"Out on the patio we'd sit,
And the humidity we'd breathe,
We'd watch the lightning crack over cane fields
Laugh and think, this is Australia."

So went a 1985 song (Songs of Then (This is Australia)) which resonated because it had more than a little truth to it. (Unfortunately it has been used in an endless ad campaign since then and I've become sick of the naffing sound of it, but that doesn't make it any less a song that captured the atmospheric mood of an Australian summer well.)

Yesterday it rained all day. Unceasing rain and drizzle which, combined with the heat of the last day of Autumn (the seasons start on the first of the month in Australia) resulted in the air being heavy with humidity. It was like being in a Turkish hammam but without the cleansing effect of having your skin rubbed with a sponge which is like a Brillo pad before a huge overweight Turkish guy pounds your muscles until every knot in them runs screaming from your body. Oh wait, I digress.

This morning dawned bright and sunny and hot. But with that much humidity in the air, you don't have to have lived in the Great Southern Land for long to know what will eventually be coming. It will be coming in the afternoon.

It's this.

Actually there was a bank of cloud which looked like an inverted anvil that I was after, but by the time I got to the beach with the camera it had broken up. Or, I should say, it had re-formed... into this.

Were you to be standing on the beach alongside me as I took this, you would have heard the thunder. Distant at first. But building, and rumbling more and more ominously. You might, perhaps, have caught a flash of lightning but it would be rare and quick for as we know, lightning will NEVER flash if I am somewhere around with a camera.

Eventually the first spits of rain came, only minutes after I took this shot. Fat, lazy blobs that splattered against your skin without needing to use much force because they knew that reinforcements would arrive soon, and abundantly.

Were you to get into the car with me and head to the supermarket's undercover car park, you would have known that we didn't make it and that rain would soon be beating down like we were driving through a car wash whose operator had accidentally set it to "Overdrive" and couldn't turn it off.

Thunder cracked from the sky, and in some places hail fell. Or rain fell so hard that it may as well have been hail.

Welcome to the first day of Australian Summer, 2024. Hold onto your ice blocks, this one is probably going to be a ride. Again.