or brickduster, subs. (Australian).—A dust or sand-storm brought by cold southerly winds from sand hills, locally known in Sydney as the BRICKFIELDS: also BUSTER (or SOUTHERLY BURSTER): see quot. 1898.
1833. LT. BRETON, R.N., Excursions in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 293. It sometimes happens that a change takes place from a hot wind to a BRICKFIELDER, on which occasions the thermometer has been known to fall, within half an hour, upwards of fifty degrees!
1839. LEIGH, Reconnoitering Voyages, Travels, and Adventures in the new Colony of South Australia, 184. Whirlwinds of sand come rushing upon the traveller, half blinding and choking him,—a miniature sirocco, and decidedly cousin-german to the delightful sandy puffs so frequent at Cape Town. The inhabitants call these miseries BRICKFIELDERS, but why they do so I am unable to divine; probably because they are in their utmost vigour on a certain hill here, where bricks are made.
1844. JOHN RAE, Sydney Illustrated, 26. The BRICKFIELDER is merely a colonial name for a violent gust of wind, which, succeeding a season of great heat, rushes in to supply the vacuum, and equalises the temperature of the atmosphere.
1844. MRS. MEREDITH, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, 44. These dust winds are locally named BRICKFIELDERS, from the direction in which they come.
1845. J. O. BALFOUR, Sketch of New South Wales, 4. The greatest peculiarity in the climate is what is called by colonists a BRICKFIELDER. This wind has all the characteristics of a sirocco in miniature….
1853. Fraser’s Magazine, XLVIII., 515. What the Sydney people call a BRICKFIELDER.
1852. G. C. MUNDY, Our Antipodes, i. 84. In October 1848, as I find by my diary, I witnessed a fine instance of a nocturnal BRICKFIELDER. Awakened by the roaring of the wind I arose and looked out. It was bright moonlight, or it would have been bright but for the clouds of dust, which, impelled by a perfect hurricane, curled up from the earth, and absolutely muffled the fair face of the planet. Pulverised specimens of every kind and colour of soil within two miles of Sydney, flew past the house high over the chimney-tops in lurid whirlwinds, now white, now red. It had all the appearance of an American prairie fire—‘barring’ the fire.
1861. T. MCCOMBIE, Australian Sketches, 79. She passed a gang of convicts, toiling in a broiling BRICKFIELDER.
1862. F. J. JOBSON, Australia; with Notes by the Way, 155. The ‘BRICKFIELDERS’ are usually followed, before the day closes, with ‘southbusters.’
1863. FRANK FOWLER, The Athenæum, Feb. 21, 264, 1. The BRICKFIELDER is not the hot wind at all; it is but another name for the cold wind or southerly buster, which follows the hot breeze, and which, blowing over an extensive sweep of sandhills called the Brickfields, semi-circling Sydney, carries a thick cloud of dust (or BRICKFIELDER) across the city.
1886. F. COWAN, Australia: a Charcoal Sketch. The buster and BRICKFIELDER: austral red-dust blizzard; and red-hot simoom.
1890. LYTH, Golden South, ii., 11. A dust which covered and penetrated everything and everywhere. This is generally known as a ‘BRICKFIELDER.’
1896. Three Essays on Australian Weather, ‘On Southerly Buster,’ by H. A. Hunt, 17. In the early days of Australian settlement, when the shores of Port Jackson were occupied by a sparse population, and the region beyond was unknown wilderness and desolation, a great part of the Haymarket was occupied by the brickfields from which Brickfield Hill takes its name. When a ‘Southerly Burster’ struck the infant city, its approach was always heralded by a cloud of reddish dust from this locality, and in consequence the phenomenon gained the local name of ‘BRICKFIELDER.’ The brickfields have long since vanished, and with them the name to which they gave rise, but the wind continues to raise clouds of dust as of old under its modern name of ‘Southerly Burster.’
1898. MORRIS, Austral English, s.v. BRICKFIELDER. The brickfields lay to be south of Sydney, and when after a hot wind from the west or north-west, the wind went round to the south, it was accompanied by great clouds of dust, brought up from the brickfields. These brickfields have long been a thing of the past, surviving only in ‘Brickfield Hill,’ the hilly part of George Street, between the Cathedral and the Railway Station. The name, as denoting a cold wind, is now almost obsolete, and its meaning has been very curiously changed and extended to other colonies to denote a very hot wind.
