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?