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.

A must-see event on the Daylesford social calendar, the ChillOut parade is a highly inclusive affair. A celebration of gay pride, it’s also an opportunity for local groups to beat their respective drums to raise funds or awareness.

Volunteers from the CFA, the visitor information centre, the community bank and a contingent of purple-clad women celebrating International Women’s Day (hey, that’s today…GO SISTERS!), joined in the parade.

Each year a broad cross-section of the local community, and countless visitors, turn out to witness the joyous procession of colour, movement and sound as it makes its way up Vincent Street and back down again.With rain threatening yesterday, the crowd might have been smaller but it was no less appreciative.

Some of the costumes were stunning – and rainproof! Cinderella and Prince Charming wore fabulous ensembles created from bubble-wrap, while a sylph-like dancing queen topped her elegant outfit with a head-dress decorated with plastic bottles.

The budget-conscious country cousin to the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, ChillOut has been celebrated in Daylesford since 1997 when it was organised by the Springs Connection, a gay and lesbian business group in town.

Controversy courted that and subsequent festivals, but with growing social acceptance of difference and diversity, ChillOut has steadily gained in popularity among the straight community. Since then, the Labour Day long weekend (March in Victoria) has seen the town inundated with visitors.

For children growing up in rural communities, difference can attract isolation at best, bullying at worst. In Daylesford yesterday, young people carried banners for a variety of support groups for young gay, lesbian and transgender people living in regional Victoria.

Not all of the groups’ names and acronyms were immediately apparent but I’ve since investigated some of them. For your information – and anyone you know who might find them helpful – here just a few of their links:

WAYOUT
HEADSPACE
OUT there
PFLAG Shepparton
YUMCHA
ZAQUE Ballarat

Yesterday in Daylesford – for young and old, straight and gay, and all those somewhere in between – there were rainbows everywhere.

The first condition isn’t too hard to fathom: a strong wind relentlessly gusting day and night with a background of crashing trees and branches is bound to be unsettling. And it seems there’s also a physiological reason for the wind-borne irrits: increased levels of the neurotransmitter, serotonin.

Much like the Santa Ana winds in the Los Angeles basin, and the Mistral in Provence, our prosaically named ’strong southerly’ produces positively charged CO2 ions. These ions are thought to prevent the natural breakdown of serotonin, hence its increased levels in the brain.

And then there’s the triumvirate of wind-blown rye grass, dust and pollen that conspire to make my life – and those of countless others – a misery. But despite the crushing pain in my sinuses today, dear reader, I’ll soldier on to apprise you of the district’s latest offering during this mellow-if-the-wind’s-not-blowing-a-gale season.

One of the first signs of Autumn is the bright red berries on Hawthorn bushes (Crataegus monogyna) growing along roadsides.

They’re reminders that early European settlers and transient gold prospectors introduced exotic species with the intention of making this vastly unfamiliar country seem more like home.

I’ve seen some old hawthorn bushes growing along the road to Kyneton, pruned into perfect hedges near an historic homestead. Left to their own devices, they become luxuriantly wild weeds.

Hawthorn berries, or haws, are eaten by birds and livestock, the seed is passed through the gut and arrives on the ground in a perfectly formed package of fertiliser, ready to flourish. When the plant’s roots are disturbed they form suckers, much like that other successful import, the blackberry.

While considered a noxious weed in Victoria and South Australia, in Tasmania, where it grows across the central and eastern districts, it’s not. That’s because the hawthorn has been there since Tassie’s earliest farming days when it was grown for hedges to fence paddocks. The great age of many of these hedges is now regarded as an important part of that state’s natural heritage.

I wonder whether hawthorn hedges are habitats for foxes in Tasmania. If you’d like to know more about the danger that the animal presents to the fragile ecosystems of the island, click here.

Crataegus monogyna is well named when you consider that the hawthorn’s pretty white flowers, produced in Spring, are hermaphroditic in their sexual orientation. One of the most prolific of our weed species, it’s not about to be controlled any time soon.

