Despite a big downpour last week, the town is on the cusp of yet another water supply crisis. Walcha already is under level three water restrictions, meaning residents can only use hand-held hoses for 30 minutes of the day at specific times. For the rest of the time they have to use buckets to carry water.

The plight of Walcha epitomises how governments  struggle to deliver water security to regional areas. For Walcha residents, it’s galling that in the hometown of former The Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, who only last year told the NSW Farmers’ membership to “put dams in” and ask questions later, that his town still awaits a solution to its water woes.

Federal funds are flowing to do a water security study but a decision seems a long way off.

Walcha mayor Eric Noakes admits: “Walcha has one of the worst secure water supplies in NSW.”  Although the recent rain heavy rain - nearly 100mm was recorded in Walcha last week - was terrific, he says:  “one swallow doesn’t make a summer”.

The  Macdonald river ran a little faster, but the two 100 megalitres of off-river water storages are still under pressure. It’s a fingers-crossed water supply system with one of the off-river storages a farmer’s dam. Mr Noake’s favoured solution is a new 600-800 megalitre off-river storage, but when or where that is built is anyone’s guess.

Walcha’s water supply from the Macdonald makes a circuitous route overland and uphill before it reaches the town. The most precarious thing is that the water is there at all. Not only has the Macdonald River stopped running but also the Barnard River further south towards Taree. The area from the Manning River down to the Illawarra (including drought-stricken areas of the Hunter) is one of the driest areas in Australia, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Walcha Council’s water and sewer supervisor Kevin Creighton was at the McDonald river pump station at "Mulyerindie" last week and saw there wasn’t much room to budge. It will only take another small drop before the council has to pump water from a farmer’s dam, which is the town’s emergency backup. He says it is a bit of a juggling act as once the farmer’s dam is drained then they can’t fill it up again. The water is pumped 20km into Walcha for the town, flowing up a hill that is a 400m climb across the range.   

In 23 years, Mr Creighton has only seen the river stop twice, but in just the last two months he has seen it stop two  times. And he's never seen blue green algae in the river before, until now. There had also been a blackwater event with dissolved oxygen levels and dead eels in the nearby Apsley River recently. The Walcha council pump starts sucking air when the Macdonald is at 2.85m. On Tuesday last week the river’s level was 3.3m

But in this big dry, the farms are also suffering from the extraordinarily hot, dry summer.

Andrew Locke, “Yerrawun”, had 25mm in the most recent rain. It was good soaking rain but there was little run-off into his dams. He relies on bores to water his stock, Angus and Angus cross cows,  Merino and crossbred sheep.

The dry has forced him to feed his cattle cottonseed and faba beans to his sheep to keep them up to the mark. He, like many in the area has noticed a change in the weather patterns, with lower summer rainfall, with moist easterly airstreams rarely flowing up on to the Tablelands now. Plenty in the district on the heavier soils missed out on the rain.

“I’ll still be feeding cottonseed to some cows, but we don’t want to be doing that for a long time. We’ll sell some cows before we feed them that long.” Strong store cattle and lamb prices had helped farmers cope with the dry, which was different from previous big dry spells. The rain had lifted his ryegrass up, but he was now wondering with drier hotter summers if ryegrass was a good option.

Farmers would be able to get some forage crops in before the colder weather set in on the back of the rain.

“We had no run-off from the 25mm so water is still an issue. Soil moisture levels are very low. They have been low since September,” Mr Locke said.

As Walcha prepares for its 141st Show this weekend (March 9-10), the many keen gardeners in the area are struggling to get top notch exhibits ready for the horticulture section.

Phyllis Hoy, who lives on one of the family blocks, "Miltiades", has been busy checking how the agapanthus in her garden is  faring after the high heat, she noticed was “different” this summer.  Mrs Hoy is head steward of horticulture at the show and says the Walcha gardens have suffered badly in the area from the extreme heat and dry. The recent rain, with another 20mm on Monday morning, has spruced things up for the show with the showground bare after a campdraft six weeks ago, but now quickly turning green with new grass.

She says it was a worry the Macdonald had stopped flowing. Two dams on her property were dry.

“We’ve had a lot of dry times but this was one was very different. It was the extreme heat, and it was very harsh on stock, people and everything.”

Mrs Hoy is entered in the frenetic tussle for the Olga Lisle trophy, named in honour of a renowned local decorative flower craftswoman. “That’s the trophy all the girls are aiming to win,” she says. She says despite the dry entries are good.

But after all the big hot summer, it will, as the song says,  be a good year for the roses. The hot conditions have helped bring out some great roses in time for the show exhibits.

Assistant Walcha show secretary Chris Hamel agrees that the weather patterns have changed on the Tablelands.

“We used to get a lot of moist air moving in from the coast in summer but they no longer reach us,” Mrs Hamel said. But she says she doesn’t mind if the Walcha Show is a wet one this year. “That would be a blessing,” she says. “We wouldn’t mind that at all.” But she says Walcha people are resilient, and despite the pressure to get stock and exhibits ready for the show with the dry and heat, the show will be a success.