Sydney - The patter of rain on a tin roof is a sound that sheep farmer Joe Hughes had despaired of hearing again during three years of drought on his Outback Australia sheep farm. "You couldn't really have timed it any better," he said after his property got a good soaking. "There's an enormous atmosphere of hope out here at the moment."
The worst drought in a generation is giving way to normal rainfall patterns.
In the high cattle country in Victoria, where at the start of this year torrid conditions drove the bushfires that razed more than a million hectares of forest, the rivers are filling.
"There's still a long way to go but every daymore water comes in, it gets better," said cattle farmer Tony Bullen. "It gives you hope that things are going back to normal."
Global warming may have altered what normal means for many of Australia's 120,000 farmers. Climate change may eventually force some families off the land.
But, for now, just the feel and smell of damp soil after such a long dry spell is helping to instill faith that there's a future in farming.
Downpours in the east coast state of Queensland have lifted dam levels as well as spirits.
"Some farmers have gone three years without planting a crop," said Mick Cosgrove, who has a property 250 kilometres west of Brisbane. "Just about right across the shire everybody wouldn't have enough moisture to plant, so this just means so much."
John Lush farms beans and canola on 2,000 hectares near Adelaide, the South Australia state capital. He said rain had come just in time for farmers to plant a winter crop.
"Widespread rains, fairly large amounts everywhere I can think of, and it's really set us up for a great start to the seeding," Lush said.
Forecasters at the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) are busy with software programmes that translate rainfall levels into crop yields. They say winter wheat crop could be double the size of last year's.
"The rainfall has been very good in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia," ABARE's John Hogan said. "There was good widespread rainfall throughout the autumn and this led to an early start to their season - probably one of the best starts in quite some time."
Last year's wheat harvest was the worst in 12 years. Cotton production was down by almost a half and the rice harvest fell 90 per cent to a level not seen since the 1960s.
National Climate Centre chief Michael Coughlan said the likelihood was that above-average rainfall will be recorded this year.
"Typically June and July is the period when we lock into that and at the moment that seems to be the case," Coughlan said. "This time the recovery does seem to be a lot more substantial."
It's the nature of agriculture on the world's second-driest continent that there are swift turnarounds in expectations. Farmers have always had to contend with droughts and floods.
Only a few months ago Dutch bank Rabobank, a major lender to the farming sector, issued a survey noting that people who lived on the land were glum at their prospects.
Rabobank economist Peter Knoblanche admitted in June that the pessimism evident in the survey had been erased by recent downpours.
"Undoubtedly these recent rains will have set up many farmers for a good season ahead and we are likely to see their confidence levels soar as a result," he said.
Among the newly chirpy is Hughes on his sheep farm near the northern New South Wales town of Cobar. He expects to clear his bank overdraft with the sale of lambs he says are dropping out of ewes now that rains have given a spurt to the pasture.
"We'll never be millionaires," Hughes said. "We just live a good life and raise our four kids. It's just a very good time to be alive and be out there listening to it belt on the tin roof all day."
