Qualla: Crohamhurst Observatory

Crohamhurst Observatory: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. On 3 February 1893, more rain fell on this hilltop than on any other place in Australia on any single day before or since: 907 millimetres, nearly a metre of water in twenty-four hours. The young man who measured it was Inigo Owen Jones, and that deluge seems to have set the course of his life. Four decades later he built a small timber observatory here on his property at Crohamhurst, in the green ranges behind the Sunshine Coast, and from this unassuming hilltop he tried to do what no meteorologist could reliably do then and few claim to do now: forecast the weather years in advance.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Crohamhurst Observatory: The Boy Wragge Recruited

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Jones came to weather young. The Queensland government meteorologist Clement Wragge, himself a famously colourful figure, was so struck by the schoolboy's ability that he took him on as an assistant in 1888, when Jones was still a teenager. From that apprenticeship grew a lifelon...

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Image: Public domain

Crohamhurst Observatory: Reading the Planets for Rain

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage branch staff, CC BY 3.0. Jones's method was as ambitious as it was unorthodox. He studied the cycles of sunspots and came to believe their irregularities were governed by the gravitational tug of the outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, as they swung through their long orbits. From these ...

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Image: Heritage branch staff | CC BY 3.0

Crohamhurst Observatory: The Observatory on the Hill

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kerry Raymond, CC BY 4.0. The observatory itself, built in 1935 with financial backing from the Colonial Sugar Refining Company and others, reflects the faith people placed in his work. It is a modest single-storey timber building, set on low stumps atop a dome-shaped hill on open lawn, encircled by matur...

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Image: Kerry Raymond | CC BY 4.0

Crohamhurst Observatory: A Monument to Wanting to Know

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kerry Raymond, CC BY 4.0. When Crohamhurst Observatory joined the Queensland Heritage Register in 2008, the listing made a telling point: the place embodies a nineteenth-century conviction that through science and patient study humans could solve any problem, even outsmart the weather. It is the only know...

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Image: Kerry Raymond | CC BY 4.0