To improve our understanding of long-term climate variability, past extreme weather events, and the rate of modern climate change, we need more 19th century weather observations for Australia. Not only will more observations help Australian climate studies, it will also improve the representation of Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation in global climate models.

Most efforts to recover historical weather observations for Australia so far have focussed on the east coast, as this is the region first invaded by the British. This eastern focus has left the climate record of Western Australia lamentably short, despite the fact that Perth was founded in 1829. 

In this preliminary study, we describe the recovery and quality assessment of a new dataset for Perth spanning 1830 to 1875. The data come from 16 handwritten volumes, and provide temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind observations at least three times a day, along with weather descriptions. We present our initial homogeneity assessment and give some examples of previously unexplored 19th century extreme weather events. Given that official observations begin in Perth in 1876, we also examine the possibility of developing a near-continuous climate record for the city from its foundation to the present day. We believe this dataset has the potential to shed much-needed light on 19th century climate variability on Australia's west coast.