After a season's worth of soaking rain, water, birds and even fish have returned to mercurial Lake George, often maligned as little more than a damp paddock.

Just months ago, Tarago grazier Luke Osborne was fattening his Angus cattle where a sheet of water stretching as far as the eye can see now laps at his feet.

The return of water to the lake has been welcomed by Mr Osborne, whose family have lived on the eastern shore for 150 years.

He can remember his uncle windsurfing across the wide, shallow body of water, but not since the 1990s has he seen the ancient lake hold so much water.

"It's really only filled up in the last few weeks. It fills up from this side first, it's a little bit deeper and the prevailing wind blows it over this side so it's just been steadily filling up all winter," Mr Osborne said.

It was the third wettest winter in Canberra since records began, with the lake filling and emptying again in early June fuelled by an intense weather system on the NSW coast.

Mr Osborne said it was the first time his 11-year-old son Tom had seen the lake really looking like a lake.

"Tom was born in the millenium drought well and truly, and it was very dry," Mr Osborne said.

"I was only thinking going into winter I remember as a kid being constantly bogged, getting one vehicle bogged trying to pull another out. It seems hard to imagine that ever happening again, but here we are a few months later bogged up to our eyebrows."

Mr Osborne has watched the levels of lake ebb and flow his entire life.

"As a kid I remember it being both wet and dry. I remember fishing in it and I remember catching redfin, but I also remember riding my motorbike when I was Tom's age right across to the highway and back, it was completely dry," he said.

"It was very treacherous riding a motorcycle across it because there's a lot of fences strung up. There's a lot of fence posts dating back at least 100 years so you get accustomed to them, but every now and again you'd find a piece of wire strung between them so you could be garrotted."

There's no redfin nowadays, but Mr Osborne said some fish were being washed in.

"We found quite a large fish washed up on one of the creek mouths recently so there's certainly some fish going on. Probably mostly carp unfortunately, but there might be some good species," he said.

Even black swans have settled on the lake's placid surface, although it is unclear how long the water will hold.

"It takes a while to dry off from this sort of state, but it can dry off fairly quickly and that's just a balance between evaporation and rainfall. It doesn't have much of a catchment, the lake, and the evaporation is obviously quite high so there's a fine balance between rainfall and evaporation," Mr Osborne said.

Lake George has long been shrouded in mystery, with bunyip sightings and several drowning deaths adding to its sinister reputation.

But it's not just the beauty and mystery of the lake that endears it to those who live on its edges.

"It also provides a sense of security in a way that you've got this great body of water up wind of you and on the land we're concerned about bushfires and there's this great bushfire break ahead of us," Mr Osborne said.

"When things get really dry it becomes this big bed of grass, which helps you out with your animals during a drought, it's a great blessing, practically well as aesthetically."