Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 January 2007 10:41:47
1997 was an extremely dry year. Since then we have had two average years rainfall with the rest below average. Last year was the driest for 40 years. Drought-stricken Victoria is tinder dry and we already have had major bushfires, the worst in Gippsland (Victoria's wettest region) consuming everything in the way of it's 200km front.... and the hottest part of summer is still to come.
One of my sisters is married to a dry land farmer in the Mallee. Every year their house dam is filled by a channel system, dug with foresight by our pioneers, that flows from Rocklands Reservoir in the Grampians. At the end of last winter this source of life for farms in a large part of North-West Victoria had only 6% of it's capacity. Usually the watery home of yabbies and redfin the only thing flowing down the channels was dust blown by a hot northerly.
We visited in November, a time when usually the wheat and barley crops are tall, green and ripening and every moment is spent gearing up for the summer harvest. We drove through miles and miles of dead crops, dried out before they even had a chance to form a head of grain.
My sister's two boys (also farmers) with wives and kids came just to say g'day us. The feelings of that day are still with me, there we were in the old weatherboard farmhouse, surrounded by 6000 acres of a years hard toil on the land that had amounted to nothing. We had a great meal, sat around and shared stories and were momentarily taken away from the dust...
One story was of when we lived at Cooma in the Snowy Mountains, in the 70's, we again visited, driving all day with a car-fridge full of fresh snow, so the boys (much younger then) could each make a snowball and throw it at the other.
I love families.