Interesting that 82-3 was bad but brief in Australia, 97-8 benign...and now this one is really no big deal (so far!) for many of us in the east of the continent. By contrast, the "weak" El Nino conditions of 1902-3 and 2002-3 coincided with shocking drought. (1902 remains the driest known year for Australia. Not so fiery, because nothing much left to burn in 1902 after the Federation Drought which started with the great monsoon failures of the mid-1890s.) Of course, many of our worst droughts did not have a defined connection with El Nino conditions, though the WW2 drought clearly did. The El Nino conditions of the mid-90s in my region went with a classical script of drought, high inland winds, high heat etc, while 2009 was nothing like that. Our year-from-hell for fire, heat and drought, early 1939, was part of a La Nina flanked by neutral years! Go figure. It's really refreshing (and rare) to read an article that's free of the simplistic/mechanistic assumptions about these handy climate indicators. I'll check back. Many thanks.