A 19th-century meteorologist with 21st-century fears
Australia’s first celebrity meteorologist Clement Wragge has had a new book about him published, writes Fiona Scott.
Rain God, self-published in Brisbane by Ian James Frazer, examines paradoxes in Wragge’s life as an ambitious self-taught weatherman, itinerant science lecturer, ardent Theosophist and devotee of séances.
Wragge began his career with daily treks up and down Ben Nevis in the summer months of 1881 and 1882.
His conscientious observations for the Scottish Meteorological Society spurred a public appeal to build a permanent weather station on the summit, which lasted from 1883 to 1904.
Born in Staffordshire in 1852, Wragge was a 19th-century gentleman scientist with 21st-century fears.
In 1902, Australia’s Federation Drought tipped him from orthodox meteorology into speculative sunspot-watching, long-range forecasting and rainmaking rocketry.
Searching for answers, he campaigned against land clearing by ringbarking — which he believed worsened droughts. He also advocated revegetation and water conservation schemes.
Known derisively as the Rain God, he trusted both in the certainties of physics and psychics.
He believed humanity — particularly the British variety — had been endowed with intelligence and moral consciousness to achieve a perfect world.
But his life, both public and private, was messy — balanced between the tangibles of having been born British and wealthy against the intangibles of finding his true identity and purpose.
In this quest, out Holy Land,
Salt Lake City he sought Indian and gurus, built the first observatories on Britain’s and Australia’s highest peaks — Ben Nevis and Mount Kosciuszko — left a template for Australia’s first national weather service and started the now worldwide practice of naming cyclones and hurricanes, confirming an age-old fear of savage storms as capricious, entities.
Ian James Frazer, a journalist from Townsville, North Queensland, came to Fort William to run in the 2012 Ben Nevis Race but withdrew at the turn-around with mild hypothermia and a respect for Wragge’s stamina. almost human