Opinion
Game over, Sydney. The sun may be back, but the rain has finally defeated us all
Thomas Mitchell
Culture reporterAs a general rule, I am not one to support any kind of aggressive public outburst, conscious that it shatters the unspoken social agreement that we must all Be Nice People.
This is especially true on public transport, where the stakes are higher because we’re all in such close proximity with no way to escape, and the last thing anybody wants to deal with is anti-social behaviour.
After weeks of relentless rain, the city of Sydney has finally given up hope.Credit: Michael Howard
And yet, on Wednesday this week, I could only watch in admiration as a man sprinted through the torrential rain, desperate to make it into the train carriage before the doors closed.
He slipped upon entry, falling onto a hapless commuter next to me while also knocking his glasses off his face and dropping his umbrella, which promptly exploded open, covering everyone around him in water. To his credit, he gave the only appropriate response in a situation like this, which was: “I am so over this f---ing weather.”
In seven simple words, he captured the entire mood of the train carriage, a collection of sodden and downtrodden idiots who have been traipsing in and out of the office, wondering what we’ve done to deserve this unique form of water torture.
But really, he tapped into something greater than the crisis on carriage three – a city-wide frustration that stems from the relentless downpour that has besieged Sydney for the past however many weeks.
I like to think that Sydneysiders are not that precious about the weather. We are accustomed to the odd bout of rain, and when it arrives, we also expect the usual consequences. The city becomes total chaos, buses replace trains, and everyone retreats indoors until the deluge is over.
Unfortunately, this most recent stint has pushed us all to breaking point while also breaking records. Sydney has already passed its annual rainfall average with more than four months of the year to go, marking the wettest August in the city for 27 years. Thursday was the wettest day of the year to date, with Sydney Observatory Hill recording 82mm in the 24 hours to Thursday morning, more than the entire monthly average rainfall for August in a day, according to Weatherzone.
For what it’s worth, I appreciate that writing about the weather is a bit like talking about the weather, a topic Oscar Wilde famously described as “the last refuge of the unimaginative”.
That’s all well and good for Oscar, but if he’d been alive to witness Warragamba Dam at 98 per cent of its more than 2000 gigalitre capacity, then perhaps he wouldn’t be so quick to judge.
Braving the rain: What else can you do?Credit: Sam Mooy
You see, for me, the issue isn’t talking about the current weather (a logical response to something all-consuming), rather it’s that we’ve bypassed complaining and arrived at dejected acceptance.
For the first time in a long time, there appears to be a resignation that this is what our lives look like now. No one seems to feel this harder than my two-year-old son, Archie, a child for whom the rain is usually cause for celebration. For the first couple of weeks, he was overjoyed, stomping around in gumboots, singing Rain Rain Go Away at the top of his lungs.
But then the rain rain didn’t go away and the novelty wore off. This morning, I spied him staring out of the window, hands behind his back, watching the rain while slowly whispering (not even singing!) the words to Rain Rain Go Away. A terrifying spoken word performance by a depressed toddler.
I knew things were truly worrying when my father-in-law – a climate sceptic who cites any extended wet period as proof that global warming is “mostly hot air, haha!” – couldn’t even muster up the enthusiasm to get excited.
The other day, he gave me a ride home from the railway station, which is usually when he’d take the opportunity to remind me that in 2007, Professor Tim Flannery, who became Australia’s chief climate commissioner, predicted Australia’s East Coast dams would never fill again. Instead, we just sat in silence, listening to that ever-present soundtrack to our lives: the rain.
Inevitably, the clouds will part, and the sun will come out once more (knowing my luck, it’s probably unseasonably warm and dry as you read this), but at the time of writing, the torrent continues. Behind me, I hear the faint whisper of a child’s voice, “Rain, rain go away … I am so over this f---ing weather.”
Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at thomas.mitchell@smh.com.au or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.