The few drops that fell on the windscreen on the way to work on Wednesday morning barely made a mark on the region’s rain gauges.

Just 0.2mm of rain was recorded at the Bureau of Meteorology’s weather station at Bathurst Airport, taking the total rainfall for July to a paltry 4.8mm.

That comes on top of a near-record June low of just 3.6mm, making a total of 8.4mm for the whole of winter so far.

To put those numbers into even starker perspective, the long-term average for June in Bathurst is 39.7mm and the July average is 45.2mm.

And this year’s long dry comes after one of the wettest winters on record in 2016 when an incredible 104.8mm of rain fell in June and 87.4mm in July – including a remarkable 37.2mm in just one day.

The dire conditions have local producers looking nervously to the season ahead and already there have been reports of farmers ploughing in crops that had been sowed around May – gambling on the “late break” that never came.

Some producers have also been forced to start hand-feeding stock and some wonder if we are heading back to the bad old days of the early 2000s drought.

It’s a terrible thought.

Now we have had the Rural Fire Service add its concerns to the mix.

In most years, late July would be no time to be seriously thinking about the threat of bushfires – but this is not most years.

The dry conditions have the RFS worried about the bushfire season ahead, saying it would be much worse than last year.

And RFS Chifley/Lithgow Team operational officer Brett Taylor told the Western Advocate there had already been a number of fires this past week, including two planned hazard reduction burns on private property in Billywillinga on the weekend that escaped containment lines.

If we’re seeing this in July, who knows what January and February might hold?

Rarely has Dorothea Mackellar’s “droughts and flooding rains” been more apt than across Bathurst in the past year.

It’s hard to believe to incredible change to our district in just 12 months, but it’s a stark reminder of the incredibly harsh – and incredibly beautiful – land we live in.