Timing and Climate: Rainfall Variability in Northern Australia

People have observed the skies over Northern Australia for millennia.First, Indigenous peoples garnered knowledge linking land, seas and sky.Then, the colonial invaders imported their own ways of seeing and knowing.The two have long existed side by side and the dominance of Western knowledge has, until recently, rendered Indigenous knowledge invisible beyond the Aboriginal population.Depending on your cosmology, we in the north have long experienced a common weather but different climates and seasons in the very same places.Nevertheless, Western meteorology in Northern Australia has long been of remarkably high quality.The colonial Departments of Astronomy in the colonies of South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland saw to this before the establishment of the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology in 1908.The Bureau itself has seen to this since.The first systematic daily weather records for Darwin were taken in March 1869.Records for Katherine, Daly Waters and other NT locations soon followed.Several lines of telegraph wire tied each of these 'outposts' to each other and to the already well-developed meteorological networks in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales (NSW), and through them to the broader