Abittot

It's the labour day bank holiday weekend and the mercury continues to rise; 29 degrees tomorrow, and by Wednesday we're heading for temperatures in the early thirties. In Darwin, the temperature has already reached 36 degrees and Broome's hit 40. It's abittot.

These kinds of Sydney temperatures are fine during the spring because the humidity is still low and the evenings are cool. Come January, the weather will be filthy day and night.

I knew summer was on it's way because I could hear it. This morning I heard the gate to the swimming pool open for the first time in months, quickly followed by the indignant quacking of the ducks who've been living afloat there since late autumn. And later I went down there myself, just to lie in the sunshine, and found all the spring flowers sprouting around the pool and three or four great big dragonflies swooping low across the water, something I'd run screaming from in Britian (because I don't like dragonflies), yet here I've begun to come to terms with the insects, with the exception of cockroaches. Cockroaches ooze their innards all over the floor after they die. Cockroaches must be stopped.

Anyway, tomorrow is October 1st and this marks the beginning of all sorts of seasons down under, like the no dogs on the beach season and the bushfire season. With 70% of New South Wales in drought, they reckon the risk of devastating bushfires is getting bigger every year, and as temperatures inland are usually at least 5 degrees warmer than down here on the coast, the prospect of hot windy conditions, as they've forecast for the coming week, is pretty worrying for the people who live there.

The other problem with drought is the failure of crops. The drought conditions here have continued for the past seven or eight years and this had led to huge fluctuations in the price of fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets. I hear we have similar problems forecast in Britain after the summer floods destroyed the harvests, though the problem in Britian has been too much water while in Australia it's a case of much too little.

The drought has been particularly hard for the farmers on land in outback NSW, beyond the great dividing range. The land out there isn't much more than desert really; a fragile environment for growing crops. In the first few years of the drought they stuck it out. Then when things didn't improve they started re-mortgaging their homes to get through another year in the hope the rains would come, but they didn't. Finally the government has stepped in and offered financial assistance which allows them to abandon the farms altogether. Clearly somebody in the government believes climate change exists, they just don't want to point the finger.