Three or four days of 30 degrees isn’t good enough. We’ve chosen to live in Tasmania because it’s supposed to have a climate more like the UK. “It’s just like being back in England,” they used to say. But, it’s not like that now. Maybe it’s more like the south of Spain.
It shouldn’t be like that. Antarctica, the frozen continent, is just over the horizon. We can sometimes see the Southern Lights from here and we have penguins nesting on our beaches. The Australian Antarctic Research Institute is in Hobart and its big red icebreaker is based there. We’re not the Gold Coast and we have no ambitions to ever aspire to their climate.
We first came here in 1975 and I wonder whether the climate has changed since then. I remember swimming in the Derwent River in January of that year and I have never encountered such cold water. But, eight years later, the weather was so hot I closed Sherwood School at lunch time and sent the infant children home because there was a bushfire warning. Did things really change so much in that short time or have there always been super-hot days from time to time? I suspect that is the case and, because the winters are so cold, we are more sensitive to the rare scorchers.
I suppose, in reality, there’s not that much difference in the climates between Launceston and Sydney. I wear pretty much the same clothes here as I might in NSW: polo shirts and shorts in the summer, jeans and a jumper in the winter. I have thicker jackets for those particularly cold days and scarves and gloves, but they stay in the wardrobe for most of the year. We probably have a few more colder days, and our northern neighbours have more hotter, but in the grand scheme of things we’re all pretty lucky.
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