My grandfathers, their lips seeming to crack in the telling, acquainted me with stories of great droughts. The one that started in the 1890s and went till 1902, known as the Federation Drought; the big dry of 1911-1915 that drove thousands of young men off the land and into the arms of recruiters for World War I. The big one in the 1930s and '40s that brought the Black Friday bushfires of January 1939, when one of my great-grandfathers, running from the flames, got caught in a fence and had the skin scorched off his back. I watched my own father staring at the sky, willing it to rain, from 1966 to 1968. As a journalist I looked into desperate eyes of other farmers during the fierce drought of 1982-83 that brought the agony of Victoria’s Ash Wednesday. Naringal Primary School, near Warrnambool, was burnt to the ground on Ash Wednesday in 1983. Credit:Fairfax Archives And during the long terrible years after the turn of the century, I spoke with women in the Mallee so afraid they were about to lose their men to despair they went bush and danced naked together, praying it was a rain dance.

But as we sat in our little pocket of green down Victoria's south-west coast a week and a half ago, scrolling through our Facebook feeds with rain falling outside and trying not to think of the waterless north, something new happened. Facebook was barely used in Australia during the last great dry, known as the Millennium Drought, a national suffering that began in the late 1990s and continued all the way to 2010, when it was doused in floods. Facebook didn’t even have a “like” button until 2009. Allansford Hotel owner Dianna McLean and staff member Jordy Muller with some of the donations for a Drought Relief Fundraiser on August 18. Credit:Christine Ansorge Here, these years later, a Facebook chat site for members in far south-west Victoria popped up with two messages that confirmed social media wasn’t just for social catch-ups and pictures of doggies and vanity selfies and rants.

The first informed that a company named Tober Fish, from the city of Portland, wanted to fill its large refrigerated truck with household goods and take it to drought-stricken families up north. Owner Daniel Hogan later said he’d been out to sea, fishing, when he started thinking about how he, a primary producer on the water, could help primary producers in crisis on the land. And so was born “Fill the Truck”: a call for donations that soon was being shared across Facebook, and which hit the front page of the local newspaper. Within days, collection points were groaning with packaged foods, pantry requirements, treats, kids’ toys, gift vouchers and just about anything anyone could think might be useful for country families in need. Amanda Kinross, the woman behind the "parma for a farmer" campaign. A few days later came an even more intriguing post.

It was a simple message: what if pubs and clubs were to donate $1 to the drought effort for every parmigiana they served their customers? A parma to help a farmer! The idea, as just about everyone knows now, went viral. It came from a young mother who runs a cake business in Bendigo, Amanda Kinross. She was, she said, wondering during a sleepless night what on earth she could do to help those brought low by drought, and began playing with the word “farmer”. Canberra Demons player Alex Paech with his parma for a farmer at the Eastlakes club in Gungahlin. Credit:Jamila Toderas “And somehow, I came up with this rhyming thing, parma for a farmer, and I posted it on the local Facebook chat group called Bendigo Have Your Say,” she said.

“I thought it would be seen by about 15 people. Just a chatty thing. “But it went absolutely crazy. Within minutes there were hundreds of responses, including from three pubs saying they were on board. A local radio DJ on Triple M, a guy called Cogho, read my post and asked if he could use it on his show.” Within a week there seemed barely a pub or licensed club in Australia that hadn’t signed up to Parma for a Farmer, and pizza parlours and retailers of all manner had joined in, donating a dollar or two (and some as much as $10) for each item they sold. Drought aid concerts were organised, and social groups all over took to organising parma outings. Kinross found herself overwhelmed. Loading

To handle the large sums of promised money sluicing in, she nominated an established drought charity, “Buy a Bale”, which has purchased and delivered more than 160,000 bales of hay since it was established during the Queensland drought of 2013. A volunteer helped her set up a Parma for a Farmer website. The website linked to Buy a Bale’s site ... which promptly crashed, so heavy was the traffic. “That was just a week ago,” says Kinross. “I just chose Buy a Bale because it was the only one I knew about. And it’s not just bales of hay. It’s too late for some farmers - they’ve lost all their animals and their crops, so it’s food vouchers, water in their tanks, even counselling ... whatever they need.” And so, in the age of much-decried social media, plain humanity and a simple idea manage to shine through the electronic static.