Climate Of Australia [top] -

He sighed, and a hot, northerly wind—a genuine Bradfield —scoured the plains below, lifting a million tons of topsoil into a rust-colored haze. “I am not two things. I am a single, violent act of balance.”

He stood up, cracking his spine like a fault line. Far to the east, a low-pressure trough was forming over the Coral Sea. It would become a cyclone. It would have a gentle name, like Tiffany , and it would tear the roofs off a town called Innisfail.

He sat on the edge of a cracked red cliff overlooking the Southern Ocean, his beard a tangle of spinifex grass, his skin a patchwork of sun-scorched earth and ancient rainforest moss. In one hand, he held a dripping coil of monsoon cloud. In the other, a handful of dry, dust-fine sand. climate of australia

“I have always been violent,” he told the ghost of that memory. “I gave them the Fremantle Doctor to cool their fever, and the Brickfielder to remind them of the furnace just over the hill. I made the Snowy Mountains so they could dream of winter, and the Simpson Desert so they would never forget summer. I am not getting worse. I am getting more myself .”

“They don’t understand me,” he rumbled, his voice a low pressure system moving inland. “They think I am two countries. The Wet one and the Dry one. The Tyrant Sun and the Flooding Sky.” He sighed, and a hot, northerly wind—a genuine

He left behind only the cliff, the crack, and the faint, fading echo of a land that refuses to be anything other than exactly what it is: the oldest, flattest, driest, wettest, hottest, coldest, most maddeningly beautiful weather machine on Earth.

Then he would close his fist. And the Wet would become a memory. Far to the east, a low-pressure trough was

He thought of the Munga —the evil winds of August that carry no rain, only the smell of smoke from distant, self-made fires. He thought of the Cocktail Hour , that sudden, violent shift at 4 PM in the tropics where the temperature plummets twenty degrees in ten minutes, and the sky turns the color of a bruised mango. They called it a “storm.” He called it a heartbeat.