Most of it has been helping to boost Chaffey –  which hit 51.2 per cent on Monday and was rising with the rainfall – a figure that equates to about 85 per cent on the old, smaller dam size. The intermittent rain over August has been the icing on the cake for the Sylvester cattle station operation.

“This is looking like the best start to spring that I’ve seen in the 10 years we’ve been here,” Mr Sylvester said two weeks back. “And we had something like 17inches (about 430mm) in eight weeks; yep, that’s a record for us.”

When The Leader spoke to him he was upbeat about the prospects – even though he was preparing to send a herd of his weaner stock out west on agistment to give them some dry feed. The rain and a mild winter temperature-wise have added to the great conditions.

“We’ll bring them back maybe in September..... that’s a head start for spring,” he said. 

The Nundle spring doesn’t start for a few weeks after places lower down the slopes and October is their peak time before there’s a boost to pasture growth and given the good runs of warm sunny days they’d seen in late July and early August, things are definitely looking positive.

It’s a case of all the rivers run, including the gullies and streams, and it’s been a case of most of it filling his dams and the overflow finding its way down from his Wombramurra station to the dam. His 12,000 acres running about 2,500 head this year is cut in half by the Peel River up there. His 90-odd dams, were all full, some of them smaller but many reasonably large so it was smiles all round. 

He’s one of a couple of landowners in that space high above the Nundle hills where the Peel River rises, to flow down the western slopes of the range and into Chaffey Dam.

They’re called the Chaffey rain-makers with very good reason.