It is a different story inland, where the same weather has farmers struggling to survive.

"It costs about A$100 ($75) an acre to plant a crop. So for 1,000 acres that's A$100,000. You do that the first year. That's a hundred grand cheque written. No income," said Mal Peters, president of the New South Wales Farmers' Association.

"Second year a hundred grand written. No income. Third year cheque written, no income. Fourth year, and some of these guys have 3,000 acres, you're getting a bit skinny on your cash flow," he said, with typical Australian understatement.

"Can you imagine rocking up to work for three years without getting a cheque?" asked Peters, a grazier who heads Australia's largest farmers' organisation.

Drought conditions in southeastern Australia this year have once again reached a critical point for winter crops, with the first to be planted, oilseed canola, now all but written off.

After years of drought, the big question is being asked: has Australia become just too dry to run a A$30 billion a year farm export industry, one of the largest in the world?

INSIDIOUS TREND

Climatologist Roger Stone raises the frightening prospect of eastern Australia having to live with drought as the normal state. Australia seemed headed toward a near-permanent El Nino weather condition, Stone, science manager for the Queensland Department of Primary Industries, told Reuters.

Triggered by abnormal sea temperatures, El Nino is blamed for Australia's severe 2002 drought, which slashed crops and caused a liquidation of the nation's livestock. In the late 1990s another El Nino caused famine and deaths among Papua New Guinea highlanders and choked Southeast Asia with forest fires.

"It's an insidious downward trend," Stone said of rainfall in Australia's farming heartland, in eastern and southern regions.

"We're worried that the trend might continue ... Many climate models suggest a near-El Nino mean state ... could be the norm for the future," he said.

Big tropical depressions which in past decades regularly formed off Australia's eastern coast to bring good rainfall to farmland had been reduced to one or two a year as near-El Nino conditions steered rain to Australia's northwest, he said.

This year, Australia's northern summer monsoons also failed. Stone blames long-term climate change and global warming for sending rain from eastern and southern growing fields to the Northern Territory and northwest Western Australia.

"We can't muck around too long on this. Some of the trends taking place, even by themselves, are alarming," he said.

Prime Minister John Howard toured parts of drought-stricken New South Wales state on Friday, where families farming 92 percent of the state's agricultural land are receiving government assistance.

The federal government has already spent more than A$670 million ($507 million) on direct drought assistance to farmers and Howard held out the prospect of more aid.

ANTARCTIC SPIN

Global warming and ozone depletion were causing westerlies that circulate around the Antarctic to contract further towards the pole, like an ice skater spinning faster, Grant Beard, spokesman for the federal Bureau of Meteorology, said.

This was affecting Australia's weather, especially in the south, diminishing "those big, nice widespread rainbands" that spin off from deep low-pressure centres born over chilly Antarctic waters.

Disillusioned by eroding margins, isolation and drought, Australian farmers have been leaving the land for decades.

Many of the country's 15,000 cropping farms, 14,000 mixed livestock-crops farms, 12,000 sheep farms, 20,000 beef cattle spreads and 8,000 sheep-beef farms have been selling out to bigger farmers. But there is a change from the past.

The big drought of 1890 to 1900 caused a major retreat and reassessment by farmers, said Mick Keogh, executive director of the Australian Farm Institute, a research and policy group.

But while the number of farms is again in decline, farm acreage has been maintained. Drought is creating bigger farms.

SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY

Improved technology is also underpinning a stoic band of optimists on the land.

In the past, dry weather during the six-week wheat planting window left farmers with little choice but to plant in dust in the hope that rain would fall.

Today, Australian farmers are not ploughing up everything in sight but using minimum-till technology that allows rapid responses to rainfall; they drive tractors guided to pin-point precision by satellite navigation; they are using integrated pest management systems; some industries are using biotechnology.

"There's a whole lot of things happening out there," said Peter Corish, president of the National Farmers' Federation.

While there is nothing like a crop, minimum-till technology meant farmers did not always have to lose an investment in wasted seed and fertiliser, Keogh said.

Farmers are also surviving drought by working off-farm, where possible, and selling off parts of farms as lifestyle blocks.