Close Menu
Honi Soit
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Trending
    • UTS elects new Chancellor
    • Out of the Deep: The Story of a Shark Kid Who Dared to Question Fear
    • Prima Facie: Losing faith in a system you truly believed in
    • Jason Clare seeks replacement for ANU Chancellor Julie Bishop after $790,000 expense report
    • ‘If you silence someone or shush someone, you can get out’: SISTREN is an unabashed celebration of black and trans joy. Is Australia ready?
    • Mark Gowing waxes lyrical on aesthetics, time, language, and his new exhibition ‘This one is a song’
    • NTEU wins wage theft case against Monash University
    • Turning Kindness Into Strength in ‘A Different Kind of Power’
    • About
    • Print Edition
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    • Writing Comp
    • Advertise
    • Locations
    • Contact
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok
    Honi SoitHoni Soit
    Thursday, July 10
    • News
    • Analysis
    • Culture
    • Opinion
    • University
    • Features
    • Perspective
    • Investigation
    • Reviews
    • Comedy
    • Student Journalism Conference 2025
    Honi Soit
    Home»Perspective

    Wet weather

    Sydney's rain
    By Max ShanahanMarch 28, 2021 Perspective 4 Mins Read
    Art by Claire Ollivain
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    Impecuniousness has demanded that I navigate this La Niña without the protection of an umbrella. As a result, I have developed an increasingly close acquaintance with the norms and nature of New South Wales’ rainfall — developing a farmer’s predilection for measuring millimeters and refreshing radars. Accordingly, I will recount some of my recent rainfall experiences.

    Last Week (Rain as Comfort)

    Last week, in the midst of a once-in-fifty-year rainfall event, I sat down and read fiction for the first time since the last time it rained. The downpour cleared away — at least briefly — the stagnancy of Sydney’s fetid early autumn, allowing for an early sampling of winter’s indulgences: tea, doonas, fiction.

    Performative wintering is an art well-practiced by certain Sydneysiders, and puffer jackets and designer raincoats soon were promptly whipped out of closets with an air of self-satisfaction to make their season debuts under extravagant umbrellas.

    To Sydneysiders with roofs that don’t leak, this sort of rain is mostly an ambivalence, a public transport inconvenience at worst. More a conversation starter than a cause for concern. 

    In this environment of Scandi-LARPing, of rain as a fashion opportunity, it is difficult both literally and figuratively, to gauge and understand the scale and effect of rain just beyond Sydney. My rain gauge only takes 150mm. Much of the North Coast took over 200mm on a single day. 

    A house floating down the Manning River on its owners’ wedding day seems from Surry Hills more like the makings of an apocryphal pub tale than a real personal and local tragedy. Only the news that the couple’s dog went down with the house has the effect of provoking much sympathy. 

    Cricket

    James Joyce wrote: “In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sounds of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.”

    Rain and cricket go hand in glove. For the amateur cricketer, a working proficiency in meteorology is a basic of the pastime. One quickly gains an understanding of precipitation percentages, vectors and variabilities of local wind patterns, and an intimacy with isobaric charts.

    Every year at the SCG Test it rains. Each year a different rain: fine mist, socked in soaking, southerly buster. But the patricians in the Members don’t mind — it at least reinforces their claim to be a traditional (read: English) test ground. And regardless, they spend the time pissing up in the bar, drinking out of glass schooners, gazing from the balcony at the plebs in ponchos, plastic cups in hand, rain pick, pack, pocking on the old tin roof. 

    Southerly Buster

    Heat settles in the Sydney basin on rancid summer days. Weatherboards warp and floorboards stick to bare feet. Non-air-conditioned Sydneysiders lie defeated in syrupy air on couches, in backyards, at beaches, bobbing up and down in the water. We chew up time in stagnant silence, waiting for the sound and action of the southerly buster as it blows up the coast. 

    A good buster is an event to remember.

    Two Rains

    Les Murray, Honi Soit alum and poet of the Manning River region, writes best about our rain:

    Our farms are in the patched blue overlap

    between Queensland rain and Victorian rain

    (and of two-faced droughts like a dustbowl tap).

    The southerly rain is skimmed and curled 

    off the Roaring Forties’ circuit of the world.

    It is our chased Victorian silver

    and makes wintry asphalt hurry on the spot

    or pauses to a vague speed in the air,

    whereas, lightning-brewed in a vast coral pot

    the tropical weather disgorges its lot

    in days of enveloping floodtime blast

    towering and warm as a Papuan forest,

    a rain you can sweat in, it steams in the sun

    like a hard-ridden horse, while southern rain’s absorbed 

    like a cool, fake-colloquial, drawn out lesson.

    perspective Rain

    Keep Reading

    The Music of Memory

    Turn Away Your Mirrors and Close the Doors

    What Was Your Name?

    Do you dream with your phone?

    Authenticating My Authenticity to Inauthentic Authenticators

    Red-Haired Phantasies: The So-Called Manic Pixie Dream Girl

    Just In

    UTS elects new Chancellor

    July 8, 2025

    Out of the Deep: The Story of a Shark Kid Who Dared to Question Fear

    July 8, 2025

    Prima Facie: Losing faith in a system you truly believed in

    July 8, 2025

    Jason Clare seeks replacement for ANU Chancellor Julie Bishop after $790,000 expense report

    July 7, 2025
    Editor's Picks

    Part One: The Tale of the Corporate University

    May 28, 2025

    “Thank you Conspiracy!” says Capitalism, as it survives another day

    May 21, 2025

    A meditation on God and the impossible pursuit of answers

    May 14, 2025

    We Will Be Remembered As More Than Administrative Errors

    May 7, 2025
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok

    From the mines

    • News
    • Analysis
    • Higher Education
    • Culture
    • Features
    • Investigation
    • Comedy
    • Editorials
    • Letters
    • Misc

     

    • Opinion
    • Perspective
    • Profiles
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Social
    • Sport
    • SRC Reports
    • Tech

    Admin

    • About
    • Editors
    • Send an Anonymous Tip
    • Write/Produce/Create For Us
    • Print Edition
    • Locations
    • Archive
    • Advertise in Honi Soit
    • Contact Us

    We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The University of Sydney – where we write, publish and distribute Honi Soit – is on the sovereign land of these people. As students and journalists, we recognise our complicity in the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous land. In recognition of our privilege, we vow to not only include, but to prioritise and centre the experiences of Indigenous people, and to be reflective when we fail to be a counterpoint to the racism that plagues the mainstream media.

    © 2025 Honi Soit
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms
    • Accessibility

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.