In the middle of the night there was a loud clap of thunder, followed by a flash of lightning, and then a heavy spray of rain that drummed on the roof for a good 20 minutes. This shouldn’t have been happening. We were in the worst drought in memory; there was no rain in the forecast; there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky when we got home at midnight.
‘Noah’s Ark,’ I said to my wife, who’d also been awakened by the thunder. Noah’s Ark was the name of a song we’d sung with our band earlier that night at the folk club, a song my wife wrote, a song that puts the wombat and the kangaroo in the story, alongside the lions and the lambs.
We had jokingly warned the audience that earlier public airings of the song (and even, on occasion, just singing it in the lounge room at home) had precipitated unanticipated falls of rain. They laughed obligingly but no one seriously thought it would rain. Not on a clear night in summer, in a drought. I didn’t really think it would myself.
But it did. The coincidences were beginning to look like a pattern, and not just in relation to Noah’s Ark. There were earlier indicators that my wife had an unusual affinity for drought-breaking rain.
Late in 1982 she returned to Australia after having lived overseas for five years. The east coast was in severe drought. Her life overseas had been arid too, but in the opening weeks of 1983, in the warm embrace of family and friends, the wellsprings of her spirit began once again to flow.
One evening in February 1983, as she sat on her sister’s bed, she began to cry. Nearby, her sister’s dog, a canine with uncanny human empathy, licked the tears away. The next day Labor won the federal election, Bob Hawke became prime minister, and it rained, and rained, and rained.
It might be stretching it to say that her arrival heralded the end of the drought. But I’m not so sure it was just coincidence. Recently, while interviewing my mother-in-law for a family history, I discovered an antecedent.
My wife was born in Medan, Sumatra, in 1951. Her mother, an American who later settled in Australia, was married to a Javanese dancer she had met overseas, and they had recently moved back to Indonesia, where they were living with his family.
My