The Long Hot Summer – A History of Heat in Australia
December 27th, 2008 by Dan HillMy offering for the Christmas season at Speechification may be a little different to that of my friends in the North, though I'm sure a few ex-pat listeners have also experienced Christmas in Australia and found the experience enjoyably surreal. Padding through a mall in shorts and flip-flops, past a queue for Santa, while 'Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow ...' plays over the tannoy. The last time in snowed in the centre of Sydney was 1836.
It's wonderfully hot over the festive season in Australia, and much of the place shuts down for a couple of months, as the peculiar circumstance of an imported European culture introduced to the local climate means that summer holidays coincides with Christmas. Most civilised. So I'm writing this from Brisbane, where I've decamped for the week from Sydney, and the overwhelming experience 'up here' is sub-tropical heat and humidity. (As I type, its still 28 degrees at 11pm and a rather well-fed cockroach just scuttled past the keyboard.) ABC Radio National broadcast a great documentary about the cultural experience of heat as part of the Australian landscape about a year ago, which I'm reposting here as my belated contribution to the Christmas week at Speechification. Hope you all have a bloody hot New Year.
ABC Radio National: Hindsight: The long hot summer - heat [mp3]
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