The frogs down in the billabong remind me with a nightly drumming: less amphibian chorus than a protest rally that’s been building volume since July.
Every morning brings new evidence of overnight goings-on. The resident wombat, pushed up the bank by the higher river, leaves fresh scratchings amid kangaroo prints and tail scrapes, like a crime scene nobody’s investigating.
Some evenings, the roo mob — up to 40 strong now — strings out across the lucerne paddock to the remnant bush on the other side of the road, does a full circuit, and doubles back past the neighbour’s to the safety of the river flats.
Conditions got off to a good start in early March with the first decent autumn break, The Boss reckons, since before the Millennium Drought, though his memory for droughts is about as reliable as his memory for where he left his keys.
Solid rain in late June and early July put a moderate flood along the lower Goulburn, most of it coming from the streams below Eildon. Watt Rd between Mooroopna and Shepparton went under, a happy event for most creatures except the motorists who had to go the long way round.
More heavy rain came through in early August. The Broken River, Sevens and Castle Creeks had their biggest falls in years and put Watt Rd under again — a minor flood this time, though there’s been more rain since.
The CMA says all this overbank business does the river good — scours the bed, carves out new pools for fish and shrimp and crays to hold in, flushes bugs out of the wetlands for the fish, platypus and turtles, and gives the wattles and red gums a proper drink after a dry summer. I take their word for it. I take most technical claims about ecosystems on trust, the same way I take The Boss’s word that thunder isn’t personally aimed at me.
It’s been handy for the irrigators too. The catchments above Eildon missed the bigger falls, but farmers haven’t needed to draw water, which has let the dam climb back to 60 per cent — while Waranga and Goulburn Weir are full, Dartmouth is at 76, and the Hume’s over 80. The Boss recites these figures as if I’m interested, and I nod along at the appropriate moments without yawning.
All this has settled him down considerably, though he still worries about the mother of all El Niños the weather people keep promising. They’ve been at it most of the year, ostensibly to give everyone time to prepare, though mostly what it produces is hand-wringing.
I’ve told him repeatedly: there’s no point barking until a stranger rattles the gate. A dog doesn’t borrow trouble from next Tuesday, and nor does it sit around regretting a bone it buried last autumn and can no longer find.
Spring, in any case, has sprung, and it’s as good a spring as a dog needs. A pair of rufous whistlers moved into the elm outside the kitchen window on Monday, and the male has been putting on a show ever since — hopping chair to chair around the terrace table, bobbing, nodding, singing like Placido Domingo, while the female chirrups back and gets on with the actual business of building the nest.
It's not unlike what The Boss is like in the kitchen at dinner time. Woof!
15°C