The sunrise burns with a golden shimmer through the bright hard dawn. Mist clings to the land. Light from the rising sun, hazy and weak, shimmers across the crystalline fields .

The day becomes bright and sunny, the skies clear, blue and depthless. Opening the window to let in the fresh winter air I hear a bird's soft warble wafting through the trees.

The temperature has risen to almost 16C and the day feels warm against my skin as I pull weeds from the soft damp earth. Sunshine streams down on my face and the smell of newly mown grass rises on a sudden breeze.

Patches of light glisten between the leaves of the gum tree, a tangle of bare stretched limbs web across the blue sky, casting odd shadows on a wintery gray-green grass. It has been a time of sleep and in the warm winter sunshine one can feel the the new season of spring waiting patiently for rebirth.

The sun drops marking the passing of early afternoon. Clouds fill the edges of the eastern sky beyond the tops of the gum trees, drifting over the lower hills and vales and rolling towards Mount Buller. I feel the cold. The sun has slipped all the way below the horizon and the darkness hangs in the sky like an approaching shroud.

The stars appear, low and large trembling. Cold darkness, as a golden moon hangs low in the sky. The cold is hard and brittle against the skin. As the moon rises silver, its light illuminates the stretched limbs of the trees, giving them a silvery sheen. All about the darkness is hushed and still. The night is bitter cold, the damp warmth of the sunny day crystallised into a fine crust that covers the landscape in a frozen sheen which crunches like tiny bells under my feet.