My name is Inigo Jones. Prepare for rain.

0:00ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Australia is hurtling into a new political era and the Victorian election will be where the change happens. I'm Raf Epstein and every Friday I'm taking over the Politics Now podcast to explore the forces changing Australian politics. Can one nation turn its popular support into political power? Are voters sick of the Labor Party? And can the Liberal Party finally win in Victoria? Search Politics Now podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabakal and Gadigal people. G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is If You're Listening. In our latest episode about the Super El Nino of 1982-83, I mentioned a guy named Inigo Jones.

0:58In the middle of the 20th century, he ran a long-range weather prediction service, which was very popular among Queensland farmers. They would pay for his predictions and prepare for drought accordingly. But his methods were very strange by modern standards. To me, they seem to have more in common with a newspaper horoscope than the kind of stuff that the Bureau of Meteorology does. So who is this drought shaman? And did he actually think that the movements of the planets could predict the weather? Producer Jess O'Callaghan is here. She has been reading all about Inigo Jones. Hi, Jess. Hi. Hi. First, Inigo Jones. Amazing name. Really good name. I thought immediately when I learned his name, the Princess Bride,

1:57my name is Inigo Jones. Saturn is in retrograde. Prepare for rain. My name is Inigo Jones. A hot summer is coming. Your sheep must die. It's so easy. It's so good My name is Inigo Jones. A hot summer is coming. Your sheep must die. It's so easy. It's so good. He has an amazing name. So he's born in 1872 in Surrey in southwest London. His dad is a civil engineer. And yeah, he's actually named after his ancestor, who is a famous British architect who was alive in the 1500s. He's the intellectual descendant of this guy who's credited with introducing classical architecture from Rome and Italy to Europe. That's sort of how his family thinks of him and how he thinks of himself. And then they wind up in Kangaroo Point in Brisbane.

2:39How did they end up in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane? So they migrate when he's two, but young Inigo, very cluey, very smart, young descendant of philosopher scientists, you know? And so this is why I'm telling you this is because when I'm telling you this story, it seems like crack potty to us. Think about those scientists and farmers at the conference in the El Nino episode, right? Where they have no idea what's coming. Like we've always lived in a time where we get these warnings about, oh, it's going to be a bad fire. Like you and I have never lived in a world where we're not getting those warnings, where we're not like, oh, let's do more burn-offs this year because it's going to get bad. That's the context I want you to have in mind when we're,

3:18it's easy to go, oh, they're crackpots, oh, it's weird. But like, that's how they see themselves as these sort of like philosopher scientists, even though they are in eventually rural Queensland. Absolutely. Okay. So when he's 15, smart little Inigo Jones, he's noticed by the Queensland government meteorologist Clement Lindley Ragg. W-R-A-G-G-E, by the way, not Ragg, R-A-G. W-R-A-G-G-E, who says, don't go to uni in Sydney. Stay here. Stick with me. And I will teach you everything I know about meteorology. You're going to be a meteorologist. So he does that in trains under Clement Rag. Have you ever come across Clement Rag? No, I've never come across Clement Rag. Clement Rag is amazing. You're going to love Clement Rag.

3:59So a lot of this weird business about planets and sunspots and all of this starts with Rag. Okay. So he was a meteorologist around the time of Federation. That's sort of when he gets really famous. He's another one of these guys who sees himself as a descendant of sort of Galileo. This guy is, he gets a reputation because he is a real jerk. He has a very short temper. He has very big ideas about himself. They start calling him inclement rag because of his name and also because he predicts the rain and also because he's just a jerk. He's such a jerk. So he's really good at like what on LinkedIn now would be called job crafting where you like have a job and then you do whatever you can to make sure that it turns

4:42into the job that you actually want. I have absolutely no idea what that's like, Jess. I definitely didn't have a certain job. And then now I just read weird facts in my basement for work. Yeah. If Rag was reading the headlines on the radio at breakfast hours, Rag would definitely think, I'm going to start a podcast about the things that I really want to talk about, for sure. So he gets this sort of like little job in the post and telegraph department. He quickly starts calling his bureau in Brisbane, the Chief Weather Bureau, comma Brisbane. Can you think about why that might be pissing people off at the turn of the century? Brisbane was quite a small city, particularly in comparison to Sydney and

