Climate History document tagging project

What researchers need:

• National Library of Australia (NLA) text correction volunteers who are interested in exploring early documents, such as newspapers, about Australia’s climate history.
• Keywords about extreme weather events to be ‘tagged’ in these articles via the NLA Trove database, accessible either at the library, or online from home. There is a Guide to text correcting here.

how Volunteers can help:

• Examine publications from South Australia between 1840-1860, and from Western Australia between 1875-1900.
• Tag any articles covering significant weather events and people who took weather observations, according to the keywords:

–

climate	drought relief	heavy rain	high seas	evaporation
weather	blazing sun	frost	swells	meteorology
temperature	cattle in distress	flood	violent storm	Charles Todd
thermometer	losses of stock	hail	gale	Clement Wragge
barometer	starving stock	cyclone	squall	George Strickland Kingston
observatories	dry period	hurricane	frost	William Wyatt
fire	shortage of water	tornado	sleet	Robert Harrison
bushfire	poor harvest	snow	icebergs	Charles Sturt
drought	loss of maize	blizzard	thunder	Edward Charles Frome
failed crops	hot wind	thunder storm	lake level	George Ormsby
dust storm	excessive heat	cold weather	river level	Colonel William Light
hot wind	praying for rain	landslide	flood	Colonel Robert Torrens
heatwave	Days of Humiliation	thirst	fog	Captain Finniss
abundant harvest	failed crops	deluge	rain	George Stevenson
dry wells	sunstroke	caterpillar plague	Murray River	Sir Arthur Henry Freeling
heat	plague	locust plague	Torrens River	Captain James Stirling
arid	dry ground	lightening	Swan River	Thomas Peel

–

What we’re trying to find out

We want to know more about significant weather events recorded in our early documents – such as newspapers, maps, photos, weather diaries, personal diaries, letters and more – and how fledgling settlements coped with these extremes, eg:

• How did extreme weather such as drought and floods affect early settlements in Australia?
• What were settlers’ experiences of extreme weather such as storms and heatwaves?
• How did weather extremes impact on stock and crops at the time?

How you can help our project:

• Your work will enable our research team and other volunteers to access a feed of documentary accounts of weather events during early European settlement.
• Researchers will combine these accounts with early weather station data and information from palaeoclimate records (eg. tree rings, coral and cave formations).
• This information will help us reconstruct South-eastern Australia’s climate history, so we can establish how current changes can be viewed in the context of long-term natural variability.
• This climate history tagging project will complement the excellent work of the NLA’s Trove text correction volunteers and will showcase the historical collection and its importance to our understanding of climate history.

Further information

If volunteers have any queries, or would like to provide voluntary library research assistance to the project in other areas, they can direct questions to the project team.