"It must be so pretty with all those dear little kangaroos flying about," says the Duchess of Berwick in Lady Windermere's Fan. Thanks to the latter-day popularity of Australian "soaps", however, we are now a little better informed about that continent.
Nonetheless, with their "tinnies" and their "dags", and a propensity for picnicking at a time of day they seem to call "this arvo", its inhabitants to a large extent still speak a language that the strangers do not know. Meteorology is not immune from these anti-podean quirks of phrase. What you or I, for example, might think of as a hurricane, or even a typhoon, the people of north-western Australia call a "willy willy". And down in the south-east, a sea breeze becomes a medico: the "Fremantle doctor" is often fresh and gusty, and brings a welcome relief to the neighbourhood of Perth on the hot anti-podean summer days of our own northern winter months.
But perhaps the most evocative phenomenon is the "southerly buster", or southerly burster as the more refined among us like to call it. The buster is a surge of cool air that moves rapidly northwards from the polar zones along Australia's south-east coast towards Sydney in the summer time.
It is accompanied by squalls and a sudden, rapid drop in temperatures, and the gale-force winds accelerate and intensify as they move inland towards the highlands of New South Wales. Sydney has about 30 southerly busters every year. The sudden onset of a buster, and the characteristic roll-cloud that accompanies it, was described graphically more than 100 years ago by an Australian meteorologist called Henry Hunt: "Afar off this cloud is sharply defined, dark on the edges with lighter shades in towards the centre. The roll is from 30 to 60 miles in length, and as it approaches, the wind which has been blowing from the north drops suddenly.
"Immediately under the roll, light clouds rush forward with great velocity only to be thrown back over the top as they reach the front; the wind vane on the Time Ball tower flies to the south, and the wind reaches us on the ground a moment later, and in a few moments is blowing with the full force of a gale."
In the early days of the Australian settlement, a southerly buster approaching Sydney was always heralded by a cloud of reddish dust that emanated from the extensive brick-fields in the city's southern suburbs. The brick-fields in that part of Sydney are no more, but the local name for the phenomenon they engendered is still occasionally heard: the brickfielder.