Australia’s ‘Big Dry’ Challenges Farm Survival

Already the world’s driest inhabited continent, Australia is getting drier as rare back-to-back droughts raise the dire prospect of a near permanently parched landscape.

For months, eastern city slickers have basked in the warmest, friendliest autumn weather on record. Day after day, Sydney temperatures have risen to 25 deg Celsius, with clear blue skies throwing TV weathermen into paroxysms of superlatives.

It is a different story inland, where the same weather has farmers struggling to survive.
Stuff