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HUMPTY DOO - When the heavens open over the savannah floodplains and billabongs of northern Australia, it seems like it will rain forever.
Great black storms march across the landscape, drenching the cattle ranches, national parks and Aboriginal reserves which make up Australia's "Top End".
Thousands of miles to the south, however, in the most populous states of New South Wales and Victoria, the fields are parched, livestock are dying and farmers face ruin as the worst drought in a century grinds on.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Australians are drawing a link between the barely populated, rain-soaked north and the intensively farmed, dry-as-dust south, where the mighty Murray and Darling rivers are being slowly bled to death.
This week a government taskforce will begin studying the prospects of encouraging Australia's farmers to bow to the harsh realities of drought and climate change, and head north.
There are dreams of opening up northern Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory to cotton, rice and citrus fruits.
"Northern Australia is one of the last agricultural frontiers left on the planet," said Bill Heffernan, a government senator who is chairing the A$20 million ($22.6 million) taskforce. "Because of the way Australia was settled, it really hasn't been tapped."
Many older farmers will be reluctant to leave land their families have worked for generations, concedes Senator Heffernan, who has the ear of the Prime Minister, John Howard.
"But I'm talking about the young blokes, the guys in their 30s. I've got dairy farmers down in Victoria ringing me up and saying, 'When can we go'? It's a case of 'Go north, young man'."
The radical proposal is backed by towns across the undeveloped north, a two million square kilometre belt of tropical savanna renowned for its lingering frontier feel, Aboriginal settlements and giant saltwater crocodiles.
"Someone needs to make a hard decision and say, 'Let's move the people to where the water is'," John Wharton, an outspoken mayor from Richmond Shire, northern Queensland, said last month.
Proponents of this grand vision say the region's proximity to Asia - Darwin is closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney or Melbourne - make it profitable to grow specialty vegetables such as bok choi for burgeoning Asian markets.
Scientists predict a 15 per cent decline in rainfall in the south in coming decades as a result of climate change. The north, in contrast, is likely to get wetter - it appears that industrial pollution from Southeast Asia is intensifying the monsoon and increasing rainfall over the region.
But history carries some sober warnings for farmers who think northern Australia is an agricultural El Dorado.
Just east of the curiously named town of Humpty Doo, in the Northern Territory, is a vast lagoon, where fish eagles swoop above the paperbark trees and storks pick their way among lily pads.
It is a birdwatchers' paradise, but it started out in the 1950s as an ambitious agricultural enterprise known as the Humpty Doo Rice Project. Despite rich soils and plentiful water, it was a disaster. Magpie geese ate the rice seed, buffalo destroyed the paddies and seasonal rains proved erratic. Within a decade, it was abandoned.
"The idea of the north as a potential food bowl for Asia is largely a mirage," said Stuart Blanch, a tropical rivers expert with WWF-Australia. "Although we get a lot of rainfall, it's erratic - we never know when the monsoon will start. Even during the wet season, it may rain heavily for a week, then we get nothing for two weeks."
Much of the soil across the north is of poor quality and the region is a long way away from its main market - the populated southeast of Australia - making transportation of agricultural produce expensive.
Rather than pursuing intensive farming, environmentalists say it would be better to preserve the region's great savanna woodlands to lock up vast amounts of carbon and contribute to Australia's efforts to lower its CO2 emissions.
With its proximity to Indonesia and East Timor, its cloying humidity and a multicultural mix of whites, Aborigines and Asians, the far north of Australia feels almost like a different country to the south.
Some locals say they are tired of having grandiose projects foisted on them by lawmakers in faraway Canberra.
"The general feeling up here is that southerners don't have a clue what they'd be letting themselves in for," said Jemma Walshe, of the Co-operative Research Centre for Tropical Savannas Management at Charles Darwin University.
"We've got a lack of people, a lack of infrastructure, a lack of everything. It would be extremely difficult for a dairy farmer from Victoria to come up here. The monsoonal cycle of dry and wet seasons requires totally different land management techniques."
But Senator Heffernan insists: "There's millions of acres up there that could be made more productive. As countries like China and India start to face water scarcity, this could be a huge advantage for Australia."
