Herald Sun 28 April, 2007 
LIFE-giving rain has made a welcome return to the vital food-bowl Wimmera Mallee region.
Nobody is brave enough yet to call it drought-breaking, but good falls yesterday and overnight have delivered at least 10mm to most farmland with some areas getting about 25mm, and patches getting even more.

On the farms and in the towns and small settlements throughout the district, farmers and townfolk welcomed the rain, even as it showed how they’d neglected their overflowing gutters and downpipes during the drought.
In the pubs of Warracknabeal and Horsham all the bar talk centred on the rain.
Rumour and fact became mixed as beers were lifted in toasts to the rain gods.
“They got over an inch in Ouyen,” was common knowledge. “There was 15mm in the gauge when I left home,” stated another old-timer.
But the overall feeling was: “It’s beautiful rain. Good, steady, soaking and a couple more days on the way.”
But there’s no talk yet of miraculous rain.
Certainly not from David Drage of Lah, north of Warracknabeal, who has just lived through his own miracle.
His wife, Narelle, is in Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital, and will be for weeks, after giving birth to daughter, Amelia, by caesarean more than 12 weeks premature.
David, who has forearms the size of a normal bloke’s thigh, can hardly wait to get them home, and he hopes that by then his paddocks will be lush with newly sprouted crops to signify the drought is over.
But he’s being cautious.
His family has been on the same land for more than a century, and he’s seen promising rain dry up before.
“It’s not really enough to plant a crop on, but if it continues another 24 hours I and a lot of others will cautiously start their cropping programs,” he said.
“If we get 20 to 25mm over the next few days I’ll plant some canola and barley.”
David said he was probably being ultra-cautious, because in his 18 years on the family farm about two-thirds of the time had either been flood or drought, with a few good years in the middle.
At the Grampians Wimmera Mallee Water office in Horsham, the rain caught them by surprise.
Somehow the plastic bucket on the reception desk catching water as it leaked through the roof was appropriate.
“The danger is the crops might germinate, but then there may be no follow-up rain,” communications manager Helen Friend said.
Louise Hicks, from a fat-lamb and crop property at Neuarpurr, out of Horsham, wasn’t caught by surprise when the rain started tumbling down as she hit the Horsham shops.
She’d packed her multi-coloured golf umbrella, but that didn’t prepare her for flooded drains in parts of Horsham.