5:25Melbourne. Around about the time of Federation, everybody was pretty keen on being very definitional about where the centre of various things were. Yeah, they're not happy. If you're the head meteorologist in Sydney or Adelaide, this guy sucks. He sucks so much. And he found a private organisation of meteorologists, but he calls it the Meteorological Society of Australasia. I really respect this in a person. You can actually just go out there and say we're the national whatever. National or central or Australian or Australasian, they're not protected terms. If there isn't already a National Dance Academy, you can just call yourself the National Dance Academy, you can just call yourself the National Dance Academy, even if you are in Condobolin, you can just do that.

6:09He did. And there was nothing that any of the others could do to stop him. So he spent some time in South Australia. And so he really had an enemy in this guy, Sir Charles Todd, who kind of has his job in Adelaide. He would have often in the paper for each city there would be sort of a rival forecast from RAG next to there. Oh, so you're reading the Adelaide Advertiser and it's like this is what the government says and then Clement RAG says that it's totally going to be different. Yeah, this guy Todd does not like RAG and he records these forecasts and outcomes from both of their columns for 12 years. About who would be more accurate about Adelaide's weather. Yeah. And then the eve of his retirement after those 12 years, he writes these figures speak for

6:54themselves. He puts a table in the paper showing the forecasts and marking right, partially or wholly wrong, and then announces that he's been correct 83% of the time and inclement rag has only been right 62% of the time. And that's still not bad considering he was in Brisbane. Better than a coin flip. Better than a coin flip, which not all of the predictions to come are better than a coin flip. So yeah, there's one more story that gets told about rag's temper that I need to tell you. This is why I'm so fond of RAG. You know how we name tropical cyclones? Yes. He is the guy who first named tropical cyclones. He is why they get their names. So, you know, other disasters don't get named. No, earthquakes don't get named. No.

7:37Earthquakes don't, bushfires don't, they don't get named. And it's actually such a useful thing. So, there's a real push at the moment in disaster fields for heat waves to get named, because we don't remember bad heat waves. We're just like, oh yeah, it was really hot that year, but like a bunch of people died from a heat wave that year. We just don't, it doesn't stick in our head, the bad heat waves. I should say that bushfires do have names. They're just really badly selected because what they're named based on is where they were first reported from. Yes. If you've got like a little fire that starts on a sheep station, based on is where they were first reported from. If you've got like a little fire that starts on a sheep station, you know, Billy's Flat Fire, and then the Billy's Flat Fire might burn the entire Blue Mountains down.

8:17Yes. And, you know, start to burn into the western suburbs of Sydney, hundreds of kilometres from where it started, but it's still the Billy's Flat Fire. Yeah, this is why I started naming the cyclones. It was the exact same problem that you're describing but on like a cyclone scale, right? Yeah, right. He starts giving them quote-unquote soft, pretty Tahitian names. Oh, I thought you were going to say he was going to name them after his personal enemies. And then he starts to name them after his enemies. But mostly politicians that he hated. There was in 1902, there was a series of cyclones named Drake, Barton and Deakin. The most dominant political figures at the time. Yep. They say that he hated a local member in Brisbane and he named cyclones after his name and electorate.

