The Shocked Vines The next day I photographed the vines beside our house. This view looks south, to the tanks at the rear of our house. Aunty Daisy's house is in the background. Before the hail hit, vines were on the point of flowering. The hail chopped canes off, or stripped them of all foliage. Growers decided to let the vines recover as nature permitted, only continuing to spray, cultivate and irrigate in the normal cycle of work. We hoped that sufficient canes would develop to give an average crop in 1978, after no crop for 1977. Strangely, the storm broke the financial treadmill of always borrowing against the coming crop to pay for the harvest, then just getting ahead if our season was good and a disaster else where in the world sultana industry meant our fruit was sold within the season. By the next crop, we had received all the money owed for the crops two and three years back. We all had 'Hail Insurance' but, as the storm was not one the insurers had catered for, each grower only received their insurance premiums as compensation, and a new Hail Insurance scheme was devised. Many of our neighbours sold their properties. We sold Block 204, and took a long service leave trip to England for a year and visited sultana producing areas in Iran, Turkey, Greece and California.

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