Upper Hunter rainfall in 2019 down 60 per cent on its annual average, the Lower Hunter 40-50 per cent, and even Port Stephens had a third of its normal falls. Gloucester's December rainfall was 7.2 millimetres compared to its average of 102.4.

Murrurundi broke a rainfall record that's stood since 1888. Across the Hunter at other locations the second, third and fourth driest years on record were noted.

There are other numbers, though, in addition to the Bureau of Meteorology's meticulous recording of rainfall across the region. They are the years of previous droughts that farmers have used as a marker with which to compare this drought.

And they're worried. Records are exceeding the worst that was experienced at the height of the Millennium Drought in 2005, the big dries of the 1980s and 1940s and back to the Federation Drought. Some recall the drought that peaked in 1965 as the worst they've experienced.

The new numbers include costs as communities across the Hunter accept what former Gloucester mayor Julie Lyford describes as the "new normal" - where the Barrington River stops flowing across the Rocky Crossing causeway for the first time, and people are worried, but not surprised.

Those new numbers include $10,000 Gloucester farmer James McRae spent to drill a 40 metre bore to search for groundwater in an area usually celebrated for its lush pastures. They include the jump in water tanker refill costs from $180 to $400, and the 50 per cent drop in Gloucester's Christmas visitor numbers from standard years when the beautiful Barrington Tops town is a tourist magnet.

The new numbers from this new normal include farmers at Sandy Creek destocking for 18 months, where just one farm's 14 dams have shrivelled and dried, with only two still holding water.

The numbers from this unprecedented long dry are not just about rainfall, but lost productivity, and multiple communities adapting to a new normal where the unprecedented is almost unremarkable.

In the new normal of droughts and catastrophic fires the costs are piling up, and Australians are feeling not only the anxiety of what lies ahead, but how those costs are going to be met. For the here and now across many parts of the Hunter, a more basic concern is the most essential. Water.

Issue: 39,494.