Jones came to weather young. The Queensland government meteorologist Clement Wragge, himself a famously colourful figure, was so struck by the schoolboy's ability that he took him on as an assistant in 1888, when Jones was still a teenager. From that apprenticeship grew a lifelong obsession. Jones turned his family's land at Crohamhurst into a private weather station and steadily made himself, in the public mind at least, the most famous long-range forecaster in Australia, consulted by farmers, graziers, and newspapers from the 1920s until his death in 1954. He never claimed he could tell you tomorrow's weather. What he offered was something grander and far more contested: the shape of seasons still years away.

Jones's method was as ambitious as it was unorthodox. He studied the cycles of sunspots and came to believe their irregularities were governed by the gravitational tug of the outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, as they swung through their long orbits. From these celestial rhythms he reasoned he could read the coming pattern of droughts and floods on Earth. Mainstream science was sceptical then and remains so; no solid physical link between planetary alignments and rainfall has ever been established. Yet in a country ruled by drought and flooding rains, where a wrong guess at the season could ruin a farm, the appeal was irresistible. Jones offered rural Australia something the official bureau would not: the promise of foresight.

The observatory itself, built in 1935 with financial backing from the Colonial Sugar Refining Company and others, reflects the faith people placed in his work. It is a modest single-storey timber building, set on low stumps atop a dome-shaped hill on open lawn, encircled by mature hoop pines. Around it stand the quiet instruments of his trade: a louvred Stevenson Screen sheltering thermometers, deep earth-temperature pits formed from clay pipes sunk into the ground, the concrete stand of a vanished sundial, the base where a telescope once pointed at the sun. A miniature Stevenson Screen even serves as the letterbox at the gate. It is, in effect, a temple to a particular kind of optimism, the belief that careful enough observation could tame the future.

When Crohamhurst Observatory joined the Queensland Heritage Register in 2008, the listing made a telling point: the place embodies a nineteenth-century conviction that through science and patient study humans could solve any problem, even outsmart the weather. It is the only known long-range forecasting observatory in Queensland, and its surviving open-air apparatus is a rare physical record of how that hope was pursued. Jones's planetary theories have not aged into accepted science. But the observatory endures as something more durable than any forecast, a memorial to a self-taught man and a farming nation that desperately, understandably, wanted to know what the sky would do next.