9:01And, you know, there's all of this folklore around all the people he hated. But he named so, so many cyclones that it's impossible to tell who he hated and who he was just paying homage to today. I think we should just let people do that. Just the meteorologists just keep naming it after people that they hate. I think that would be fun. It would be way more fun. That would get people into meteorology. This should be an argument with the heatwave naming. Yes. You will name heatwaves and the way to sell it is you get to name them after anyone you want, anyone you hate. So 15-year-old Inigo is RAG's apprentice for the next five years and it's around this time that RAG's ideas on long-range weather forecasting start to develop

9:40as well and get a bit woo-woo where we're going. He goes to a meteorology conference in Germany in 1891 and he's introduced to the work of a European researcher called Bruckner who says that planets have effect on the climate. And Inigo Jones has his own ideas separately to rag about sunspots and how they affect the weather. So he starts to pull all these threads together to get what becomes this like weird tradition of Queensland weather prediction, which continues all the way up to the year 2000. So he really sees himself encouraged by Rag, I'm sure, as part of this like long lineage of guys doing this thing. You know, they have their weather instruments at his home in Kangaroo Point in Brisbane, but they also have

10:24their telescopes and they're looking up to the heavens and they're trying to decide what's going on. Exactly. What is it about the movement of the gas giants that is affecting the weather in Queensland? So there's five cycles, predictable cycles. There's Bruckner, that's three orbits of Jupiter, 35.586 years. There's Saturnian, which is two orbits of Saturn or five of Jupiter. That's the conversion ratio. There's the main cycle. That's 71.1 years, six orbits of Jupiter. Yep. There's Uranian. That's 84 years or one orbit of Uranus. Yep. And there's the grand cycle. There's 164.7 years. That's one orbit of Neptune. When you really boil it down, what he was doing was keeping a ledger. He would look up what the

11:13weather did 35, 59, 71, 84, and 165 years ago. He would chart those old seasons side by side. And the records are really patchy, right, because of colonisation. There are certainly no, you know, readable weather records for Queensland until a reasonable distance into the 19th century. If you're sitting in the 1940s, I'm sorry, but you can't look at what the weather was like in the 1760s in Queensland. Basically, if all periods indicate rain, that's the forecast. Oh, you've got five out of five indicators. All the cycles say rain, so it's going to rain, that's the forecast. Oh, you got five out of five indicators. All the cycles say rain, so it's going to rain. It's going to rain. That's such a terrible way to predict things, but yep, all right. And importantly, when he misses,

11:53he doesn't think of it as the method being wrong. He just thinks it was correlated with the wrong cycle. An example I found online is the flood of 1870. He thinks it will repeat in 1941. And when he doesn't, he's like, oh, it must have been on the Uranian cycle instead, one orbit of Uranus. So he rebooks it for 1954 on the 84-year cycle. He's like, oh, wrong one. So he's never wrong. He's just not – it's just a misread of the cycle. Oh, yeah. So when he's 20, he moves to his family's farm up in the Glasshouse Mountains. So his apprenticeship with RAG is up. Farm is at a place called Chromehurst. So he's farmhanding on his dad's farm, but he's also diligently recording rainfall and he's taking weather observations from the farm and collecting the weather and he's using

12:37it on his dad's farm. And then in 1923, he predicts that the drought will break based on the Bruckner cycle, that shortest cycle. That's Jupiter. That's three orbits. Okay. Specifically three orbits of Jupiter. The first orbit, that does nothing. The second orbit, absolutely nothing at all. It's only the third time. That's when the magnetic field affects the rain. So he tells the Council of Agriculture and he tells the media and this forecast is published widely and then it's borne out, the drought breaks. So all the farmers who bet on that in some way, make decisions based on his prediction, think he's brilliant. They just think he's a genius. They all say to him, please, like, come do this for us all the time. Stop being

13:15a farmhand and devote yourself to predicting the weather. So he researches these cycles, records the weather. He moves to Brisbane for like five years to sort of drum up, support organised building and observatory at his family farm in Chromehurst. The farmers, they love him. They start giving him money for his predictions. He builds his observatory. Why does he need an observatory? The sunspots. Because if your prediction is off, if every one of those five years has a different type of weather in your location, you got to check the sunspots. And the farmers, they start to campaign for official recognition of his methods. So much that in 1954, the federal minister for the interior establishes

