Out here in Mount Gambier, a lawn bowls game on a hot January afternoon is no casual pastime. Ian Von Stanke knows this better than most. He has been rolling jacks on the greens in and around South Australia's second-largest city for years, and he has learned to pack a wet rag under his hat and line his shoes with the silver insides of wine casks just to get through a round.
"When you're out there, the heat in the bottom of your shoes is unbelievable," Von Stanke said. "It's the heat that generates up from the carpet up into your face that is the killer."
Now there is a number to go with that feeling. In January, the South Australian State Emergency Service deployed a drone fitted with thermal imaging over the Mount Gambier Bowls Club and recorded a surface temperature of 86.75 degrees Celsius on the synthetic green. The air temperature that day was around 40 degrees. The surface was running at more than double.
SA SES chief remote pilot Brad Flew said the flight started as a routine equipment test. "It was an opportunity to use drones in the heat and actually test their capabilities," he said. What the imagery showed stopped him. Concrete, bitumen, and synthetic turf were absorbing and radiating heat at levels that surprised even experienced emergency services personnel.
"To actually see how broad that temperature was, even on things like astroturf or fake grass through the concrete and bitumen," Flew said, was a genuine surprise. The thermal images also showed something instructive: where large trees cast shade, surface temperatures dropped sharply. Where there was no canopy, the heat had nowhere to go.
This is the urban heat island effect, and city folk might not realise how sharply it bites in regional centres. The phenomenon is well-documented in places like western Sydney, where it attracts sustained policy attention. In growing regional cities like Mount Gambier, the same physics applies, but the planning frameworks and public debate have not always kept pace.
Paul Cheung, a postdoctoral research fellow in urban microclimates at Western Sydney University, put it plainly. Hard, non-living surfaces absorb more sunlight than grass and cannot use water to cool themselves. "Grass and trees can transpire and use the water they absorb to cool down the community," he said. Concrete and bitumen simply store the heat and radiate it back.
Abby Mellick Lopes, a professor of social design at the University of Technology Sydney, pointed to planning rules as a key part of the problem. "We still design European houses and they're not appropriate for our climate," she said. The thermal imagery from Mount Gambier, she argued, illustrates the case clearly. Where tree canopy exists, temperatures are manageable. Where it does not, they are not.
For Von Stanke and his fellow players, the policy gap is immediate and practical. Heat rules for bowls pennants in the region are triggered by forecast temperatures in Naracoorte, a town roughly an hour's drive north of Mount Gambier. There is no separate rule for tournaments at all. "We played a tournament the other day and three or four went down," he said. Players collapsing from heat on a competition day, governed by rules that do not account for conditions in the actual town they are playing in, is not an abstract policy failure. It is a direct one.
The broader tension here is familiar. Spending on urban greening, canopy management, and heat-resilient planning requires upfront investment from local councils and state governments already stretched thin. Sceptics of expanded government programming will reasonably ask whether voluntary adaptation by community clubs and individual players is not a more proportionate response than regulation. Von Stanke's wine-cask shoe liners suggest people will find ways to cope. But as Cheung's research and the SES data together show, coping is not the same as being safe, and individual ingenuity does not cool a surface running at 86 degrees.
There is a reasonable middle ground available. Requiring shade canopy assessments as part of planning approvals for new sports facilities costs little and could prevent real harm. Updating heat protocols to use localised temperature data rather than readings from a distant town is a straightforward administrative fix. These are not grand government programmes. They are practical adjustments that reflect what the Australian Bureau of Statistics data already shows: regional cities are growing, more people are spending time in them, and the infrastructure planning must account for the climate those people actually live in.
Talk to anyone in Mount Gambier and they'll tell you the same thing: the heat is not getting easier to ignore. The drone footage just gave everyone a number to go with what their shoes already knew.