Clement Lindley Wragge (1852–1922) spent the 1880s and 1890s building weather science across Australasia — founding the Royal Meteorological Society of Australasia, running stations from Mount Lofty to Mount Kosciuszko, serving as Queensland’s government meteorologist — and then spent his last two decades on the lecture platform. The Public Domain Review collects 350 surviving slides from his talks, held in wooden boxes at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, labelled by lecture series and sometimes only by a single letter.

The outlines of the life are as strange as the pictures:

  • Orphaned early — his mother died in childbirth, his father from a fall — he was raised for a time by a grandmother who taught him cosmology and meteorology, then studied law at Lincoln’s Inn before an inheritance sent him through Egypt, Palestine, India, Australia, and the American West, where he met Brigham Young
  • In 1881 he helped the Scottish Meteorological Society plan a weather station on Ben Nevis, making daily ascents of Britain’s highest mountain and winning its gold medal in 1882 — the origin of his nickname, “The Weather Prophet”
  • His most famous exploit was a flop: six Steiger Vortex cannons installed at Charleville, Queensland, to break the 1902 drought by firing shockwaves at the clouds. There was a drizzle, then no rain, then two cannons exploded — and he blamed the locals for not firing the full ten minutes
  • From 1900 to 1922 he lectured under titles like “A Voyage through the Universe” (1902), “The Majesty of Creation” (1906), “The Grandeur of the Universe” (1912), and “The Endless Universe and Eternal Life” (1918–22)
  • Theosophy took over as the decades went on: radium slides marked “R” for the element he called “the radio-active spark of God,” and text plates insisting that “YOU are indestructable and have Eternal Life”

With few transcripts surviving, the slide sequences have to speak for themselves, which is exactly the pleasure of the collection. An eclipse gives way to a flock of sheep. A sunset fades into a moonscape. A hen sits on her eggs, and the next slide asks: “Who am I? Who are you?” A 1902 observer caught his delivery as weather-like — “His voice comes in gusts, and dies away in murmurs; it occasionally travels with the speed of a small tornado.”

Arthur Conan Doyle, visiting while writing The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, called him “the most remarkable personality in Auckland — dreamer, mystic, and yet very practical adviser on all matters of ocean and air.” That is the note the collection leaves: a man who thought observing the heavens was itself a form of prayer, and who built a lecture theatre in Birkenhead to prove it.