At the home farm of the old Koreelah station the creek is flowing high and paddocks of kikuyu are glowing green so it is not hard to imagine a full year's worth of rain fell in just the first five months. Yet on this day the weather has broken and the sun is shining brightly.
For Hereford breeders George and Shirley Hardcastle the welcome break has come too quickly to give them the chance to clean up the house garden, surrounded by ground saturated to the consistency of pudding, but there is one job that must be done come rain, hail or shine and that is to check the official rain gauge and log its numbers with the Bureau of Meteorology.
Shirley measures and tips out a couple of points from that morning and when she records the measurement her pen joins the dots on a history that stretches back more than a century.
George's grandfather, also named George, first started recording rainfall for the government weather bureau back in 1912, a job willingly adopted by the next generation: Murray, who adorned his figures with sparse words - like the apt but brief description "wet day" during the peak of the 1954 flood. This was caused by a cyclone that damaged south-east Queensland and the Northern Rivers. A total of 14 inches fell in just 24 hours at the homestead farm on Koreelah Creek, whose waters run into the Clarence River. It was a wet one indeed. Before Shirley took over the job of emptying the Bureau of Meteorology's official rain gauge it belonged to George's sister Unus, who lived with her mother Dorothy on the property at the time. The skills employed were the same: First lift the wide funnel - 203mm in diameter - off its galvanised housing and reach for the clear plastic vial through which rainwater is measured to the closest point - or 1/1000th of an inch. To do that requires reading the rain at the bottom of the liquid surface and not its miniscus, or the film of water that clings to the vial and can fool a learner in the art of reading accurate rainfall.
"I prefer to talk in inches," says Shirley who submits data to the Bureau of Meteorology on-line and in metric. "When you're desperate for rain one inch sounds better than 25 mils."
Lately no one has been keen to see another drop fall from the sky but the dry times will come again, as shown in cyclical pattern by the detailed 110 years of rain records at Old Koreelah.
Meanwhile, the memories linger - like the time when a sharp drought broke in 1965 and the rain came in mid winter and brought a blast of cold that killed cattle and left a bitter taste in grazier mouths.
The drought of the 80s was bad enough but the five years of dry conditions from July 1991 proved difficult to manage.
"In 1988 we had 51 inches and '89 was pretty much the same with 50 inches," says Shirley. "Then in 1990 we had only 36 inches and between 1991 and 1996 it was very dry. We sent away our weaners on agistment to Victoria. It was a disaster.
Are wet years easier to deal with? Probably, but they come with their own form of baggage.
In January 1974 a full 10 inches fell in the gauge in one day and by the end of the year there was 36.5 inches -which doesn't really stack up to extreme rainfall years lately, however the March flood of 2011 was the remarkable "rain bomb" (a term the Bureau despises) which produced the biggest inundation at Old Koreelah. That was the then the wettest year on record around the world and the stationary cloudburst that hovered over Toowoomba poured damaging run-off down both sides of the dividing range.
"I prefer to talk in inches. When you're desperate for rain one inch sounds better than 25 mils.
- Shirley Hardcastle
In an average year the property on White Swamp Road at Old Koreelah gets 34 inches. During the worst-ever drought of 2019 just 10 inches and 70 points landed in the gauge and the Kikuyu went to dust and all the Hereford stud cattle had to be fed.
This year, the wettest ever, recorded half the annual rainfall or 17 inches by mid March - by far the wettest year on record.
"Since then we've had another 22 inches, she said. "It's been really wet. "We've still got clover. We never really had a hot summer to burn it off and today is the most sun we've had for weeks. So far this year we've had 74 wet days and the remainder have been cloudy but Woodenbong is wetter than us and our neighbours further up White Swamp Road are wetter again.
"I prefer a wet season," she said. "It's better than feeding cattle."
In recognition of their efforts to consistently record rain data the Bureau of Meteorology has presented the Hardcastle family with a brass barometer mounted upon a plaque but the real reward has been to keep tabs on their local environment with records to back up their observations.
The volunteer network employed by the Bureau involves 5900 rainfall observer stations and over 1000 river height gauges.
