Austral English / A dictionary of Australasian words, phrases and usages with those aboriginal-Australian and Maori words which have become incorporated in the language, and the commoner scientific words that have had their origin in Australasia - Edward Ellis Morris

"She passed a gang of convicts, toiling in a broiling `brickfielder.'"

1862. F. J. Jobson, `Australia with Notes by the Way,' p. 155:

"The `brickfielders' are usually followed, before the day closes, with `south-busters' [sic.]."

1886. F. Cowan, `Australia, a Charcoal Sketch':

"The Buster and Brickfielder: austral red-dust blizzard; and red-hot Simoom."

This curious inversion of meaning (the change from cold to hot) may be traced to several causes. It may arise—

(a) From the name itself. People in Melbourne and Adelaide, catching at the word brickfielder as a name for a dusty wind, and knowing nothing of the origin of the name, would readily adapt it to their own severe hot north winds, which raise clouds of dust all day, and are described accurately as being `like a blast from a furnace,' or `the breath of a brick-kiln.' Even a younger generation in Sydney, having received the word by colloquial tradition, losing its origin, and knowing nothing of the old brickfields, might apply the word to a hot blast in the same way.

(b) From the peculiar phenomenon.—A certain cyclonic change of temperature is a special feature of the Australian coastal districts. A raging hot wind from the interior desert (north wind in Melbourne and Adelaide, west wind in Sydney) will blow for two or three days, raising clouds of dust; it will be suddenly succeeded by a `Southerly Buster' from the ocean, the cloud of dust being greatest at the moment of change, and the thermometer falling sometimes forty or fifty degrees in a few minutes. The Sydney word brickfielder was assigned originally to the latter part—the dusty cold change. Later generations, losing the finer distinction, applied the word to the whole dusty phenomenon,and ultimately specialized it to denote not so much the extreme dustiness of its later period as the more disagreeable extreme heat of its earlier phase.

(c) From the apparent, though not real, confusion of terms, by those who have described it as a `sirocco.'—The word sirocco (spelt earlier schirocco, and in Spanish and other languages with the sh sound, not the s) is the Italian equivalent of the Arabic root sharaga, `it rose.' The name of the wind, sirocco, alludes in its original Arabic form to its rising, with its cloud of sand, in the desert high-lands of North Africa. True, it is defined by Skeat as `a hot wind,' but that is only a part of its definition. Its marked characteristic is that it is sand-laden, densely hazy and black, and therefore `choking,' like the brickfielder. The not unnatural assumption that writers by comparing a brickfielder with a sirocco, thereby imply that a brickfielder is a hot wind, is thus disposed of by this characteristic, and by the notes on the passages quoted. They were dwelling only on its choking dust, and its suffocating qualities,—`a miniature sirocco.' See the following quotations on this character of the sirocco:—

1841. `Penny Magazine,' Dec. 18, p. 494: