Maleny Weather

On Monday morning at 9.00am the 24 hour rainfall measured 104 mm, and once again creeks were running at full spate.

A ridge of high pressure up the east coast interacted with the southern drift of the monsoonal trough bringing in a belt of rain on to the Ranges. On Tuesday a rise of 9hPa in barometric pressure brought stable atmospheric conditions to the region and sunshine and isolated showers became the weather pattern for the remainder of the week. Total rainfall for the month to date is 341 mm. This  represents an increase over average of 11 mm.

On 1^st February 1890, Stage 2 of the North Coast Line railway from Caboolture to Mellum Creek (Landsborough) – a distance of just under 20 miles was opened. This was an important significance to settlers and loggers, and later would provide the farming community with easy access to Brisbane markets for their produce, including Maleny butter.

The men who built the railway line used picks, shovels, spades, cross-cut saws, jacks, broadaxes, winches and horse drawn ploughs. Sleepers were made of tallow wood and blackbutt. A variety of men built the railway and apart from local settlers, loggers and teamsters were the hard-drinking and hard playing notorious ‘navvies’, moving camp alongside the track as the railway progressed.. The original ‘navvies’ were the ‘navigators’ who built the English canal system and then the British railways.

Total rainfall for this month to date is 331 mm, equalling the 117 year average for the whole month.  The highest Maleny February rainfall was in 1893 with 2,733mm, the year of the Big Flood, and the lowest ever recorded was 2.5mm in the  drought year of 1926.

RUTH LAVERICK

With heavy rainfall in the early days of settlement we can only imagine what it must have been like in 1886 when the first Europeans Robert Laverick and his wife, Ruth and their children James and Lilly took over a selection in Maleny’s Baroon Pocket.   Ruth, from Central London was to spend two years before she saw another white woman, and told of how the Aborigines were frequent visitors to her bush home. Her husband, Robert, was a butcher in Cobb’s Camp (Wombye) and only walked home once a week over the Blackall Range from Wombye via the Hunchy Razorback and down, what was later to become Mill Hill Road, Montville. He would stay the night and walk back to Cobb’s Camp the next day

Possibly, Ruth encountered one of her greatest hardships when in the torrential rains of February 1893 while her husband was away working at Wombye she was trapped with her young children in their little home. All the food was gone and the vegetables were washed away. They faced starvation. Their faithful dog came to the rescue. He seemed to sense the need for food for Ruth and her children (and for himself). He left the house and not long after Ruth heard a lot of noise at the door. When she opened the door the dog chased a wallaby into the kitchen. Ruth killed the wallaby with a poker. She cooked the good eating part and the remainder she gave to the hungry dog. This food kept them going until the rain stopped.

An extensive high pressure system in the lower Tasman Sea with a ridge extending along the east coast is mainly responsible for drawing northerly maritime monsoonal rains down on to the ranges. Total rainfall for the week ending 3.00pm Sunday is 300.6 mm, with more to come.

Please go to ‘This Month’ page for more data                    *** Tank overflow

Perth Drought Broken

The Bureau of Meteorology recorded 0.2 of a millimetre of rain in Perth overnight, ending the city’s second longest dry spell in history.
Up until yesterday there had been 78 days without rain, only six days short of the record dry spell of the summer of 1974-75.
The rain comes just after Perth’s hottest January in 48 years with an average temperature of 33.5 degrees.
Perth is on track for its hottest summer ever, with the temperature since December averaging 32 degrees

The highest February rainfall ever recorded at Maleny was in 1893 with 2733 mm, or over 109 inches, well in excess of the average annual rainfall.  In three days over 1715 mm of rainfall was recorded at Mooloolah On the 3^rd the highest 24 hours rainfall in Queensland was recorded at Crohamhurst with 907 mm. It is said the Obi-Obi Creek rose to an enormous height, reaching a point in Maple Street above Coral Street, which would have been submerged.

It was during this tropical storm that Steamer SS Dicky was shipwrecked on a Caloundra beach, to be named after her. The ship sailed from Rockhampton and as it arrived to clear Caloundra Head it met lashing rain and cyclonic winds that sent the ship on her beam ends.  Captain James Beattie was force to beach the ship to avoid hitting the rocks off Moffat Beach. On 4^th February 1893 at 10.35 am the ship grounded stern first on the beach, where her ribs and keel until quite recently were a tourist attraction.

The tropical storm continued the following day when the northern half of Indooroopilly Rail Bridge was washed away and part of the Victoria Bridge, spanning the Brisbane River, collapsed

 For the first time in 117 years there were 19 consecutive rain-free days in January, breaking the previous record held in January 1939 with 15 days. The dry spell was finally broken with a thunderstorm at 6.00pm on Friday 29^th when the parched ground was moistened with 8.2mm of precipitation.  Total rainfall for January was 154.6mm, representing 132.2mm below average for Maleny.  The monsoonal belt drifted south, and ex-TC Olga moved down the Queensland Coast as a rain depression, giving some moderate falls of rain to our region. In the 24 hours to 9.00am on Monday 1^st February the MWS recorded 105.0 mm. The maximum storm rain-rate was 164.6mm/hour at 3.30pm on Saturday 30^th