This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchel, calling Jeremy Zakis, my good mate in New South Wales, Sydney.

We've got a whopper of a Valerie story, and then we have a whopper of an India-Pakistan war story involving cricket.

We begin, however, with the tamest story of the week, which is the wild weather, Jeremy tells me on the

East Coast, that's the New South Wales Coast. Queensland is always another galaxy, and then we have to

update the drought. Jeremy, I remind myself each time we talk about your climate, that you're a continent.

You're not a country in a continent. You're the whole thing.

So you have to deal with the dynamic forces, continental dynamic forces,

given where you are, which is at the bottom of the ring of fire, the moving plates,

the tropics to your north, the Antarctica to your south, and the vast Indian

ocean basin to your west, and then even the more vast Pacific Ocean to your east. You're a continent.

All right. We begin with your weather in New South Wales where everybody needs to commute to work.

It's wintertime.

Is this unusual seeing wet and cold weather?

Good evening to you, Jeremy.

Gidey, John.

Yes, I can say it.

It's actually feeling very unusual out there.

And what's unusual about it is typically in May.

This is where we start to go into a full kind of weather pattern. So it's

getting cool. It's still a little bit warm during the day, but the days are generally clear.

When I say clear, beautiful pristine skies, not a lot of rain out there and certainly no frost.

Well, right now as I speak, we're not only getting very, very cold temperatures and we're getting cloudy skies and a lot of wind and rain, but we're also starting to get frost in the mornings.

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