We knew it was coming.
But it felt like an unreliable memory — not to be trusted.
We’d been promised the salvation of rain so many times, now it felt like an ancient myth of halcyon days.
What did it sound like? What did it feel like?
Was that overused and pompous description called petrichor really true?
Did it really smell like honeysuckle in olive oil or mushrooms cooked in butter over concrete? I don’t know anymore. I can’t remember.
Watching the electric blue and orange rain fronts flicker across the BOM map towards Shepparton became a ritual of disappointment.
Everything always went south or north.
Everyone else got some and I began to hate Gippslanders
I felt like an outback farmer who had been watching the same cloud since January.
But I’m not a farmer.
I’m just a verandah man in lawnmower land, whose mower hasn’t left the shed since November and is now clogged with cobwebs.
For a while, we became hopeful dreamers only to be left standing on a carpet of brittle gum leaves under the merciless sun.
Eventually, we turned our backs on the sky and went inside to the relief of air conditioning.
This summer has been a long, powerful one.
I’ve been here half my life, which is only 35 years, but I can’t seem to remember a more roasting or parched three months.
I’m sure there are childhood memories out there of longer, hotter seasons, but they are not mine.
For me, this summer has unearthed images and emotions from a book I read last year by one of Australia’s great fiction masters.
Tim Winton’s Juice is set a few hundred years into the future when Australia has become a place blackened by heat with sparsely populated communities bartering for, and sometimes fighting over, food, water, batteries and turbines.
Dwindling human populations are relegated to the northern and southern extremes of the planet to escape the furnace of the tropics.
The last remnants of the old-world order, the oligarchs and trillionaires, live in grim fortresses protected by paid armies.
The rest of humanity lives underground for several months of the year to avoid the fatal surface heat.
In an echo of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we meet the narrator of Juice as he drives across the Australian hellscape with a child.
They become prisoners of a man armed with a crossbow who takes them to his underground lair where they are forced to tell their story in exchange for water and possible freedom.
So it becomes a sort of futuristic Scheherazade tale of One Thousand and One Nights.
Yes, it’s a dystopian novel infused with anger at the selfish exploitation of the planet, and it has plenty of broken and bleak characters, but Winton is a craftsman who keeps us engaged and charged with hope right to the end.
When the rain finally arrived late on Sunday afternoon, I went outside to sit on a chair and watch.
Distant thunder circled me like roller doors being opened in Geelong. I tilted my face to the sky.
The first drops felt like being slapped by warm butterflies drunk on bee nectar.
Then everything was being washed clean and I felt the earth gulp and sigh.
The next day arrived with a sparkle and a reminder we are still safe and all is well.
The earth will always renew and replenish itself.
Until it doesn’t.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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