THE SUMMER IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1103, 9 February 1872, Page 2

THE SUMMER IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA.

A South Australian correspondent of the Lyttelton Times gives. the following description of a summer day in that colony : — " I jump out of bed and note .the green blue of the cloudless sky toned down to a coppery kind of glow about the horizon, and say to myself 'another roasting day.' The sun gets up as red in the face a3 though he had. been drinking overnight, and begins to be fierce and vicious at once. All nature shrinks before him, and everything that has life, except the snakes and lizards; seems to begin the day by wishing that it were over. Some of my friends who are not teetotallers begin the day with a bottle of porter, which, speaking from experience, is by no means a bad acquaintance to make. By nine o'clock you begin to growl, by ten to perspire uncomfortably, and by eleven the chances are that if you wear paper collars the button-holea have broken away through sheer dampness. Your clothes cling to you like another "skin, and except you are an angel (and this seems quite too warm a place for such beings),you begin to lose your temper, and wish yourself the subject of the nursery rhyme sailing "in the middle of the sea in a great bowl-dish." So you go on till noon, getting up more and more steam as it were, with the perspiration rolling down face and neck aud hands in a most un comfortable fashion, the thermometer going up all the time till on some unusually warm days it reaches 154 in the i Bun. Put your hand on a piece of iron ! and it fairly burns you, the pavements are painfully hot to the feet, the glare of . the sun almost blinds one, and unless [ every precaution is taken, sunstroke i occurs. : Nothing is cool but ice; butter . is liquid oil; as a rule everything that , ought not to run does so ; things that one . . likes to see perfectly inanimate, meat for i instance, are too lively to be pleasant; . dogs of the most pugilistic tendencies , allow other dogs to gnaw their favorite bones before their very eyes, and horses . droop their heads and allow the flies to , eat them if they like. : ■ '■: \ ■ I have never seen a dog fight or a run- ! away horse in the place. Men stagger about beneath ponderous white umbrellas, wearing white canvas boots, white silk coats, big hats like dishcovers slightly compressed at the sides, with a sort of \ lean-to run out behind to protect the neck, and are either fat and florid or lean ; and yellow. Picture to yourself a very ; broad man, with the perspiration streaming down his face, puffing. along and gasping like a big fish newly taken out of \ the water, and looking as though life were a burden to him, attired as above, and, you have middle-aged South Australia. As the .evening draws on the powerful heat of the sun, of course, departs, but the friendly night - often enough brings with it nothing but weariness, mosquitoes, and the stifling heat of a house like an oven. To sleep in anything like the orthodox fashion on bed of down or horsehair, is a matter of. impossibility. Have every window and door wide open and lie full length on the floor, and there is just a chance that sleep may make your passing acquaintance, but only a chance, and a good deal depends upon whether you bear the annoyance of being eaten alive by a variety of insect life, the names of which the imagination must supply. If I were going to emigrate again, I should make \\ a skie qua non that it should be to a country where one can sleep under a blanket all the year round. I don't see the wisdom of anticipating my possible fate in the next world by voluntarily submitting to be roasted in this. I believe that Adelaide is the hottest city in the world inhabited solely by Europeans, and the wonder is that people are as healthy as they are.. The great ■ wonder is,, that, fires are not more prevalent. ; Your hottest summer days are as nothing compared with ours, because they are tempered (with a cooling breeze ; but, after all, I suppose we mustn't complain— we get nine months of paradise to three of its antithesis.