Extract from the weather journal

Early Australian weather journals

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Australia's first written records of weather conditions were kept by William Dawes of the Royal Marines when the colony was founded in 1788. His weather journal was discovered in 1977 at the Royal Society in London, as shown above.

The 182 pages (seven days to a page) contained five or six observations a day about wind, temperature and barometric pressure at Port Jackson. He began his journal at an observatory near where the southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge now stands.

Some of the first notes on inland Australia's weather were made by William John Wills, of Burke and Wills fame, on the first white expedition to attempt the south-north crossing of the Australian continent. Wills was the expedition surveyor and astronomer. One of his last entries, before he died near Coopers Creek, was: "Night calm, clear and intensely cold, especially towards morning."