My time grows short, gentle reader, so I will do my best to complete as many posts as possible in the next 8 weeks. As you may know, my trip was originally to last at least another year with further stops to New Zealand, England, and a year in Scotland. However due to the pandemic, I’ve had to curtail these additional excursions and return to the States for a respite. Alas. But as we are just coming out of the colder months here (in August), it may be apropos to take a moment to talk a bit about the temperatures here and how to deal with them. Before we talk about the weather, though, there is the related issue of cooking.
Everything here is in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit and this includes oven dials and baking instructions. In itself this took some adjusting to as I tried not to accidentally burn things, but add to this baking hurdle the fact that the stove is not only gas (which presents its own problems) but also highly temperamental. This made for some spectacular culinary fails, but more on my travails in this arena in a future post.
The shorthand conversion formula was to double the Celsius number and add thirty. Twenty degrees Celsius here was therefore about 70 Fahrenheit. Even so, having to learn that a forecast of 20 degrees meant a jacket was needed while 30 degrees meant stripping down to only a pair of shorts, took some time. If someone told me, for instance, that the temperature was going to be 10 degrees on a particular night, I could do little more at first than offer a blank, uncomprehending stare, before next furrowing my brow, casting my eyes downward, and offering a grave ‘Hmmm’. This ploy would be enacted in the hope that the other party would then provide further informational context such as ‘Do you have firewood?’ or ‘I hope your air con is working’ to clue me in to what the number actually meant. At least there was no humidity to deal with this far inland.
As mentioned previously, the heat here was intense upon arrival. The median temperature was 33.1 C (91.5 F) with the monthly high being 36.5 C (98 F). This meant walking around barefoot more than at any other time in my life as well as regularly choosing to forego a shirt while inside (this practice made me a walking buffet for mosquitoes, however). When out in the field ministry we would often knock from the bottom of a set of stairs or a bit away from the door in part, I suppose, because a person not expecting visitor might be similarly under clad on a very hot day. I was never able to confirm this as a reason, however. At least not empirically. Thank goodness.
I noticed the cars here also had a feature unknown to Clevelanders: dashboard covers. These dash mats were sort of like carpet saddles that sat on top of the dash to protect it from sun damage. They also meant that if you set a hat on the dash it was less likely to slide off. Not as easily at any rate. It was standard practice to try to find shade to park under and people were very fastidious about this whenever there was a spot to be had, even if it was tiny. Most people had sun reflectors to fold out and place under their windshield before leaving the car for long stretches, and nearly all of the cars had air conditioning.
The house I stayed in had the interesting feature of being raised off the ground, which allowed it to be much cooler than those that allowed no air to pass underneath, and this helped. The walls were also about twelve feet high which allowed the warmer air to hover up at the top of the room and be sucked out by whirly birds on the roof. Once the sun went down, there was often a very pleasant breeze if one was sitting by an open door or window, but for the purpose of teaching in a quiet room with no distractions I often had to sit in a closed-up room and that’s when things got warm. Though putting it off for as long as possible, I eventually had to start using the a/c rather than teaching in a buttoned up shirt and tie while visibly moist and agitated. I also went through gallons of water and cordial to keep cool, but the upside of this was it was the most hydrated I’ve ever been and was a picture of health. Another reason for the air con at night to cool the room a little was the fact that if I chose to lie on top of the bedding, I would again be a mozzie buffet for most of the night. Those things were irritatingly persistent, clever, and sadistic.
Being outside was a different story altogether (though as soon as you stepped into the shade the mozzies were there waiting). When going out to work or walk to town, it was a good policy to try to cover up against the sun, due its intensity and potential to do serious skin damage. With skin cancer and other sun-related maladies being issues here, a broad hat and 50+ SPF sunscreen were constant friends. But because the air was usually moving, working outside was actually a relief to being inside. And to be honest I didn’t mind the heat. I had known coming in that Australia was a hot, dusty place and I was determined to uncomplainingly rise to the occasion. I had also long imagined riding the range in a hat and boots amid swirling dust and parched vegetation, so this was exactly what I had signed up for.
But all of the cooling conventions that made Queenslanders so perfect for the heat, tended to backfire in the cool of summer when the temps tended to drop to fifty at night. “But 50 isn’t that cold”, you say. In Ohio this would be true, but all the walls there are insulated, the houses have central heating and sit on the ground. Here the house had no insulation and so there was no barrier to keep out the cold. In addition the raised nature of the structure meant that even once it had warmed up nicely outside by 10am, the interior of the house was still very chilly. There was also the fact that this particular spot was very low by comparison to other spots around town, so it was always a few degrees cooler. To combat the chilliness, there was a heater in my room as well as a plug-in space heater. But these cost money to use so a cheaper option was using the wood burner in the living room.
Gathering wood thus became part of each day’s chores. To find kindling and small bits of wood this meant walking around the back paddock and picking up sticks and branches that had fallen from the trees, but for the larger chunks of wood needed to burn for hours, it meant picking through great heaps of timber which had once been part of a now demolished wooden building. Often these pieces were small enough that I could carry or drag them to the house and cut them up with the cross cut saw, but sometimes a brother with a chainsaw would offer to come over to help cut up the larger beams and posts that I couldn’t move. This was usually done by Rodney Egan and it was always appreciated.
To get the fire started there was a stack of newspapers and magazines in a basket next to the wood burner, and as I went through these I would glance at pages and save ones that stood out as interesting. For example there was an articles on Orphan Puggles, one on Yvonne Strahovski’s Baby, and an odd one that talked about how various Catholic schools are trying to ‘desex’ hymns and prayers by removing gender specific terms so as to be more ‘gender inclusive’. (Tirade omitted) I soon introduced that particular article to a nice Redhead of my acquaintance. Another intriguing article was in a Queensland Visitor’s Guide for the Fraser Coast accompanied by a tantalizing picture which highlighted whale watching at Hervey Bay, (Yay!) as well as travel ads for New Zealand, Scotland, and the London reminding me of all the places I would now not get to see in 2021 (Boo!!!)
Once a match was struck (or sometimes several in succession) a nice fire was blazing and toasty heat began to be pumped into the room. While this was gratifying, one small problem was that most of it went straight to the ceiling and stayed there. Fine if one was sitting in that room, however by bedtime, after several hours, very little of it had actually made its way into the bedroom and what had drifted in had also gathered at the top of the ceiling. It would then be time to shut the door and barricade myself in for the night. In this last action, I was at odds with the people here who left windows and doors open at night to keep things cool during the hotter months, but I was constantly at war with an array of creeping things and vampiric insects. Just as Captain Ahab had come to develope an obsessive hatred for the white whale known as Moby Dick, so I had come to fly into a blood rage at the mere sight of a mosquito now.
And though it will make your skin crawl, we can look at these and other creatures in the next post.
You have been warned.
