“Nanna, there are bees everywhere!” she exclaimed, her eyes wide.

Maggie smiled, scratching Blue behind the ears. “So do I, love. So do I.”

“It’s just spring having a tantrum,” she said. “It’ll be over in ten minutes.”

She was right. As quickly as it came, the storm passed. The sun re-emerged, setting the wet, shattered gum leaves on fire with diamond light. They went outside to find a double rainbow arcing over the barn, and the sweet, petrichor smell of rain on baked earth.

“Right then,” she said to her old kelpie, Blue. “Time to wake up.”

Later, as dusk settled—a long, golden dusk that didn’t belong to any other season—Maggie and Lila sat on the veranda. The last of the kangaroos were hopping back into the bush, their joeys’ heads poking out of pouches. The air was cool again, but not cold. It was the cool of a perfect, forgiving evening.

“That’s the smell of new things,” Maggie said. “In Australia, we don’t get a gentle spring. We get a sprint. Everything has to happen fast—the flowers, the storms, the baby animals. Because summer is just around the corner, and it’s a beast. So we enjoy this while we can.”

Spring in Australia doesn’t tiptoe in like an English visitor. It arrives like a surfer catching a break—all at once, bright and reckless. Within a week, the paddocks that had been brown and hard as biscuit were suddenly dotted with a thousand different greens. The ironbark trees, which had stood skeletal against the grey winter sky, began to fizz with new leaves. And the noise! The magpies were warbling their territorial, caroling songs at 4:30 in the morning, and the raucous screech of the sulphur-crested cockatoos meant they were stripping the almond tree in the back garden.