'The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran.' So begins Albert Camus' famous 1948 novel The Plague (La Peste). Allowing for a couple of small adjustments — '2008' for '194-' and 'Adelaide' for 'Oran' — a similar chronicle might unfold for most of the month of March.
The first signs were small and too familiar to be taken as precursors of anything unusual. February had been hot and relentlessly dry, but that's not unusual in these parts. Combined with the continuing drought, the long, bright, burning days bleeding their gusty northerlies and smouldering sunsets into early March made a mockery of the crisp, leaf-turning autumns of other years. On 3 March the temperature in Adelaide rose to 35.4; on the following day, Tuesday, to 35.7 and on the Wednesday to 37.9. This bland yet faintly sinister progression was like the dead rat that Camus' Dr Bernard Rieux notices in the hallway of his apartment one ordinary morning: uncommon yet not wholly abnormal. And surely not indicative of a plague.
On the Thursday and Friday, as Adelaide Festival Writers' Week crowds — the biggest ever recorded — gamely flocked to the tents in the Pioneer Women's Garden, the huge blue overarch of the sky whitened with heat and the thermometer went through 38 and 39, just missed 40 on Saturday, but made it on Sunday and stuck there on Monday, the eighth successive day over 35 degrees.
In the city, light streaked like tracer fire off shiny cars and the air shimmered round diesel-clunking buses. Cold draughts fell out of the doorways of shops and department stores, footpaths baked, older cars boiled, supermarkets had air conditioning so low their trolley-shoving customers were threatened with cryogenic suspension. Caught in the open, raked by the fire-throated northerly, pedestrians sought even the slim shade of a lamp post while they waited for the green light.
Further north, as the weather forecasters say, our normal routine of watering the plants in the heat became converted into a Dunkirk effort to save them from extinction. Salty bore water, 26 buckets and long snaking hoses were the preoccupations of our days and the monsters of our dreams in the hot, moony nights. Lorikeets balanced on the sprinklers to drink from the flick-flick of spray while magisterial magpies, too dignified for such display, harvested the droplets on blades of grass and leaves.
As the