Early Days in the Bureau (continued)

I have a clear memory of Davy Mares proudly explaining to me the significance of the 'kidney-shaped high', represented by a framed chart of a mean sea level pressure distribution which hung on the wall of his office. It depicted one anticyclone centred over the Great Australian Bight and the other over the Tasman Sea. He assured me this was the precursor of severe floods over south-eastern Australia. More than 50 years later this still remains a useful forecasting clue.

Although Davy and many other meteorologists in the 1930s relied heavily on the analogue method of forecasting, some, such as Hunt, Taylor, Quayle, Barkley and Kidson, were wanting to know more about mechanisms in the atmosphere. In particular they were convinced that processes in higher levels of the atmosphere were likely to be significant.

I remember B. W. (Barney) Newman and Messrs Ainsworth and Steele in the Sydney office when I joined the staff. Barney was a short, friendly, likeable man of slim build who gave me what instruction in meteorology his other duties permitted. Barney's father had been captain of one of the steamboats operating on the Murray River. George Ainsworth had been a private secretary to William Morris (Billy) Hughes when the latter had been Prime Minister. George had also served as Officer-in-Charge at Macquarie Island when the Bureau operated a meteorological station in those remote sub-Antarctic latitudes in 1916. As Chief Clerk, Mr Steele was a dignified if somewhat sombre and remote man.

Bureau of Meteorology