Pretty well his only topic of conversation was the drought. Like all farmers, he knew the rainfall by the millimetre - and its shortfall for the day of the month by the millimetre.

Everybody did. He spoke of a farmer in the area who had. It played on their minds, day and night.

He told me about another farmer there who had had to "cut his neighbour down". Those were the horrible words he used, whispering them, barely able to utter them.

In that part of country Australia, drought was and is a matter of life and death, and if in life, it is a matter of mental health.

To state the obvious, if there is no rain, there is no grass, no pasture, so cattle and sheep can't graze. They starve and die or they are sold for slaughter early. Or farmers have to buy in hay and that is crippling financially.

There is a dilemma for them, a gamble. They have to calculate whether rains will come, so they can hang on in expectation or sell now rather than have to sell stock later at rock bottom prices.

Or to kill cattle later when the drought gets even worse. The longer they wait, the lower the price. There is a saying here which I've heard from farmers faced with killing their cattle: "Better to sell them, than smell them."

You see the signs of the drought everywhere. Everybody is holding a fund-raiser under the banner "R U Aware We Care". When I was there, the high school had a concert to raise money on the Thursday. There was a raffle and barbecue at the Royal Hotel there on Saturday. There was a "drought forum" the following week where the Salvation Army gave farmers advice on how to get assistance.

On the road out of town, herds of 500 cattle were being driven by drovers on horse-back with cattle dogs, dusty images from another century. There are what are called "long paddocks" there - long, long cross country routes where settlers used to drive cattle to ports and rail heads. These routes still have legal status and are often alongside modern roads - and they have grass along them.

Or rather, they did. Before they, too, were bare, farmers in the worst affected areas would truck their cattle up to feed on the grass that was still in this region.

Now, that, too has gone.

I drove around and saw cattle and sheep eating earth to get the scant blades of grass hiding in the middle of it.

In Britain - the green and pleasant land, drought means not watering the lawn for a few weeks. It seems serious. It is not. It happens every few years in the newspapers' "silly season". Parliament is on holiday so is everyone else who might make news, so a few grumpy gardeners complaining about the crisis of a brown lawn refreshes the pages and TV news shows nicely.

Little do they know. In Australia, droughts continue for years. They occur about every decade or so and those who know that prepare - they sell and hunker down.

But there are many who don't.

Local doctors testify about the strain on sanity and on marriages (not that local doctors are abundant in many of the drought stricken areas).

Here's how one GP's advice sheet puts it: "Drought affects family relationships. Stress and worry increase irritability, and partners and children are required to become more involved in farming tasks. Fear of suicide can be of particular concern."

Farmers don't just work the land, they are part of it. It is their very being. When the land fails them, they despair. And desperation leads to tragedy.

It's easy to think all this is far away. We city folk live in another world from deep country Australia, so we imagine.

But droughts affect wider areas than the properties out of sight up long lanes.

They hit the small shops in the country town. Businesses across the broader economy suffer when farm incomes fall.

Keeping country Australia alive means keeping the whole of Australia alive. You and me, too.