At last, the dark clouds of this morning have begun to lift, the sky has become a soft blue and sunlight strikes the earth, glinting on puddles and greening the ground. The wind is softer though still chilly and shredded clouds scud gently across the sky.

Spring flowering freesias in our garden

Spring has finally awoken from its brooding sleep, as the Winter coldness edges from the land, unlocking with some private incommunicable note of triumph, marching forward with a burst of colour into another cycle of life. The architrave of the sky creeps earlier and later towards light as the sun rises higher each day to cover the shivering earth with fingers of warmth. The tangled bare branches of sleeping trees and bushes are rendered into bead strings of buds, which burst forth in a blaze of colour. Wattle trees are puffed out in a thousand yellow flowers. Working in the garden is a joy digging in the damp earth surrounded by nodding daffodils and blossom, watching the dormant plants come to life and to see those we'd planted and cut back in the autumn spring forth with new growth.

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The view from the patio

In the North West of Victoria the farmers are suffering from drought-like conditions - the Winter rains have come and gone without delivering a good drenching for the parched land. Will Victoria again see the destructive tornado-like swirls of dust on the plains covering everything in a choking mass of red dust as we did in 1982?

We woke this morning to the mourning cry of the curlew - an eerie cry from a small ground living bird. There is something haunting about its sad wailing cry. Like the cry of the dead - a pitiful cry of a soul doomed to eternal damnation in hell.

Nearby a crow sits perched in an eucalpt tree watching with its beady eyes a superstitious shudder runs through me when it spreads its wings and with a long, lazy cawing call it takes flight.

Our Rhodedendums are now in flower

Some of our decidious trees now have a faint colouring of green as their buds begin to burst into leaf. Pink and white flowering cherries are now fully out and are absolutely glorious. Daffodils and crocus nod their heads in the light breeze. Having cut back my rose bushes in July they too are now beginning to shoot into leaf. It really is a wonderful time of year.