ABSTRACT
The ability to forecast rainfall several months or seasons in advance has been a goal of water resource managers for many decades. Forecasting rainfall is very essential in developing a water resource management strategy to check the balance of future water supply and demand to ensure proper water supplies to the people. A reliable rainfall forecast can be beneficial for the management of land and water resources systems (Anwar et al. 2008, Cuddy et al. 2005), particularly inAustralia where the hydro-climatic variability is very high (Peel et al. 2001). Many researchers have tried to establish the relationships between large-scale climate drivers and rainfall in different parts around the world (Grimm 2011, Shukla et al. 2011). Australian rainfall is highly variable both in space and time. The variability of Australian rainfall has been linked to several dominant large-scale climate predictors including the ENSO, IOD and SAM (Chowdhury & Beecham 2013, Cai et al. 2011, Kirono et al. 2010, Risbey et al. 2009, Meneghini et al. 2007). A number of researches in different parts of Australia tried to find out the relationship between the climate drivers and Australian rainfalls. Some of them covering the whole of Australia are Kirono et al. 2010, Risbey et al. 2009, Meneghini et al. 2007, Cai et al. 2001, while the others are more concentrated on a specific region like South West Western Australia (Ummenhofer et al. 2008), South Australia (Nicholls 2010, Evans et al.
