37 degrees Celsius (99 in old money) yesterday.

A dust storm came through last night that reduced visibility to under a mile in places. The dust stretched from Mt Isa in North Queensland to Wollongong, south of Sydney - around 1500 miles. I haven't seen anything like it for nearly 20 years.

This should all build up to a good thunderstorm about Sunday. God knows we need it - most of Queensland (500,000 square miles) has been declared as drought stricken and large parts of the rest of Australia are the same.