British ancestors helped found Hobart, Tasmania's State capital, in 1804, the same year Matthew Flinders circumnavigated & christened the mainland of Australia.
That Marine, serving with the then Lieutenant Governor, David Collins, bore the distinction of being the groom in the colony's first official marriage on the 16th March, 1804. Having been widowed at the end of 1816, about the time an Indonesian volcano, Tambora, erupted, disrupting world weather, he was able to remarry a Scottish-born convict woman, sent to what would be later remembered as the harshest of Australian convict settlements, for the term of her natural life, for the
"horribly dastardly crime"
of stealing as many as
six handkerchiefs, in collusion with another woman.
Now, if it was as many as
six boxes of paper tissues, today,
would she still be sentenced to hanging, commuted to transportation for life, I wonder?
These lockdown days we are rationed to
two boxes of tissues per person plus one packet of toilet rolls per purchase. It is quite a bargain when sometimes what is on the shelves to be sold are boxes of tissues, in packets of 3 boxes.
It is something amusing to ponder these lockdown days whilst awaiting my turn to be served on the self distanced queue (don't forget to stand on the x marked spot) to the checkout.