13:57a committee to investigate his activities and claims. And it finds that Jones's forecast had only a 50% chance of being correct. The federal government. He has columns in papers all around the country. There's people paying him for this stuff all over because it works anywhere, right? Yeah. That method. Yeah. You don't even need to know whether it rained yesterday. You only need to know whether it rained three orbits of Jupiter ago. And this is where I'm torn. He kind of knows all this and doesn't care. So there's this paper he writes in 1944 where he's kind of saying, here is my method. It's the best I've got. It's been useful for me. Here's how I predict things. It's a scientific inquiry, but I am torn because he is selling all this stuff to farmers. If it's

14:35scientific inquiry, but then you're earning money off it. Anyway, same year as that inquiry dies, 1954, but his work is carried on by his assistant Lennox Walker. And Walker is the guy who's doing this forecasting at a very interesting time for us personally, because it's after the ABC gets good at archiving things, but before the Bureau is really serious about seasonal forecasting. So those sort of 30 years between the 50s and the 80s, Lennox Walker actually gets quite a few runs on the board. Quite a number of interviews on the ABC. Okay. We've produced a lot of radio. Imagine it's the 1970s. You have this guy's number in your little book of people you can call up at a moment's notice. When are you getting him on without fail every year?

15:21I don't know when. The week before Christmas. Oh, I see. Of course. Yes, you need to know whether it's going to be sunny at Christmas. Yes. Everyone's gone on holiday. You need someone to chat to. Oh, the worst time of the year to make radio. Yeah, you can definitely call that guy. Yeah. Hilary Roots talked to the long-range weather forecaster Lennox Walker. At the present juncture, I'd say that storm rains are indicated between the 21st and 24th. And over the Christmas period, it should be overcast and unsettled with further rain on the 31st of December. The one that cracks me up is when they call him on Christmas Eve. Because I'm like, you could just use the real weather guy. Like, was the real weather guy on holiday?

16:02Yes, yes. The real guy. Like, once you're within a couple of days. Like, guy. Like once you're within like a couple of days, like I know they couldn't predict more than a couple of days in advance, but Christmas Eve and you're asking Lennox Walker what's the weather like tomorrow, like why? Why isn't someone saying just call the Bureau? Yeah, they love that. Oh, I don't know. I'll just check the planets. Just let me check the sunspots. All right, just one second. What was Neptune up to 164 years ago? Rainy, rainy tomorrow. You better move Christmas lunch inside. I mean, it made good radio. It made really good radio. He takes over after Jones dies and he makes a name for himself really soon after

16:36because he predicts there'll be fine weather for the Melbourne Olympics. So that's two years after 1956. The rain stops before the opening ceremony, which he predicted would happen, points for the sunspots. But now it is really a business. So there's none of these donations to run the observatory. It's like a full business. So first of all, I just want you to watch and describe the mise-en-scene. What can we see? This is determined by the planetary revolutions around the sun. There's purely an elementary matter. Look up your almanac and say, righto, where are the various planets in relation to these points? He's a very sharp dresser. I mean, he's dressed very much in sort of 50s and 60s Queensland attire.

17:17He's in a sharp shirt and attire, but no jacket, of course, because it's Queensland. He has got brill-creamed hair and he's sitting on the most chintzy 1960s plush, plush, plush, plush, plush couch that you've ever seen with multicoloured cushions in the background. It is so 60s and 70s. It's like you can feel the sort of velvety velour of that couch like sticking to you. And I can see smoke coming up from the ashtray as well. That's great. Fantastic. This interview seems to go for like at least an hour and the whole time all three of them are just puffing on their cigarettes the whole time. Over to a different guy and he's smoking. Yeah, wow. The hosts, the guests, Lennox, like they're all just puffing away.

