In the slanting, late-afternoon summer sun, the fields around the small Australian town of Ouyen – almost 450km north-west of Melbourne – turn the colour of honey. The edges shimmer with silver, that old cruel trick of feigning water where it hasn’t rained for weeks.
Summer is always hot out here in the sparse, flat Mallee, but this year is shaping up to be particularly harsh. Just two weeks ago, on Thursday 8 January, Ouyen got to 47.5C. On Monday it reached 44.3C.
On Tuesday, according to preliminary data, the nearby Mallee towns of Hopetoun and Walpeup reached 48.9C, but the BoM said temperatures at the Ouyen Post Office could have reached even higher.
This might seem insignificant, were it not the highest recorded temperature in Victoria’s history.
But it’s just one extremely hot day here among many: the fifth day in a row that temperatures have exceeded 40C, with four more forecast to follow. The harvested fields are bleached yellow and the earth is a sweep of red dust. It hasn’t rained since before Christmas.
For most locals, the heights of such days are best enjoyed behind a thick pane of glass and down-draught from a functioning air-conditioning unit.
“When it gets hot like that, not many people are out working unless you have to be,” Deane Munro says. “Most places just bunker down – do a bit in the mornings and bunker down in the afternoons … We just try to make sure we work our week out so you don’t have to work in those conditions.”
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The 54-year-old is a fourth-generation farmer and Ouyen local. He grows wheat, barley, lentils, hay, oats and vetch on 25,000 acres he runs with his brother. Their father and uncle still work on the property with them, and the next generation is gearing up to join them.
They had a good harvest last year, Munro says, but it was dry.
Australia’s average temperatures were up 1.23C nationally in 2025, the country’s fourth-warmest year on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. The climate crisis has increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, including heatwaves and bushfires, and the long-range forecast is for hotter-than-average days and nights to continue until April for much of the country.
Munro does not acknowledge the anthropogenic origins of the climate crisis, but says he is “absolutely” worried about it getting hotter.
“We’re at 12-inch rainfall. We don’t have to miss out on any more than one or two rains and we can’t grow a crop, so we are very worried about that,” he says. “We’re never going to be on the wetter side here, it’s always going to the dry side.”
The family have altered their farming practices over the past two decades to adjust for drier conditions, including more regular crop rotation and planting practices that don’t “rip up the ground” as much. “Our moisture conservation over summer has been exceptionally good,” Munro says.
But that only goes so far. “We’re doing a lot of things like that, that allows us to grow bigger crops on less rainfall. But it’s going to come to a point where that doesn’t work at all.”
With the extremely high temperatures comes extreme fire danger. Munro says he hasn’t been too worried about bushfires this week, because the winds have been low. But the animals, and particularly the wildlife, are still vulnerable.
“There won’t be anyone that’s got livestock that’s not checking their water once or twice a day making sure everything’s right,” he says. “But certainly wildlife does suffer in these conditions.”
Bushfires that start in heat like this can be devastating. Out-of-control fires were still burning elsewhere in Victoria, and Munro says a fire that burnt through more than 55,000 hectares of country at Boinka just two weeks ago, the last time temperatures soared close to 48C, resulted in a scale of wildlife loss that shocked him.
“I’ve never seen so many dead animals. It was just so fast-moving and so hot – I’ve never seen such a hot burn there either. There were literally tens of thousands of dead animals. That was really disappointing to see,” Munro says.
As Tuesday wears on and the temperature climbs, the heat becomes heavy and insistent, pressing sharply through clothes, sunglasses, windows and walls. A statewide warning issued by emergency authorities in the preceding days noted the health dangers of such extreme heat, especially to elderly people, very young children and people with pre-existing medical conditions or those who are socially isolated.
For people raised in this climate, however, extreme heat is business as usual.
For Lillian Hickmott, air conditioners are a luxury. The 86-year-old grew up in Nyah West, with her 16 siblings on a fruit block growing sultanas, currants and other kinds of grapes. Huge peppercorn trees lined the driveway.
“When it was hot, like these days, Mum would say, righto, the coolest place is out under the peppercorn trees,” Hickmott says. “We’d sit there and play. We’d have the baby out there in the pram with the fly net over so … the flies and mosquitoes couldn’t get the bub.”
They would squeeze lemons from their enormous lemon tree to make lemonade, using cool water from a large canvas bag that hung in the shade.
The house Hickmott’s family lived in was corrugated iron lined with hessian. In summer, Hickmott says, it became stuffy and hot; it was impossible to sleep inside, so they’d burn cow pats to ward off mosquitoes and drag their mattresses outside on to the limestone to sleep, only going back inside a few hours before dawn when it had cooled down.
These days, Hickmott says, “we’re absolutely spoiled.” Most young people “wouldn’t survive the way we did” because they hadn’t experienced life without air conditioning.
“They can step inside and turn on a fan.”
