[2][3] The wet spell of the early 1890s ended earliest in the area between Melbourne and Sydney, where rainfall in 1894 was below normal even as much of inland Queensland and New South Wales had one of their wettest years on record.
Over all of Victoria and South Australia, however, extremely dry weather in October and November was sufficient to cause the failure of many wheat crops, whilst in East Gippsland these months saw unprecedented rainless spells.
Despite El Niño, drought-stricken Gippsland has one of its wettest winters on record as a series of storms produced torrential rains between Melbourne and Sydney—and around Hobart—in June and again in August.
This year began with cool, moist summer weather in most of Victoria and New South Wales, but conditions in Queensland, which had continued to have heavy rain during the "wet" season in 1895 and 1896 became drier.
April was particularly dry despite the breakdown of El Niño, as was May except in Gippsland, but June and July were very wet over inland New South Wales and northern Victoria (it was the wettest winter on record at some stations such as Nyngan and Echuca).
August saw good rains shift to South Australia and coastal Victoria, but despite continued good rains in September and October over inland New South Wales water supplies did not really recover owing to a very dry November and a hot December in inland regions, which saw temperatures again reach 40 °C (104 °F) in many parts of Victoria and not much less in Tasmania, where rainfall had again been deficient throughout the winter.
Heavy rains on the North Coast of New South Wales were of little use to an agricultural sector that was seeing many inland properties demonstrably overstocked based on expectations of higher rainfall than was falling.
August, though wet in southwestern Australia and the west of New South Wales, was extremely dry in the worst-hit areas of southern Victoria, whilst useful September rains did little to ameliorate the situation there.
The anticyclonic conditions, however, created a strong onshore flow that gave the cost of New South Wales almost continuous heavy rain: in Sydney the winter of 1899 was the second-wettest on record.
Dry conditions continued throughout the rest of the year except on the coast of New South Wales, and only the heavy June falls prevented grain crops being a total failure.
[10] Although in southwestern Australia—often looked upon as a "saviour" when the rains fail further east—the rainy season began on time in May, the dry weather continued without a break in the eastern states.
[11] Though September was wet over southern Western Australia and a single heavy storm produced above-average rainfall in eastern Tasmania and southern Victoria, and October saw very heavy coastal rains in New South Wales (Sydney's 162 millimetres (6.38 in) on the 13th is still its wettest-ever October day), unrelenting dryness inland combined with hot northerly winds saw one of the worst dust storms ever hit Melbourne on 12 November.
Overall for eastern states 1903 came out as the wettest year since 1894, even if its rainfalls were distinctly short of the high marks of the early 1890s except over western Victoria and parts of South Australia.
In East Gippsland and coastal regions of New South Wales the entire decade between 1901 and 1910 was consistently dry: Sydney did not exceed its long-term mean rainfall once, and Brisbane did so only twice between 1899 and 1915.
Climatologists today frequently view the Federation Drought as a major climate shift across eastern Australia from the wet period of the nineteenth century to a dry spell lasting until the mid-1940s.