I’m just glad I’m not allergic to it.

According to the weather report, that could be later this week. In the meantime, we haul water around the garden for the vegies each morning, and again in the evening for whatever needs it most.

Orchards in the region are harvesting their last luscious nectarines and peaches. I should buy up big for  jams and chutneys. But the last jar of plum chutney in the pantry, from 2007, and a solitary bottle of grape sauce, from 2004, remind me that it’s best to leave that sort of thing to those who are good at it.

Tangy white varieties of peaches and nectarines, my favourites, will be gone even sooner than the yellow ones. Their brief season makes them all the more desirable. With their end in sight, it’s a guilty pleasure to eat two in one sitting. Well, we don’t want them going soft now, do we?

In their place, there’ll be Fujis and Pink Ladies and all manner of pears.

A roadside tree not far from here – perhaps a remnant of a long-lost garden – offers apples to all who care to pick them.

A few years ago, the poor thing barely escaped an overzealous road crew on a grass-slashing job. Its recovery was nothing short of miraculous and while its apples are a little on the tart side, they’re fine for cooking.

On the weekend we sallied forth to pick basketsful of succulent blackberries from any number of bramble patches sprawling across the neighbourhood, only to find the ripest fruit already taken, probably by birds.

A second crop of bright red unripe berries has replaced them. Along with the feral apples, we’d planned to bake them in a crumble, served with an extravagance of cream. Oh well, perhaps next weekend.

For the first time since I planted it, the grapevine reaching up the wall of the big shed has produced fruit. It’s planted in a discarded, bottomless (no pun intended) dunny can that I found under the house.

After a friend gave us the vine a few years back, I dug a big hole near the shed’s entrance, where the morning sun is fierce, pushed the can into it and planted the vine. With chicken wire to climb, I doubt it could be happier.

It’s rewarding us with fruit that has an unusual musky flavour… nothing to do with the dunny can I hope.

Soon there’ll be chestnuts to gather, conveniently ripe when the weather turns cold enough to roast them, and mushrooms to pluck from their pine needle beds.

And hopefully there will be rain.

Last week I was dismayed to read that the future of the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine is now jeopardy. The Castlemaine Mail reported that unless owners can raise $300,000 to upgrade the cinema to conform to safety regulations, it will close.

This is after the owners have already spent $200,000 on new lighting, staff training and new fire extinguishing equipment.

They now plan to apply for government funding and are asking members of the community to show their support.

Built circa 1852, the Theatre Royal is the oldest operating theatre on the Australian mainland.

Buildings of landmark quality such as post offices, churches, schools and picture palaces are often vital components which attract tourism and promote community pride. – The National Trust of Australia (NSW)

Before we moved to Daylesford, a friend introduced me to the Rex Cinema in Vincent Street. From the outside, it looked like a tawdry bargain shop and it was with some reluctance that I agreed to go inside with her.

‘Look up,’ she urged, once we’d cleared the entrance.

I gasped. The ceiling decorations above and around the dress circle, the high proscenium arch, the wonderfully elaborate plaster work… It was a true picture palace.

Picture palaces are valued by the community for their social significance as the place where families were entertained over generations.– The National Trust of Australia (NSW)

The Spanish Mission-style Rex, built in 1928, was once the social hub of the district, thrilling successive generations with the marvels revealed to them in the plush warmth of their very own palace.

I’ve heard tales of courtships conducted and marriage proposals presented in the back stalls, and the story of an intrepid pair of sisters who walked the 14 km round trip from Eganstown to Daylesford every Saturday night to catch the main feature. They both lived well into their nineties.

Three hundred historic cinemas are being conserved in the USA. It should be possible to conserve and continue operating two dozen in Australia.– The National Trust of Australia (NSW)

On that first visit to the Rex, it was so cold that the woman behind the counter was wearing an overcoat, scarf and gloves and looked reluctant to venture far from the bar heater she was perched above.

