Rainmakers

Since 13 years there is a drought in Australia, which has changed the way of living for many people. Therefore Australians do not exaggerate when they say it is a century drought. It is the longest which Australia ever had and even before Australia was already the second driest continent in the world, after the Antarctic.

The Toolondo reservoir makes this extremely obvious. In former times it held 90.000 liter water and now it looks like the moon. Only the signs ‘Powerboat speed limit 8km/h’ are still signs of its former reputation of a water sport park. Strange.

A sheep sale in country South Australia is where you also can see the real impact of the drought. Here farmers have been left with a landscape stripped bare of vegetation and feed for their livestock. Some farmers haven’t had a summer or winter rain, or any decent feed rain for four to five years. There’s no green, no cover on the country at all. Those farmers are now forced to destock their land, unable to support their animals on country that appears to have been sandblasted.

The good news for the farmers is that the destocking has no impact on lamb prices in Australia due to high international demand. But the total number of sheep is decreasing steadily. Last year there was a total of 76 million sheep in Australia, down 115 million head in 1999. So when conditions improve, it’s going to be tough to restock, because there are not enough breeding sheep.

Climatologists say that it has really been a series of droughts, interspersed with periods of sparse rainfall. At best, the current drought might be an early warning - for a hotter and drier future. At worst it may be the beginning of irreversible climate change across the bottom half of Australia.

Thus in order to recover nature needs rain – a lot of rain. As you can imagine we as tent campers do not really like rain. Therefore, we had hoped that there is no rain while we were there only some more weeks till x-mas. After 13 years, you wouldn’t expect the rain to be in a hurry. But it seems nature could not wait any longer and therefore the rain god made sure it was raining. Since the beginning of November it is raining every day, at least everywhere where we were going (even at those places which we had picked to escape the rain). Well, that was happening to us since the beginning of the year therefore we were thinking about a career as rainmakers. Thus we make a lot of people happy and we would be for sure fully booked out.

The rain started when we reached the tropical North of Queensland (well, seems that the rainy season started a bit early this year). Then in Central Queensland and then we even drove 400 km into the outback where it hadn’t rained since April. We witnessed a severe rainstorm and it was raining cats & dogs. Such a tropical rainstorm can start from one minute to the other and could also stop suddenly - after 1 hour or after 2 days. Anyways, Mother Nature and the Australians were so so happy. And thus we stayed at a motel and enjoyed the rain under the roof of the car park. That is how beautiful rain can be… No worries :o)