The rain pounds on the tin roof. Overflows the gutters and cascades to the ground below, creating a perimeter of small pits in line with the overhang of the bullnose verandah. It squalls overland in the dark. Bends the stalks of the Weeping Grass and weighs down its pale seed heads, a grey wall joining the land and the sky. Drops collect on stamens and the fine hairs of an insect’s legs – a bolt of lightning and they appear to be glass. The desert swamps fill from the fall itself and the run-off from Black Box trunks and the backs of Australasian Grebes. It dilutes the salt that dried around the fringes of pans, water spreading across country, flat sheets of it, like a creature on the move.

As the clouds disperse, the earth erupts. Amphibious mouths mewl, framed in grit, eyes bulging at the moonlight that now bleaches the land. Noisy aestivators, resistant as the stars, they have waited for a long time, a metre below, their burrows sometimes refuges for years at a time. Their northern cousins shed the cocoons they have wrapped around their bodies to protect from water loss, casting off a version of themselves as they climb towards the rain. But these emerge hard-skinned, the spade-like structure on their hind legs propelling them to the surface, each one no bigger than a dollar coin.

Craa-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awk.

This is the reprise of the Common Spadefoot Toad.

It draws in breath and closes its nostrils. Air passes back and forth between its lungs and its vocal sac, until it begins to vibrate amid the cords, calling in a mate as it floats in the new wet. Before nightfall of the coming day, a thousand pigmented eggs will be strung on jelly strands and wrapped around the submerged stalks of Water Ribbon, where they will soon hatch, tiny silver bodies swarming the water that will be both birthplace and grave.

Craa-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-awk.

The song of revival.