I don’t depend directly on the land for my livelihood but many of our patients do, and the farmers and their families are struggling.

We live 10km out of Tamworth. Our garden is dying, we have no grass except the little bit watered by the grey water outflow. Everything is dusty and so dry. I have been buying water for most of the last year, every month another truckload.

Normally you don’t see roos except at dawn and dusk – now we see them any time of the day, they have come out of the hills and are in the paddocks, eating the last of the tall dead grass. Huge mobs. They are even coming into town, eating any grass or plants they can find. They are desperate.

Even the indigenous trees are dying. Driving in through the pass in the hills behind Tamworth, the gums on the ridgelines are starting to die – dead leaves, dead branches on almost every tree.

There are no frogs – the last six months we have hardly heard any frogs at all.

We are losing things that are precious to us – the breed lines for the farmers, the special trees and plants in our gardens and parks, the lovely green lawns we used to have. It seems so long since we have seen green grass, since we have heard rain on the metal roof. It is a hard slog, minimising water use, shuffling buckets of water out to the remaining treasured plants, knowing that it may all be useless unless the rain comes.

And yet, on the mainstream news bulletins, it is as if we don’t exist on the other side of the sandstone curtain. Weather reporters blab on about lovely clear skies and sunny weather as if the cities were all that mattered. But how will the people in the cities eat if the country isn’t producing food for lack of water?