id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
hom-49	Fenby, Claire	‘Seven Lean Years, Seven Fat Years’: Climate Theory in Australia, 1820–1830	2015	14	.pdf	application/pdf	7208	253	48	Serious droughts were experienced in coastal New South Wales from 1790–1792, in 1798–1799, from 1802–1803, 1809–1815, 1824 and 1826–1829, with settlers experiencing widespread crop failures, livestock death and water shortages. 03 Fenby - Seven Lean Years History of Meteorology 7 (2015) 25 ‘Seven Lean Years, Seven Fat Years’: Climate Theory in Australia, 1820–1830 Claire Fenby claire.fenby@alumni.unimelb.edu.au Independent Scholar In the 1820s and 1830s, British settlers in Australia relied on folk theories, memories and patchy weather data to understand the past and future climate of their new settlements.1 A lengthy drought in New South Wales from 1826–1829 buoyed belief in a folk climate theory called ‘the septennial theory’ – the idea that south-eastern Australian climate was dominated by drought periods of seven years in length, followed by a seven-year period of good rainfall – and challenged the way British settlers had understood Australian weather and climate during the preceding 40 years of colonization.	cache/hom-49.pdf	txt/hom-49.txt