By Warren Nunn
Chafed lips and knuckles that cracked and bled. That was what some of us experienced growing up in Central Queensland during the 1960s.
July 1965 was particularly frigid with light snow falling in the Springsure area and around Mackay as well.
Fast forward almost six decades and no-one would question that this has been a chillier-than-usual year.
It has been colder on the Capricorn Coast though. Our lowest temperature came on 25 July 1995 when it dropped to 0.1 degree Celsius, which is 32.18 degrees Fahrenheit.
Chilly Capricorn Coast
What the temperature range looked for Yeppoon in 1995.
Who remembers that? The graph from http://www.bom.gov.au/ shows the data.
By comparison it has not fallen below 6 degrees on the Coast this winter.
Minimum and maximum temperature don’t really tell the story of what makes us feel uncomfortable.
Most would agree that it has stayed uncomfortably cool all day for some weeks now.
It’s a challenge wading through the records to get a picture of days on which there are low maximum temperatures.
When it’s six in the morning and only gets to 14 with fewer sunlight hours, that’s when we feel the cold.
Because we are blessed with such warm weather for most of the year, these chilly days impact us more.
We are not used to it. Our houses aren’t built for cooler conditions but rather to deal with the heat.
Wintry way out west
Newspaper report from 1965.
Back in 1965, Springsure dropped to -4.4 degrees (24 Fahrenheit) leading to a light sprinkling of snow.
One grazier said it was not the first time it had snowed in the district. He’d seen it about 35 years earlier.
On the Coast that day, it was only 6.4 degrees (43F).
For we youngsters who walked to school or rode our pushbikes that winter, we well remember.
For anyone who wants to check historical weather data, the website http://www.meteorology.com.au also has comprehensive records, with graphs.
NOTE: This article was published in The Spectator News Magazine on 5 August 2022. The publication is distributed on the Capricorn Coast and in Rockhampton.
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