Reference to index of Frederick Mackie's journal 1852 - 1855

Frederick William Mackie (1812-1893), Quaker, son of William Aram and Sarah Mackie, accompanied Robert Lindsey (1801-1863) on a "mission of concern" for the Society of Friends (Quakers) to the Australasian colonies. They left England in July 1852 in the barque "Wellington", arrived in Hobart, Van Diemen's Land in November 1852 and later travelled to New Zealand in 1853, New South Wales (1853), V.D.L. again (1853-4), Victoria (1854), South Australia(1854), N.S.W. and Victoria again (1854), a brief third visit to V.D.L., the Victorian goldfields (1854-5) and West Australia (1855), finishing their journey in South Africa. Mackie kept a diary of his travels, illustated by little pen or pencil sketches, in small notebooks still held by the May family, descendants of the family of Mackie's wife. After the mission journey was completed in 1855 Mackie did not return toEngland but went to South Australia to marry, in May 1856, Rachel Ann May, daughter of Joseph and Hannah May of Mount Barker, South Australia. For a few years they ran a Quaker school in Hobart, but returned to South Australia in 1861

Photograph of Frederick Mackie, Tasmania

Photograph of Frederick Mackie husband of Rachel Anne, Tasmania, originally from South Australia. The photographer was Charles Alfred Woolley who had studios at 42 Macquarie Street, Hobart from 1860-1870

Extreme drought impacts have been underestimated in grasslands and shrublands globally.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of short-term (~1 y) drought events-the most common duration of drought-globally. Yet the impact of this intensification of drought on ecosystem functioning remains poorly resolved. This is due in part to the widely disparate approaches ecologists have employed to study drought, variation in the severity and duration of drought studied, and differences among ecosystems in vegetation, edaphic and climatic attributes that can mediate drought impacts. To overcome these problems and better identify the factors that modulate drought responses, we used a coordinated distributed experiment to quantify the impact of short-term drought on grassland and shrubland ecosystems. With a standardized approach, we imposed ~a single year of drought at 100 sites on six continents. Here we show that loss of a foundational ecosystem function-aboveground net primary production (ANPP)-was 60% greater at sites that experienced statistically extreme drought (1-in-100-y event) vs. those sites where drought was nominal (historically more common) in magnitude (35% vs. 21%, respectively). This reduction in a key carbon cycle process with a single year of extreme drought greatly exceeds previously reported losses for grasslands and shrublands. Our global experiment also revealed high variability in drought response but that relative reductions in ANPP were greater in drier ecosystems and those with fewer plant species. Overall, our results demonstrate with unprecedented rigor that the global impacts of projected increases in drought severity have been significantly underestimated and that drier and less diverse sites are likely to be most vulnerable to extreme drought