Snowfalls in Australia have a colourful history, we reminisce, as south-east braces for cold blast

Updated 8 Aug 2019, 2:57am

Snow falls on the mountains every year in Australia, but only rarely does it spread down onto the plains and cities.

According to Blair Trewin, senior climatologist at the Bureau of Meteorology and probably Australia’s leading weather history aficionado, the wintery snowfall event forecast for the next few days is likely to be one of the most significant in recent years.

“[But] it certainly doesn’t look like we’re going to see anything on the scale of some of the events we’ve seen historically,” he said.

Historically it has been much worse.

“Obviously our records do get more sketchy the further we go back in time,” Dr Trewin said.

So let’s delve into the fabulously sketchy world of old news and weather records, all the way back to colonisation.

June 1836

Snow in Sydney. Seriously. It didn’t stick and it has never been repeated, but according to Dr Trewin it was the first time white settlers reported seeing snow around the renowned harbour.

Snow in Australia generally comes off the Southern Ocean, so by the time it gets across to the east coast it usually runs out of steam and is sheltered by the Great Dividing Range.

But apparently not on this particular day in 1836.

August 1849

August 31, 1849, was the first big snow event in Melbourne since European settlement. The Argus newspaper, the following day, reported:

“Yesterday morning inhabitants of Melbourne were astonished at beholding the streets and housetops covered with snow to the depth of several inches, being the first occurrence of the kind which has happened since the existence of the town.”

Curiously, by the time The Argus did its 80-year review of the event in 1929, published alongside an advertisement of maternity corsets, the depth had mysteriously grown to “upwards of a foot”.

But back to 1849.

“The fall of snow was welcomed by our native-born youth, some of whom, at the age of 20 years, had never seen such a thing in their existence,” the paper reported of the currency lads and lasses.

It reports that the subsequent flooding was so severe that, “a cabman earned a handsome sum by conveying passengers across Elizabeth Street, at its junction with Collins Street, for which a penny a head was charged”.

According to Dr Trewin, this is the only time snow is known to have settled on the ground in central Melbourne.

“We have seen nothing like it since,” he said.

July 1882

By the 1880s The Argus was publishing weather charts. The chart produced for July 26, 1882 looks remarkably similar to what the south-east is expecting over the next few days.

Sure enough the following day the reports were in:

“Yesterday a spectacle of a decidedly novel and, as far as is officially known, unprecedented character, was observed by the citizens of Melbourne and suburbs, vis., a genuine snowfall.”

It may have been a good idea for them to have checked back though their old editions before claiming it was “unprecedented”, but I’m told life before the internet was hard and we all make mistakes. Getting excited and forgetful about weather is evidently not a new phenomenon.

Hopefully more accurately, it goes on:

“The fall lasted about half an hour, during which time large numbers of people in all parts of the city and suburbs watched the unusual sight with a keen and evident interest.

“The fall was by no means confined to the metropolis, for according to the communications of our correspondents, supplemented by information from the Observatory, it has extended over the whole south-eastern portion of Australia and has also embraced the elevated districts of New South Wales.”

July 1900

This was one of what Dr Trewin calls localised “oddball” snow events — where snowfall is the result of an upper level cold pool of air on the back of a low pressure system, rather than a big widespread, cold southerly outbreak pushing up into the continent, as is the case with most of the other events on this list.

He said 60 centimetres of snow fell around Bathurst, with more than a metre falling in higher areas. Another oddball occurred in 1987 around Bombala in New South Wales.

Bombala’s other claim to fame is its long snowfall record.

Dr Trewin says there are fairly limited places where we actually have good long-term systematic records at low elevations. But they did unearth one a few years ago at a place called Bukalong, which is a farm near Bombala at 750 metres elevation.

“We analysed those and found that the frequency of snow events have dropped off by about half from 1950 through to the early 2000s,” Dr Trewin said.

It is not the only place that has seen a decline in low-level snowfall.

“Historically Canberra had a snowfall significant enough for snow to settle on the ground, typically two or three times a decade,” Dr Trewin said.

“But we have to go back to 2000 for the last time we saw substantial snow settle on the ground in the central city.

“Some people probably remember that event, if nothing else, for the NRL match between Canberra and Wests which was played in the snow.”

Canberra’s biggest snowfall on record was in July 1949, when Dr Trewin says it snowed on and off for two days.

July 1901

According to Dr Trewin this was probably the most extensive fall since European settlement.

Adelaide’s Advertiser from July 31, 1901 includes reports of snow from most towns in South Australia and as far away as New South Wales and southern Queensland.

It also included a poem, from which this is a mere extract:

On July’s seventh and twentieth day,

Of nineteen hundred and one,

Was seen a wonderful display,

When sank the wintery sun.

…

Each rocky ridge and wooded hill,

And valley, high and low,

Showed clear, and beautiful and still,

Beneath a shroud of snow.

…

Robert Caldwell, Valley of the Onkaparinga.

Here’s to bringing back the publication of weather-inspired poetry.

July 1951

According to Dr Trewin this system brought snow to the suburbs of Melbourne but not in the central business district.

July 1965

This event saw the most northerly snow on record. It came in two waves: the first bringing heavy snow to the Blue Mountains, the next bringing snow all the way up to the hills around Mackay in Queensland.

Yes, the tropical end of the Great Barrier Reef — Mackay.

The hills have elevations of around 1,000 metres — pretty high. But still.

July 1986

After snow on July 25, 1986, only 20 per cent of the workers of Hobart showed up — showing perhaps less conviction than those who paid their penny at Elizabeth and Collins streets in 1849.

Snow was also reported in the suburbs of Melbourne and was widespread in surrounding regions.

October 1995

Another ‘oddball’ event, especially unusual in both its timing and location.

According to Dr Trewin, it affected primarily the northern agricultural areas of South Australia, where my family was living at the time.

Sure enough, the mere mention of snow and my father revelled in the tale of cancelled cricket.

“It was a Saturday, so I was nominally going to be playing cricket at Railways Oval in Peterborough,” Dad Doyle said.

“The Willowie team only made it as far as the Morchard Hotel and rang up to say that it was snowy over there and they were quite comfortable where they were.

“And, um, we just basically, with the Clarke boys and others, just hung around for most of the day drinking the supplies that we had stocked down there for the game.”

The outback cricket game was called off because of snow, so both teams spent the day sitting around drinking beer.

The dates check out. You can’t make this stuff up.

October is late but not unheard of.

Ocean temperatures take longer to warm up than land, so October is still really late winter for the ocean, according to Dr Trewin.

“There was a particularly significant [event] actually in southern Western Australia in November 1992, which was arguably one of their two or three most significant snowfalls of the past 50 years at any time of year,” he said.

Then there was the Christmas Day snowfall in Tasmania and Victoria in 2006.

Again, according to Dr Trewin, it was about the presence of the Southern Ocean as a source of cold air.

“You actually get far more summer snowfalls to relatively low elevations in southern Australia than you would at comparable latitudes in Europe or North America,” he said.

July 2015

According to Dr Trewin, the snow in 2015 was likely to be more severe than what is forecast over the next few days.