You don't like to bring up the drought in phone conversations to your friends and family in the city. It's starting to get boring.
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You can almost hear the fingernail filing and vacant gazing out the window at the other end. I'm banging on about that again.
So I stop. I talk about something else.
I don't mention that I'm worried about my husband who is 70 and had heatstroke last week after sitting out in the truck on the side of the road for four hours as the cattle grazed. And that he will need to do the same again every day for an indefinite time.
I don't mention that the neighbour's bore has run dry - or possibly the water table has sunk below its reach - and that we are worried ours might be going the same way.
In Gunnedah, we wake to another beautiful, rain-less day, this one clouded with the dust that was, until recently, the topsoil of carefully nurtured farms.
I do mention that we are lucky, because we are. We can graze our cattle beside the road. We are not dependent on them. We have hay and other sources of income.
We are not those gutted farmers in Queensland who, after nursing their animals through a blistering, unforgiving drought, saw them drown or starve in sudden floods. Even the Queensland Premier was stunned at the sight of those bodies on the roadside - those lives and those critical sources of income - gone.
The irony of it. Droughts and flooding rains - Dorothea Mackellar was so right.
In Gunnedah, we wake to another beautiful, rain-less day, this one clouded with the dust that was, until recently, the topsoil of carefully nurtured farms.
We had our five minutes of fame in the media, and now it has moved on. Unfortunately, the drought has not.
Most difficult to bear are the calls from the city from eye-rolling urban unit owners for farmers to hurry up and drought-proof their farms already. Sheesh. When are we going to learn that Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains and get on with it.
There is no doubt farmers around the nation are doing this and have been finding techniques to "drought-proof" their farm and income for many generations.
This is, however, a doozy of a drought. And people still want to eat. And wear clothes. They don't want a reduced number of livestock and higher beef and lamb prices, and they don't want a smaller choice of fruit and veg on their shelves.
Farmers have always done it tough. They don't have days off, sick pay, annual leave.
Give them just a quiet moment of thought as they survey the dusty remains of cropland and hope it might one day be green again.
