A searing heatwave is baking central and northern Australia, piling more misery on drought-hit cattle farmers who have been slaughtering livestock as Australia sweltered through the hottest year on record in 2013.
Temperatures have topped 40°C in large parts of Australia's key agricultural regions for most of the past week, with the mercury topping 48°C in the central west Queensland town of Birdsville.
The heatwave is moving east across Australia, prompting health warnings on Friday in some of the country's biggest cities and firefighters were already battling bushfires.
But it is in the outback that soaring temperatures have had the most devastating impact, especially on cattle farmers in Queensland, which accounts for about 50% on the national herd.
"Water supplies are fast diminishing and whatever feed supplies that were left are cooking off to the point where there won't be any left," said Charles Burke, a beef farmer and CEO of Agforce, a Queensland cattle industry group.
"This drought is shaping to be an absolute disaster."
Monsoon rains in Australia's north failed last summer and the entire continent endured its hottest year since records began in 1910, the Bureau of Meteorology said on Friday