Can fish fall from the sky?

Spend any time travelling in outback Australia and it won’t be long before someone tries to convince you they do.

IT SEEMS THAT just about every country pub has a barfly who remembers the day it ‘rained fish’. The first time I heard of this phenomenon was in the 1990s at the Royal Mail Hotel in Hungerford in south-western Queensland, on the New South Wales border. There a local (yes, he was sober at the time) captivated the bar with a yarn about “the day it rained fish” in his home town. “During the storm, I went outside and there were fish flapping around on previously parched paddocks,” he revealed. “The unsuspecting fish must have been plucked out of a dam or creek by a mini-tornado a long way away.” Dr Peter Unmack, an ichthyologist at the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra, has also encountered similar tales of fish…

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Australian Geographic (Digital) - 1 Issue, July/August 2019

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