The caption on this old Box Brownie photograph (at left) says, “Bill Gesler on his horse, Teviot Brook in flood, outside the Coulson State School, March 1937. Taken from the school house verandah.”
The photo at right is also of Bill Gesler taking his wagon along a higher point along that same road also taken in 1937.
The photographer was his son Henry.
For those new to the area, Coulson School is now the National Park Headquarters on the main Boonah-Ipswich Road, just before the turn off to Beaudesert and the Gold Coast.
My parents’ farm adjoined the school ground, south and west. Bill Gesler was our next door neighbour. His three grandchildren, our cousins, sometimes with the Alback children from Stegert Road opposite the Geslers, cut through our paddocks to walk with us to school.
Teviot floods seemed to be more common then, especially around the beginning of the school year.
My father, who also attended that school, walking in from Hoya, said that the highest flood he’d seen at the school lapped the big hoop pine that used to be in front of the school, which surely would have covered the road by tens of feet.
We could usually get to school, much to the teacher’s disappointment, if we came in through our paddock, and if the gullies weren’t too deep with frothing water. Sometimes we made a point of wading the flooded road, just for the excitement.
You can see two road marker posts just upstream from the Gesler horse.
Watching the clumps of ants, pieces of wood, cow manure, rafts of hyacinth, and the odd brown snake being carried down the muddy stream laden with topsoil from the corn paddocks cultivated right to the stream’s natural edge, we children had no inkling of the opposite weather phenomena on the other side of the Pacific, in Peru and Ecuador, that regularly contrasted with what was happening here on the Teviot.
The fishermen there harvesting the bounty from the food laden western and north-travelling currents as they had done for hundreds of years noticed that in some years the currents turned round or slowed down, the phytoplankton nurturing the fish diminished, and their nets caught fewer and fewer fish.
Some years the catch all-but ceased, or sometimes vast numbers of dead sardines, as recent as a few years ago, washed ashore.
The fishermen were familiar with an irregular change in the normal cycle of currents, rainfall, temperature and fish catches, but they were not to know that in the years and months when it was colder and wetter for them, here in Australia it was more likely to be dry and hot.
Likewise when it was flooding here, on the other side of the Pacific there would be drought, and a famine of fish.
In both areas the weather extremes of flood and drought could be separated by rainfall and temperature periods that were “average,” or “neutral.”
The South American fishermen noted that the irregular but temporary change in the weather cycle roughly every eight or nine years, more often than not occurred close to the month of December.
They called the change to the dry hot times by the Spanish name El Nino, the boy child, or sometimes, because of its close proximity to Christmas, the Christ Child.
When after a year or so the cycle in Peru turned to the opposite time of plenty and flood, it made sense for more modern weather experts to call the new cooler, wetter cycle the Girl Child, in Spanish, La Nina, the sister and counterpart to the boy, the female sibling of the Christ Child.
The Bureau of Meteorology this week declared that eastern Australia is entering the sister La Nina’s time of above average rainfall, floods, more powerful cyclones, and cooler temperatures.
Today these three weather phenomena which stretch intermittently in area and irregularly in time over the entire area of the Pacific and influence much of the world’s weather - El Nino, Average, and La Nina, are known by weather scientists by the acronym ENSO.
The letters refer to “El Nino” plus “Southern Oscillation.”
It is disappointing to know that while El Nino’s sister La Nina still exists, the lovely female weather phase La Nina is dropped from the name.
If it is any consolation so also is the name of the third weather condition that used to be there, which covered most of us – Mr Average.
Perhaps we should start a petition: “Please restore the Christ Child’s sister and the average ones among us!” The acronym for what’s happening with the weather would be ever so much more pleasant if it sounded less like something from Star Wars – ENSO, and more like the melodic ELNINO–A-LA–NINA!
But for now, we’re stuck with the scientists’ choice – ENSO.
In accordance with the scientists’ observations or the legend’s declarations, the weather pattern ENSO has three phases. The one which is around most of the time is Mr Average Weather. The two extremes of ENSO, its warm and cool phases, are El Nino and La Nina. Together all three phases affect much of the earth’s weather.
The Boy-child and the Girl-child take turns at driving the world’s weather every few years. Though they can continue for a couple of years, both phases are more typically measured only in months.
Both the Boy-child and the Girl-child affect the ocean and the atmosphere. Both phases can begin with weaker or stronger than average easterly trade winds, disrupting the atmospheric jet-streams and the temperature of the eastern Pacific ocean.
Put very simply, the Boy-child brings drought, heat, bushfire conditions, the Girl-child brings floods, lower temperatures, more intense cyclones.
Would you rather have one of the children, or Mister Average? After you have sent your Christmas list to Santa, you could send your Christmas weather requests to Mister ENSO. Tie up your dog to facilitate delivery.
