A train loaded with skeletons arrived at the Bendigo Railway station 121 years ago in a grim demonstration of a drought's toll.
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It is just one of the hundreds of stories researchers scoured for a newly published research paper delving into media coverage to show how people experience droughts.
The skeletons were not human but did vividly illustrate the extreme suffering to the city's north during the Federation Drought, a cataclysmic dry spell stretching from 1895 to 1903.
A team of La Trobe and University of Melbourne researchers say that period still shapes media coverage of droughts today.
Lawrie Zion is among those who pored over articles from the Bendigo Advertiser and the now defunct Bendigo Independent for the project, newly published in academic journal Media History.
"Reactions to drought over time are under-researched," he said.
The Bendigo newspaper research is giving important historical insights to a broader research project called Parched, which is exploring how Australians in different communities have dealt with drought, Dr Zion said.
The skeletons bound for Bendigo
The skeletons on the train, "some whole and others disjointed", were on their way to Bendigo's bone mills from the Kerang area, the Independent reported.
"Though minus skin and flesh their frames indicated they had been at one time very valuable butcher's meat. The sight was a depressing one," it told readers.
Both the Independent and the Advertiser were clearly prompting readers' emotional responses, "teamed with reminders of the economic and food loss", the researchers have concluded.
Local newspapers had covered a number of droughts since Bendigo's 1850s establishment but the Federation Drought was when reports started covering themes recognisable to modern readers, he said.
"This particular period through the 1880s through to the 1910s was really formative because you could provide high quality information through the trains and the telegraph," Dr Zion said.
"Newspapers changed over this time and you get a real focus on weather stories, especially during the Federation Drought, on the long term climate by people who fashioned themselves as having insight."
There was also a pressing nation-building reason to discuss lessons from the drought.
Australia was trying to entice settlers into new areas of the country to feed its population, kickstart a new national character and (because this was the racist-era that birthed the White Australia policy) help maintain racial "purity".
"The drought prompted people to really question this notion sold to British migrants, in particular, of these places having reliable rainfall," Dr Zion said.
The dust storm from hell
Not everything about drought coverage in that period aligned with what might appear in a modern-day edition of the Advertiser.
Journalists were unaware of climate change and El Nino, for example.
"But just because weather forecasting was not as sophisticated as it is now, that does not mean people did not want to know and speculate a lot about climate patterns," Dr Zion said.
Articles in the Advertiser and Independent proliferated on themes ranging from the suffering of settlers, plight of animals dying of thirst, high food prices and charity drives, researchers found.
By the state election year of 1902 the drought was incredibly intense and newspapers had become the battleground for water policy battles and community campaigns, Dr Zion said.
It was also the place to record weather events of such intensity they seemed apocalyptic, like the suffocating dust storm that swept into Bendigo over nearly an entire day in November, 1902, making life unbearable for people no matter where they hid.
"It swept on, a solid, thick, blinding dust, which so obscured the sky it grew almost dark," the Advertiser reported a day later.
"It was impossible to see through the great mass, and people rushed hurriedly to any shelter convenient.
"The fact that little rain fell greatly aggravates the effects of the drought ... The country is therefore faced with a more serious difficulty than ever, and it is hard to say what the result will be unless rain falls shortly."
Then, just like a modern day news article, the Advertiser turned to that day's weather forecast.
The research paper "'The Long, Continued Dry': Themes of the Federation Drought in Australian Regional Newspapers" by Karen Twigg, Lawrie Zion and Linden Ashcroft appears in Media History.
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Tom O'Callaghan
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
