no, it absolutely ISN'T fair. We're on the same latitude as Kodiak ALASKA, for heaven's sake. Perth is in this weird little microclimate all by itself--sometimes it snows two hundred feet further up and it doesn't snow here. You can always see snow on the mountains from our house. But we only get one or two storms a year, never more than about four inches, and it's always gone by the next day.

The winters here are just awful--dark and chill and wet. They have a word for it--"dreich." (actually, "flist" is also a scottish word describing a mixture of fog and mist)