The question is: was the heavy rain that fell last week truly the Autumn break? There’s much speculation about whether it was or it wasn’t.

Weather boffins argue that the break rarely arrives in March; it’s usually later in the season. Farmers reckon it’s the real deal and are delighted to have had it.

Whatever it was, freakish in both timing and scale, it swept from the inland where it caused massive floods in Queensland, to deliver a devastating storm to Melbourne.

Here, we were lucky to escape the tempest and receive a manageable amount of rain.

So early in the season, rain and cool temperatures are a novelty to us. As is lighting the wood stove and sleeping beneath a quilt. But long-time locals – whose memories hold rainfalls of 650mm a year – might remember otherwise.

In the garden, frogs croak their rain songs and birds noisily gather food. Each night, millipedes invade the house in their dozens, drawn by the dryness and the light. We scoop them up and drop them into buckets of water. With no known predators, they’ve reached plague proportions but, in the scheme of things, they’re a minuscule inconvenience.

A consolation, perhaps, to those in flood-affected Queensland is that the rain has brought new life (but not millipedes) to the outback and there are high hopes for good crop yields in seasons to come.

Dorothea Mackellar, in My Country, wrote of  the cycle of privation and hardship, followed by rain-borne bounty, that characterises life in Australia: ‘For flood and fire and famine/She pays us back threefold’.

Yes, the wide brown land is turning green.