Since its closure as a cinema in 1963, the Rex’s glory was reduced to peeling paint and its beautiful plaster work was crumbling. But the old building was still magnificent. Soon after that, rumours that it was on the market flew around the community.

A few people talked of joining together to buy the cinema. The Montreal Community Theatre, in Tumut New South Wales, was held up as a shining example of how this could be done.

Built in 1929 by the town’s enterprising draper, J.J. Learmont, it had closed in 1995. The redoubtable Tumut community, with assistance from the Learmont family and through government grants, bought and refurbished it.

The Montreal had fewer problems than our Rex and the town had a larger permanent population base from which to draw its audience. But the story of its salvation by the community is still an inspiring one.

Now, after a protracted and troubled construction process, the Daylesford Rex has been re-born as a shopping arcade. It has no soul and little atmosphere and there are fears that it could become a white elephant. For the sake of the town, and all those who now operate businesses in the building, we sincerely hope that it doesn’t.

Let’s not allow the Theatre Royal to end like that. Go to the website, people, make your feelings known. Save your palace.

Our landlords sent a skilled arborist to fell it, along with a few other mature trees including one whose ailing head was still clinging to its badly split trunk.

My partner cut down the young eucalypts that grew near the house on a sloping bank. Many was the time, last Summer, when I envisaged those small trees fuelling an inferno and I was glad to see them go. Now that they’ve been reduced, I’m feeling a little easier about whatever the weather might throw at us between now and Winter.

I say ‘reduced’, rather than ‘removed’ because, as you know, eucalypts are practically indestructible. So it probably comes as no surprise when I tell you that all those that were cut down are now sprouting. I’m planning to keep them as shrubs.

Cutting a tree back at ground level is called coppicing and in Europe it’s done with all sorts of trees. The wood is used in building construction, to make poles and for fencing.

In the northern hemisphere trees were originally cut back for firewood and to feed animals during Winter. Coppicing is now used for woodland management, providing a variety of habitats that enrich biodiversity.

If you cut down a eucalypt to a stump, you’re effectively coppicing it. The stump from which it will inevitably re-grow is called a stool. Coppicing eucalypts that grow in gardens is a good way to keep them small. It keeps eucalypts in their juvenile phase, turning them into attractive and unusual shrubs.

It also transforms a tall tree into something a little more manageable – one that’s not going to rain branches on your roof, or scatter slowly-decaying leaves all over garden beds, or turn into a towering inferno during a bush fire.

Coppicing eucalypts and turning them into low-growing shrubs is a good way to manage what was once known as a ‘low-maintenance’ garden. These days it’s called a ‘low-input’ garden, meaning less work, less water, less time.

The trick is in knowing when to coppice eucalypts, especially in this part of the world where gardening is sometimes regarded not so much as a relaxing pastime but as an extreme sport. Too late in Spring, and the new shoots could be frizzled by Summer’s heat. Too late in Summer, and frost could have the same effect.

The right time to coppice also varies from species to species. I’ve read that Sugar Gums (Eucalyptus cladocalyx), that grow in western Victoria, produce the best coppice shoots after they’re cut down in September and October.

Pollarding is reducing the height of trees without cutting them down to the ground. One of the rapidly regrown eucalypts that I pollarded yesterday has beautifully rounded  leaves on pale red stems that have sprouted profusely from its coppiced  stool.  It grows on the bank, west of the house.

I brought some of the cut branches into the house for a vase. I’ve seen similar small branches mixed with flowers in florists’ bouquets and they contrast beautifully with a mixture of hectic colours.

I’ve read that pollarding might not be a good thing to do to mature eucalypts. It seems that reducing the height of larger trees can weaken them, causing them to drop branches as they age. The jury’s still out on how pollarding affects young trees. Over the next few months – as part of a house-work avoidance scheme – I’ll conduct experiments to find out more about that.

Right now I can report that possums regard the tender new shoots on eucalypts as their idea of heavenly hors d’oeuvres.