Making Landfall: Towards a Critical Tempestology of Cyclones in Colonial Australia to 1850

In paleotempestology the mapping of past tropical cyclone activity has been conducted through two principal methods: geological proxy techniques, to gauge the millennial scale incidence of cyclones, and examination of archives, for example, newspapers, ships' logs, diaries, annals, government documents and Chinese historical documentary records which date back over a thousand years (Liu 13-15). The survey of historical sources by paleotempestologists is designed to elicit information about the incidence, intensity and tracks of cyclones and the material damage they have caused. In this essay I turn to Australian colonial newspapers before 1851 digitised by the National Library of Australia for its Trove database. They carried local and overseas reports of hurricane and intense storm activity; poems, letters, and excerpts of travel narratives which represent hurricanes; and local and overseas commentary on current affairs of state.