Inigo Jones, Lennox Walker, and the Crohamhurst Observatory

Inigo Jones spent the better part of his working life on a hill in the Sunshine Coast hinterland of Queensland, trying to answer a question the Bureau of Meteorology still hasn't fully solved: can you forecast Australian rainfall a year ahead?

His tools were sunspot tables, planetary ephemerides, and a long series of Queensland rainfall records. His method sat outside the bounds of official meteorology. The mainstream didn't take him seriously. Farmers did.

Who was Inigo Jones?

Jones was born in Victoria in 1872 and trained as a government meteorologist. He spent early years doing standard observational work before becoming preoccupied with the long-range forecasting problem. By the 1920s and 1930s he had established himself at Crohamhurst, a property near Nambour in southeast Queensland, where he built a small but serious observatory and began systematic work on astronomical cycle analysis.

He published an annual almanac, distributed through the Queensland government, giving rainfall probability forecasts for Australian agricultural districts twelve months ahead. These were not vague seasonal outlooks. They specified regions and periods, "above-normal rainfall for central Queensland April through June", against which you could later score the forecast right or wrong.

Jones died in 1954. He had spent roughly three decades refining his method.

Lennox Walker and the continuity of the work

Lennox Walker worked alongside Jones in his final years and took over the almanac after Jones died. This transition was important. Without Walker, the Crohamhurst tradition would have ended in 1954 along with its founder. Instead it continued through the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s.

Walker brought additional computational rigour to the planetary position calculations. He also engaged more directly with the scientific community, presenting the methodology at conferences and responding to critics, something Jones had largely declined to do.

The observatory work formally wound down in the 1970s. But Walker ensured the records were preserved and the methodology documented well enough that later researchers could pick it up.

The method: cycle analysis, not astrology

It's important to understand what Jones was actually doing, because the mention of planetary positions tends to trigger dismissal.

Jones was not reading horoscopes. He was doing what statisticians call cycle analysis, finding repeating patterns in a long time series and testing whether those patterns had predictive value.

His starting material was Queensland rainfall records going back to the 1870s. He looked for correlations between annual rainfall totals and:

• The 11-year sunspot cycle
• The 35-year Bruckner cycle (documented in European climate records and appearing in Australian data)
• Outer planet positions, particularly Jupiter and Saturn
• Planetary conjunctions and oppositions

The empirical observation driving all of this was that Australian drought years cluster in certain parts of the planetary cycles. Not every sunspot minimum brings drought, and not every Jupiter-Saturn conjunction marks a wet year. But the statistical tendency is visible in long records.

Whether there is a physical mechanism behind these correlations, something in solar output, or cosmic ray flux, or some other pathway, is a separate question. Jones took the empirical pattern seriously regardless.

The accuracy question

Any honest treatment of Jones has to address this directly.

His forecasts were assessed several times, both during his lifetime and after. The results were typical of any long-range probabilistic forecasting system: not right every season, but meaningfully better than chance across a long run. Drought prediction was his strongest suit. Queensland wheat farmers in particular regarded the almanac as a useful planning tool, and that kind of persistent practical uptake doesn't happen with something that simply doesn't work.

The formal verification problem is real. Seasonal forecasts are probabilistic, and scoring probabilistic forecasts requires a consistent methodology. The records from Jones' era weren't always documented in a way that allows clean retrospective analysis. Critics have used this ambiguity to dismiss the method; supporters have used it to deflect rigorous scrutiny.

The honest position is that the data suggests Jones was onto something real, but the formal evidence base is thinner than proponents like to admit.

Why it still matters in 2026

The Bureau of Meteorology's seasonal outlooks are based on ENSO (El Niño-Southern Oscillation) and Indian Ocean Dipole patterns. They are useful but work best one to three months ahead. Beyond that, accuracy drops sharply.

Jones was trying to forecast at twelve to eighteen months, driven by the hypothesis that longer astronomical cycles provide skill at longer lead times. This is still an open research question.

The computational tools available today make it possible to test Jones' hypotheses more rigorously than he could have. Planetary positions can be calculated to arbitrary precision. Historical rainfall records for Australia now span 150+ years. Statistical tests that didn't exist in Jones' time, Bartels cycle significance testing, FFT spectral analysis, can now be applied systematically.

This is part of what Crohamhurst.app is built to do: apply modern computational methods to the same cycle analysis problems Jones was working on, with proper statistical rigour.

For Bartels significance testing, the statistical method for determining whether a cycle in a time series is real or noise, see our separate guide. It's the foundation for evaluating whether any claimed astronomical cycle has genuine predictive content.

For historical and current weather data from the Dayboro region, which is in the same catchment zone as the original Crohamhurst Observatory, see dayboro.au.

The observatory today

The Crohamhurst property still exists in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. The observatory structures are gone. The records Jones and Walker kept have been partially digitised and form part of the long-range forecasting dataset on which modern cycle analysis tools are trained.

The name "Crohamhurst" carries the weight of that history. It was a serious scientific enterprise, pursued outside the institutional mainstream, driven by a conviction that astronomical cycles leave traces in rainfall data if you look long enough.

That conviction hasn't been disproved. The work continues.

Related: Bartels Cycle Significance Testing | Rainfall Analogs and Planetary Configurations