Clement Wragge -Meteorologist
Our Maleny weather records go back to 1885 partly due to the foresight of Clement Wragge. Clement Wragge was Queensland’s first government meteorologist had the foresight to set up a rain recording station at Maleny and we now have over 120 years of accurate records.
Clement Lindsay Wragge was truly an extraordinary person. He was tall, lean and restless with a mop of red hair and bounding energy. Born in England in 1852 and son of a solicitor he trained in law. His love of natural science proved too much and he ran away to sea where he learned, navigation, astronomy and meteorology.
Clement Wragge then joined the Royal Meteorological Society and was given the task of setting up a weather stations at Fort William and on top of Ben Nevis – Britain’s tallest mountain
Arriving in Australia to take up his appointment as Government Meteorologist of Queensland on 1st January 1887 it rained incessantly for several weeks resulting in him receiving his nickname of “inclement” Wragge.
Wragge’s rise to fame was that in an incredibly short space of time he had established 400 rain recording stations, including Maleny, and 100 synoptic weather stations, including Crohamhurst Observatory, near Peachester. It was here under the guidance of his pupil and assistant, Inigo Jones, the observatory was to become a world famous centre for long range forecasting using a European technique of 30 year cycles that Wragge had learned about at one of the International Meteorological Conferences he had attended in Munich and Paris and later improved upon by Inigo Jones.
Another first for Wragge was naming of tropical cyclones, using the Greek alphabet, progressing through Greek and Roman mythology and finally to names of politicians of the day, on the grounds that both were ‘national disasters’. The system of naming of cyclones lapsed for many years but was resumed by the BOM in 1963.
Wragge thought he could break droughts by firing Steiger Canons at rain bearing clouds. He set up a ring of canons around Charleville and fired them all at the same time to create a tremor in the atmosphere. The experiment was a failure. One of the Steiger canons is still place and can be seen at Charleville, Queensland.
