Warble gloaming.

Six inches of it just fell on Victoria.

IT WAS snow time in spring across Victoria yesterday. The cold snap dumped snow as low as 500 metres above sea level, with falls reported in areas including Mount Dandenong, around Ballarat and the ranges north-east of Melbourne.

Kinglake general store's Linda Hamer said snow began to fall at about midnight on Friday, blanketing the town ravaged by last year's Black Saturday bushfires and forcing road closures.

''It was amazing,'' Ms Hamer said. ''Australia's a strange country sometimes.''

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Kinglake Central farm manager Sue Rabjones said the snow was like a ''white wonderland''. ''It's quite beautiful. It was about five to six inches deep in some places,'' she said.

Of course weather is weather and not climate, and to their credit The Age managed to get through the whole article without a mention of carbon dioxide, AGW, CACC, or whatever is this week's term for the idea that we've angered the weather gods. Since every type of slightly unusual weather these days seems to be the fault of someone with a Range Rover or who flew on holiday or who doesn't get their electricity from a company with a lot if industrial bird mincers, and since the Fairfax group believe this enough to have collaborated with the WWF to invent Dirt Hour, I have to say I'm surprised. Perhaps they're struggling to link climate change supposedly driven by CO₂ forced warming with unseasonable snow falls, and to be fair that must be becoming an increasingly tough sell, but maybe they're going to start applying weather ≠ climate across the board now. Time will tell, and so despite the discomfort I'm hoping we get a run of four or five 40˚ days just to see how The Age report it (and I hope I remember to check). Perhaps I'm being unfair but I'm anticipating a return to form.