Eden identity Betty Buckland who grew up on the family farm near Genoa said she could recall her father warning of his prediction that this century would begin with 10 years of drought.

Betty said her father had used Inigo Jones’s long-range forecasts, which guided farmers for more than half a century, to determine how many paddocks to lock up for hay.

Jones was a controversial figure who based his forecasts partly on sunspot activity and the orbits of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus as well as a detailed study of weather patterns over decades.

He believed that weather events moved in predictable cycles varying from as much as 20 to 100 years.

Internet searches confirm that shortly before his death in 1954, Jones predicted a 10-year drought across south eastern Australia from the turn of the century.

He saw conditions being similar to those prevailing during the great drought of 1902, sometimes referred to as the Federation drought.

Betty said the best hope now was that Jones was also right about the drought ending in 2010.

Internet versions of Jones’s long-range prediction models say that he predicted it would be at its most severe from 2007-09.

But once the drought does break, there are favourable seasonal conditions predicted for the next 25 years.

Jones operated from his Crohamhurst observatory in south east Queensland and his long-range forecasting work was carried on after his death by Lennon Walker, then his son Hayden Walker.