IT WAS only a couple of months ago, our family was enduring Tasmania’s coldest winter’s in 20 years.
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Fair dinkum, it was freezing. One day we had snow at sea level.
You may have seen the images of that day which were beamed around the world – the most famous being the surfer standing on the beach in the south of Tasmania with a blanket of snow on the sand around her feet.
Well, back then this editor was commuting each week to his new job at the Illawarra Mercury, flying out of Tasmania at sparrow’s fart for Sydney airport on a Monday morning.
That snowy day was a Monday.
Now, I knew it was cold when I went outside to jump in the car and the ice on the windscreen was three inches thick. It was so cold brass monkeys were trembling in fear.
That was at 5 am and it hadn’t started to snow at that stage at sea level on the North-West Coast of Tassie.
On arrival at the Melbourne airport bound for Sydney and the regulation check of Facebook showed the snow was indeed falling at sea level back across Bass Strait.
The mandatory phone call to wake up the far better half and the kidlets went something like this _
ME (chirpy after coffee and a crap airline muffin): Good mornin’.
WIFE (not so chirpy): *mumbles incoherently. *Kids more chirpy shouting good morning in the background.
ME: Is it snowing down there?
WIFE: What? Here?
ME: Yes, I think it’s snowing.
WIFE: Don’t be stupid. *She knows me well. I am often stupid.
ME: Yes, I’m serious. Look out the window.
WIFE (Groaning with delight as she pulls herself out of her warm bed. The sound of curtains being drawn can be heard. Initially there is silence. Then a second later): IIIIIIIT”S SNOWING. *Squeals of excitement and delight scream out the phone and draw the looks of other weary commuters sitting in the airport waiting lounge.
In the background an opportunistic then seven-year-old can he heard saying “does this mean I don’t have to go to school?’’.
Not too many weeks after that day, the Tasmanian family moved to the ‘Gong and were greeted with three days straight of plus 30 degree days.
Now we’re enduring a 40-degree day in November?
And yet across the weekend it’s meant to drop almost 20 degrees?
FYI the forecast high was 19 degrees in our old home town of Devonport for Friday.
Go home Wollongong in November. You're drunk.
