Climatic variability throughout tropical Australasia is a relatively recent 'discovery'. While weather extremes have long been recognized - and even celebrated in Australia - they have been understood as deviations from orderly norms. Any sense that such varying weather constituted an inherently variable climate was, until recently, peripheral to thinking about weather and climate. However, this belated recognition of variability has been concurrent with awareness of anthropogenic climate change. Unsurprisingly, climate change deniers have appropriated variability to dispute that human induced climate change is underway. This paper challenges so spurious a misuse of such a vital climatological concept. Examining the Dutch colonial encounter in Indonesia and the British experience in northern Australia, I will also sketch how variability became invisible to European observers in Australasia. Then this paper will show how variability, finally, came to be recognized. These histories reveal how the modern propensity to impose order and patterns has shaped contemporary understandings of weather and climate. But they also demonstrate the difference between variability and climate change. In particular, these histories attest the incoherence of climate change deniers' deliberate confusing of two distinct phenomena.