A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
brickfielder
In Australia, a hot dry wind out of the interior that runs ahead of an approaching front, lifting red dust and driving coastal temperatures up fifteen or twenty degrees in a matter of hours. It is followed, usually the same evening, by the southerly buster off the sea, which drops the temperature almost as fast as the brickfielder raised it.
Etymology
From Brickfield Hill in Sydney, a rise near the present Haymarket where the colony’s brickworks stood. The name is a good example of a word that turned around completely. Originally it did not mean the hot wind at all: It meant the cold southerly change, which came in across the bare grassless slope of the brickfields and arrived in the young city as a wall of reddish dust. A correspondent in 1863 was still complaining that people had it backwards. They had it backwards anyway — later generations lost the connection to the brickfields, heard the name as a description of furnace heat, and applied it to the hot north wind instead.
Notes
The term spread out of Sydney to Melbourne by around 1850 and on to central and Western Australia.