There’s not much to Yarras, a suburb on the scenic Hastings River inland of New South Wales’ mid-north coast.
An hour’s drive west of Port Macquarie, and with a population of 65, the landscape around Yarras is dominated by farmland. To find a pub or general store you’ll need to travel 15 minutes down the Oxley Highway to the next village, Long Flat.
What Yarras does have, though, is the unenviable record of being the rainiest location in Australia this year.
Meteorologists have said it was an “exceptionally wet start to the year” in NSW and Queensland – and Yarras recorded 121 days of rain by 15 May, meaning only 14 days of the year have been dry.
That’s a month’s worth of rainy days more than Sydney, which in 2022 has had 90 days of rain, ahead of Brisbane and Darwin with 70 days each.
The Bureau of Meteorology defines rainy days as ones which recorded at least 0.2mm of rain.
Yarras resident Michael Prott has confronted a revolving door of challenges over the past three years from bushfires to drought, followed by Covid and now downpours and floods.
Working as a carpenter, subcontractor and labourer, he’s only picked up eight days of work over the past two months, and an attempt to diversify his income didn’t go to plan.
“We launched a kayaking and paddle tours business – Moon River paddle – at the start of this year and we were only able to run one paddle in the entire season,” Prott says.
Cattle farmer Phillip Morton lives in the next valley over from Yarras in Rollands Plains.
When there was a rare break in the rain a few weeks ago, Morton planted winter feed for his livestock. But a fortnight of persistent rainfall rotted every seed he’d planted, resulting in $5,000 worth of damage.
“I hope I don’t sound like a whinging farmer,” he says. “It’s better than drought but I’d like to see a bit more scattering of the rain.”
Of the 10 places in Australia with the most rainy days this year, eight were in NSW. Yarras’s 121 days of rain in 2022 puts it just outside the top five for rainiest starts to a year, a list dominated by locations in the tropics. Lockhart River had only six days without rain by 15 May in 1977.
Ben Domensino, a meteorologist from Weatherzone, says Sydney reached its annual average rainfall before Easter this year – the earliest date on record. Brisbane had one of its top three or four wettest starts to a year on record.
Brisbane has been the wettest capital city this year, with 1060mm of rain, ahead of Darwin’s 1013mm and Sydney’s 967mm. While Perth and Adelaide are yet to record 100mm.
“It’s been an exceptionally wet start to the year with persistent rain but also some very big rain events,” Domensino says.
“Some of the biggest anomalies that we’ve seen have been on the eastern side of the Great Dividing Range in NSW and south-east Queensland.
“[In Sydney] the dams are full and the ground is still completely saturated.”
The heavy downpours have sparked anxiety for those whose livelihoods depend on the weather. Working as a recruiter for a Sydney construction company, Jose Dominguez says the first question people ask him is whether they’ll be working outside.
“This year it’s been raining a lot and when you are paying rent or you have kids, it’s tough when you don’t have secure work,” he says.
“As a company we try to help people as much as we can but sometimes jobs depend on the weather and when it’s raining it affects everyone.”
But the wet weather isn’t looking like it will let up soon. Domensino says many locations in Australia will see historic levels of rainfall this year.
He says La Niña is still lingering over the Pacific Ocean and on the other side of Australia, a negative Indian Ocean Dipole is starting to develop.
“That will mean that we’re about to [get] more moisture coming across the Indian Ocean over the next three to six months,” Domensino says.
“That is likely to cause more above average rainfall over large areas of Australia in winter and spring.”
