How We Broke the Drought, Almost

AUGUST 1973

A Queensland country town turns to a rainmaking cannon.

Outside the boy scouts’ hall in Charleville, Queensland, stands a curious monument to man’s eternal hopes of controlling nature. It is a cannon of sorts, nearly three times the height of a person. With a wide muzzle tapering to a narrow base, the thing had the shape of an upside-down candlesnuffer or a forefather of the modern bazooka. The Charleville cannon has never been fired in anger, only against innocent clouds.

I f irst saw the clumsy monster some 20 years ago. The occasion: an inaugural f light to Charleville in a new flying-doctor ambulance plane. My lasting impression of that 1600- kilometres circuit of sheep and cattle runs was of arid, desolate landscapes desiccating under a relentless sun. From one f lat skyline to another, there was little but bare red soil, drying waterholes, dust rising and pastures eaten to stubble by stock.

Everywhere the main topic of conversation was rain. Or the absence of it. In western Queensland, stockmen will tell you wryly that their scanty annual rainfall, which can be as little as 13 centimetres, comes largely from storms that get lost on their way to somewhere else. Months pass without a cloud in that Madonna-blue bowl of sky. And even when clouds do eventually appear, they fail frequently to disgorge rain.

During my Charleville visit, however, rainmaking had taken a more practical turn. A specially equipped

DC-3 was based at the airport, operated by the Commonwealth Scienti f ic and Industrial Research Organisation as a flying laboratory. It was there to seed clouds, an experimental practice that had already had some success in other, more moisture-bearing regions. However, the problem around Charleville was to find the clouds.

Perhaps it was the presence of that aerial rainmaker that prompted us to act the way we did. Returning to town with the f lying doctor’s pilot one day, I ran across a young grazier I knew. “Let me show you something,” he said.

He took us down a side street past the cinema and into the fenceless backyard of a weatherboard cottage. There, among weeds and rank grass, lay that monstrous candlesnuffer of a gun. Someone had chalked on its barrel in large, irregular letters: THE RAIN MAKER STEIGER VORTEX GUN

USED AT CHARLEVILLE 1898 BY CLEMENT WRAGGE

It really was a mighty affair. The mystery was how it could be fired, for although the muzzle was 76 centimetres in diameter, there was only a small hole at the other end. We were still speculating when an old man appeared at the cottage’s back door.

“This belong to you?” I asked. “That’s right, mate. She’s the last of her kind. All the others got melted down.

The old fellow told us he remembered those guns first being f i red 50 years ago when he was a boy in short pants. He said he thought there had been six of them, though records I looked up later said there were ten.

It turned out that he was right, a lthough he had chalked the wrong date on his vortex gun – the actual year of their use had been 1902.

But they had been fired. No question of that. And by the celebrated Clement Wragge.

IT REALLY WAS A MIGHTY AFFAIR. THE MYSTERY WAS HOW IT COULD BE FIRED

A GOVERNMENT METEOROLOGIST

down in Brisbane, Wragge had been deeply concerned by the six-year drought that began in 1896 – “the grandfather of all droughts”, as old hands called it long after.

Throughout Queensland, millions of sheep and cattle perished, pastoralists went bankrupt, many stations were abandoned. So Wragge decided to borrow a technique he had seen used in northern Italy.

When v ineyards there were threatened by hailstorms, approaching clouds were blasted with giant guns designed by a German named Steiger. The blasts turned hailstones into innocuous rain.

Wragge visited Europe to invest igate rain-producing techniques. He contacted Herr Steiger for speci f icat ions, and had similar guns made in Brisbane.

After an 800-kilomet re rai l journey out west, he positioned them at strategic points around

Charleville.

They really were simple enough to fire. No ammunition was needed. All one had to do was mount them on wooden blocks, point them to the sky, pour gunpowder into a loading breech and light a fuse. The rest was a mighty blast of air.

THE OLD MAN, Bob McWha, told us there had been uproar in the town on the day of the initial firing. A market gardener’s horse bolted, and wicker baskets, fruit and vegetables scattered everywhere. Galloping wildly,

with a lurching cart behind, that poor horse ran into more explosions wherever it went.

But did they bring any rain? Not as far as he remembered, McWha said. CLEMENT WRAGGE tried again. As before, the cloud conditions were promising. The net result was that two guns blew up in the faces of their firers. “Happily without damage to all concerned,” reported the

Charleville Times. But there was no rain, either.

Subsequent explosions were of another kind. Several councillors attacked the mayor for wasting publ ic money. He had, without their consent, they claimed, voted £ 50 towards the cost of manufacturing the guns. The mayor, trying to save face, put the blame on Wragge, who apparently left the town in a huff.

There were further repercussions when Herr Steiger heard of the affair. The German wrote berating Wragge for his “foolishness” in trying to make rain with a device never designed to do so. It was one thing to turn hail into rain, quite another to conjure it out of empty air.

Soon thereafter, the guns were sold to a blacksmith’s shop, where Bob McWha worked at the time. Somehow McWha became owner of that last gun, which was fired in the Charleville centenary celebrations of 1947.

“WHAT’S WRONG with trying it out again?” I asked him.

“No, I wouldn’t come at that. Be hell to pay in town.”

We were very persuasive, however. We wanted to see how it worked and, after all, there was a drought on. Who knew that Herr Steiger’s famous gun might not have some effect this time?

McWha remained wa r y of us, but agreed to set up the gun. Together we heaved and strained, propping it into an almost vert ical posit ion. McWha produced a packet of gunpowder, and we poured some into the breech.

“What do you use for a fuse?” the flying-doctor pilot asked.

“Well, anything’ll do. A rolled-up newspaper, anything.”

I handed him my paper. My grazier friend struck a match.

By this time, several bystanders had appeared. Seeing the newspaper catch al ight, they ran for cover. It was not clear if they were

A WEIRD WHINING SOUND FOLLOWED, SOARING ALMOST VISIBLY INTO THE UPPER AIR

preparing to shelter from the rain, or if they simply remembered the last explosion. We three visitors crouched behind some buttresses shoring up the cinema walls.

McWha, our battery commander, was left alone, holding the flaming newspaper. Several times he lit the train of gunpowder, running for safety. Each time the thread of fire went out. And then at last ...

It was a tremendous bang that must have been heard far away. A weird whining sound followed, soaring almost visibly into the upper air, fading slowly like a receding jet-propelled plane. Dogs began barking up and down the street. People ran out of houses. Inexplicably, a number of boys on bicycles appeared.

But that was all – at least in Charleville. Then, an hour later, rain was reported to have fallen at Cunnamul la, 160 ki lometres away. Who knows? Perhaps Herr Steiger’s device worked after all. Update: Today only two Steiger Vortex guns remain intact. They have been restored and given pride of place in Charleville’s biggest park. A sign at the park reads Clement Wragge was “equal parts genius, eccentric and larrikin”. THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RECORDED AS AN RD TALKS PODCAST FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE. TO LISTEN, GO TO WWW.READERSDIGEST.COM. AU/PODCASTS