18:04I think they're having beer as well. I think you're right. Science has given us a lot of innovation in weather prediction since the 1970s, but they've also given us a lot. A lot of censorship. We're just not allowed to do anything anymore. I was going to say health. Health's also come a long way. Oh, yeah, I suppose, yeah. But, yeah, we're also just not allowed to make fun TV. Go to a guy's house in Queensland, have a couple of beers with him and ask him about the weather. Yeah. So what Lennox does, which is maybe this is developed a little bit from Inigo's time, but he gives us a really good idea of who is buying his predictions by 1974. I'm completely dependent for my living, my livelihood, on the degree of accuracy of my

18:43forecasts. As you know, probably, I service every major business organisation in Australia of any note, possibly a lot of brides, holiday makers, clubs, racing clubs. I don't think there's any, probably none, that I know of, construction organisation of any note in Australia that's occurred in the last 20 years anyway, that I haven't serviced and handled, starting with the Snowy Mountains scheme and going through Mooney Pipeline. Oh, no. I think I've handled this over the years. That's killed me a little bit inside. I know. He's like, yeah, every major business organisation. Every bride is calling up this guy in Queensland and being like, is it going to rain on my wedding in Geelong? Oh, my goodness.

19:22And apparently he's just ad hoc charging them whatever. He's like, oh, yeah, bride, the big, I don't know for sure, but it'd be a couple of dollars. And then it's like, what about the big organisations? Oh, no, that would be a lot more. Unless he did the whole wedding markup thing, you know. This is what I thought. I thought because you're not meant to tell them that for a wedding if you want the cheaper price. This guy's doing the opposite. I'm like, I'm from the snowy mountain ski and I'm calling up and I'm like, hello, I've got a wedding for the next 15 years in the snowy mountains. What's your best rate? Discount for cash? Yeah. He also has what sounds to our ears now, and I think to the host at the time, a truly nonsense explanation of how the weather works.

20:03But before I play it, I want you to remember the context. We don't know about El Nino. Lots of weather patterns are a mystery to us. Here's his explanation for how he does the predictions. Look up your almanac and say, righto, where are the various planets in relation to these points in the sun? And the particular point is the 18th hour of bright ascension, which sounds terribly scientific, which means the point exactly in front of the sun. So if you're utilising a cycle based on Jupiter, which shall we say is in front of the sun at the moment, that'll be a 35 and a half year cycle, or a 71 year cycle if you have two of them. Now what we do, we must also find out how our sunspot activity is in relation to that year,

20:44that we're saying 35 years ago, and this year. If the sunspot activity is in relation to that year, that we're saying 35 years ago, and this year. If the sunspot activity is reasonably the same, well, the forecasts will be reasonably the same. No, they won't. But if your sunspot activity, shall I say, in that year was less and is higher in this year, you would have to intensify your forecast. For example, if Brisbane had... It's just fascinating watching this guy who has no idea what he's talking about speak in a, well, it's quite simple. This is how it all works. I mean, it's so interesting. I mean, it's something obviously that still happens so much. People just confidently saying something that they probably believe to be true. I mean, I can't tell just by watching him how much he really believes what he's saying here.

21:31I can't tell either if he really believes it or not. And I think by the time they do start to make these discoveries like El Nino and other things, I think he starts to incorporate some of that. Like he keeps going until 2000. Like he keeps this up for a really long time. And there are still some who are using those methods today and really believe in them, the planets and the sunspots. You can find online different businesses still selling that. And I think the thing is these farmers are just desperate for it. They just want to know. Of course. The weather is so unpredictable. They just want to know. And it's so annoying, the idea that you can't do anything about it, the idea that there's something that is unpredictable

22:07and you literally can't do anything would be so frustrating. And even if you just kind of go, oh, yeah, well, Lennox Walker, he's almost never right, but you'd almost rather just have it so that you can just look at it because you've got something. Yeah, you've got something. And, I mean, as long as you're not paying too much money for it, maybe it's nice to have something to base your decisions around. Yeah, as long as you've called up with the bride voice and got the discount. Yeah. I'm having my wedding 246 kilometres northwest of Charleville. What a story. Fascinating. Thank you very much, Jess. Thank you. on thursday we are diving into the bond market and i promise it's not boring even though everybody

22:54often says it is the u.s government owes the rest of the world trillions of dollars and somehow that's the thing holding the entire global economy together. Your mortgage, your super, the price of your groceries, they're all tied in some way to US government debt. It's a very, very strange story, and it's one that affects all of us. And that's coming up on Thursday.