AustLit

'Marrying photographs from the collection of the National Library of Australia with an evocative and contemplative essay by poet Mark Tredinnick, Australia's Wild Weather is a lyric field guide to Australian cloudplay and rainfall, wind and light, storm and calm, hail and snow, cyclone and duststorm, drought and flood, and fire.

'Tredinnick asks us to look at our assumptions about weather. We are a stable people on a stable continent, whose weather is not, in fact, uncommonly wild, and perhaps we tell ourselves stories of meteorological disaster (narrowly and bravely survived) to reassure ourselves we're real. But Australian identity is without question an adaptation to habitual drought. Drought is in our nature. It's in the way we speak and in the way we get about our lives—undemonstrative, dry, imperturbable. As if we had three years at best. As if emotion were a scarce resource. As if beauty were always suspect and unreliable ...

'These are times in which, of course, weather is no longer small talk; it is most of the news. Tredinnick contemplates with quiet urgency what it means to be living at what may be the beginning of the end of the weather we have known.' (From the publisher's website.)