Totally Cooked: Episode 25 – Rescuing Australia’s lost weather records

In this episode join hosts Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Iain Strachan as they welcome historical climatologist Dr Linden Ashcroft and PhD candidate Ruchit Kulkarni, both from the University of Melbourne. This episode the panel dig through diaries, ship logs and colonial era weather stations in search of Australia’s climate before the instrumental record began. What counts as a reliable weather observation from 1830? Why does a reference period matter for understanding today’s extremes? And why is the Southern Hemisphere’s climate history so much thinner than the Northern Hemisphere’s? The episode traces how pre-Bureau of Meteorology data, from convict-era rain gauges to a lighthouse keeper’s logbook on Gabo Island are rescued, digitised and quality-checked before it can be trusted.

Deadly droughts, time-series analysis, historical data in research and the beauty of stories that stood the test of time and science. All part of this Cooked episode going back in time. So dust off the family diaries and tune in as Totally Cooked goes looking for Australia’s climate in the historical record — and asks what two centuries of old numbers can tell us about the droughts and floods still to come.

Iain records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Bunurong People of the Kulin Nation. Sarah records Totally Cooked on the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging and recognise their unique and continuing connection to the land, skies, waters, plants and animals.

Show Notes

In this episode, we look at:

• Why historical climatologists need a pre-1930s reference period to separate natural variability from the human-induced climate change signal.
• The reliability challenge: instrument placement, observer motivation, and missing metadata all affect how much trust can be placed in colonial-era records.
• Australia’s earliest written weather observations come from Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer with the First Fleet, recorded at Sydney Cove from 1788.
• Numerical rainfall records lag behind temperature and pressure data in colonial Australia, only becoming common from the 1820s.
• The 1852 Gundagai flood remains Australia’s deadliest recorded flood, with an estimated 89 deaths — around a third of the town’s population (National Museum of Australia).
• How dynamic time warping, a statistical method for comparing time series, is used to reconstruct historical rainfall trajectories and infer past weather systems from rainfall data alone.
• The Federation Drought (c.1895–1902) and how its media coverage shaped enduring Australian drought narratives — city versus country, the “Aussie battler,” and the near-total absence of Indigenous knowledge from historical reporting.
• Citizen science platforms like Zooniverse, and international parallels including the UK’s Rainfall Rescue project, which used volunteers to digitise UK rainfall records back to 1836, expanding the dataset roughly sixfold in a matter of weeks (University of Reading).
• Why Southern Hemisphere records matter disproportionately: fewer stations and shorter networks mean each rescued observation carries more statistical weight than its Northern Hemisphere equivalent.
• A look ahead to Ruchit’s PhD research on multi-year droughts under “overshoot” scenarios — where global warming temporarily exceeds the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target before (hopefully) coming back down

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This episode will be released and available to stream and download on Friday 3rd July, 2026.

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Why listen to Totally Cooked?

Because it’s time to feel empowered, not overwhelmed. Totally Cooked is a science-backed, straight-talking podcast about weather, climate change, and what it all means for life on Earth – especially here in Australia.

Hosted by climate scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick and science communicator Iain Strachan, Totally Cooked breaks down how human activity is changing the Earth’s systems—from our skies to our seas—and what we can do about it.

From greenhouse gases to fire weather, supercomputers to Antarctic ice cores, this is climate science without the jargon, and where no subject is too complex or controversial.

Totally Cooked is for anyone who wants to understand the science of climate change—without needing a PhD. Whether you’re a high school student, policy maker, journalist, teacher, concerned citizen or just a little climate-curious, this podcast will give you the tools to think clearly and act confidently.

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