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The floods in Queensland. An Australian tale by Rick Morton

This has been an extraordinarily difficult Christmas for thousands of Australian affected by  historic floods. Huge logistical operation are under way across Queensland to evacuate thousands of people and deliver emergency supplies. Our hearts go out to each and every one of these people

Rick Morton, media professional and popular Mamamia contributor lives in Queensland and has been witness to some of this flooding.  He writes

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The early Australian explorers might have had the technical detail entirely incorrect when they began searching for a vast inland sea.

There were multiple expeditions that would have proven – if nothing else – very good at deconstructing optimism.

But the explorers were close.

Situated some 700km north of Adelaide and more than 700 kilometres southwest of Eromanga in Queensland – itself the farthest town from the sea in the entire country – is a lake.

It is a sometimes-lake, a yo-yo dieting water body that is very rarely filled (perhaps just four times in a century) but enjoys the odd flood of varying degrees every few years.

This is Lake Eyre, the lowest point of our vast continent and a highly convenient convergence point for floodwater far and wide that runs down into it; like water beads running down the depression on a trampoline on a rainy day.

One of those floods cascaded across the countryside in 2009, delivering a breath-taking nine cubic kilometres – count it, nine – of floodwater into the lake and only managing to fill it to a quarter of its highest recorded depth of 6m.

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There is no doubt that the floods devastating Queensland at the present are much worse; the worst in recorded history, in fact. There is currently water enough to cover the landmasses of France and Germany combined. That’s a lot of Oktoberfests and Parisian markets.

To put it parochially, the floodwater is enough to cover the entire state of New South Wales.

The area is so vast that it would take days to drive around it non-stop; so vast that it would be terribly unwise to attempt to do this with kids in the car and without a packed lunch.

If ever there was a prompt to return to the days of measuring things in cubits and assembling gigantic arks for the sake of biological subsistence, this was that time. As a perfect storm of events came together in my own home town and across Queensland, my thoughts did indeed turn to salvation-by-ark and what particular animals would be left from it (do we, for instance, really need howler monkeys?).

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I would also, for the record, leave out termites (lest the ark be whittled away and sink) and mosquitoes (because why the hell?) and bantam chickens because I’ve never really liked the way they look at me.

That perfect storm, as it happens, was this: some dams were already overflowing or near capacity, the ground was soaked from persistent rainfall in the lead-up to December and the biggest element of all – what sounds like a Spanish stripper but is actually a particularly wet weather pattern: La Nina.

Combine those – like the clues in a Hollywood murder mystery as the next victim finally figures out who the killer is and retraces the giveaways in quick edits – and you have yourself a recipe for the biggest of wets this state has ever seen.

And like moths courting a highly dangerous flame, we were transfixed.

In regional Queensland especially, it is highly customary to drop everything you are doing and spend at least half your day surveying floodwaters as they begin to rise – not out of any sense to protect your homes necessarily, but because holy shit look at all that water.

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This is mostly because everybody spends a great deal of time talking about the weather and of course it’s going to be a fanciful day when the weather decides to do something exciting, impending disaster or not, to make all that chatter worthwhile.

When I was younger, on the cattle station I called home about 90km west of Eromanga, it would very occasionally flood and the Cooper Creek, which feeds into the Diamantina River which feeds into Lake Eyre – would become awash with more water than my tiny brain could handle.

Water as far as the eye can see, a shimmering blanket of mud-brown stretching all the way to the horizon as soon as the little creeks had burst their banks, so utterly incapable of holding back that much water as it surged from somewhere else.

The only way to see it all was from the air and even that was an effort; looking down at a landscape of capillary creeks that looked for all the world like they had haemorrhaged and burst out across hundreds of square kilometres.

The floods of 2009 took something in the order of 7 weeks to wend their way to Lake Eyre. These will take even longer.

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In events unprecedented in Queensland history, entire towns were evacuated due to the flood threat. Not just some homes in some towns, entire towns. The only human souls left behind were police and State Emergency Service volunteers to protect homes.

Thousands have been homed in evacuation shelters and thousand more homes inundated completely or surrounded by water.

Looting isn’t as big a problem as some would have you believe, although vandals appear to have taken the opportunity in flood-ravaged and pre-occupied Rockhampton to steal the balls from one of the bull statues in town in what must have been, ironically, an act of grand testicular fortitude.

Castrata are possibly the least of the damage, however, with Queensland losing a hefty chunk of the mining royalties it earns – in the order of $10 million a day – and damage to homes, businesses and crops in the billions of dollars.

Supplies have been cut off to some towns – the basics like bread, milk, water funnily enough and beer – unable to be trucked in and now being brought in by the army in Blackhawk helicopters.

Well, not the beer. The passage for beer has been left to craftier individuals. I saw one man fashion a makeshift raft out of rope, an old door and some empty milk crates like an alcoholic MacGuyver and use it with the help of friends on the other side of a swollen river to ferry beer supplies across.

And there was a little tear in my eye. Sigh, how wonderful it is to be Australian.

There is an iconic photo of the 1974 floods in Brisbane of a group of men ferrying a small child on what looks like a door through waist high floodwater. One of the men, clear as day, is pushing the door with one hand while clutching resolutely to a stubbie of Fourex in the other.

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And in another news story on television a man with water coursing through his home is interviewed with the stock standard questions. He’s chest deep in water and he responds ‘yeah, it’s a bit wet isn’t it?’ as if he has accidentally left the shower running rather than being caught up in historic floods.

And another old lady who insisted on checking the rain gauge still, even though she had to wade through waist deep water to get to it. 120mm of rain, she notes, and then looks quizzically at all the floodwater as if it’s just snuck up on her.

God I love this country.

The thing about floods that really gets you, moreso than the deluge itself or the evacuations and the waterlogged homes, is the smell. The smell of mud in homes when the water goes down will never leave you. It’s pervasive. It loiters in the nostrils. I’ve smelt better bins filled with prawns.

These floods won’t be gone in weeks, rather, months. Some people won’t even be able to return home for weeks themselves. The water will push on, rush down and pour into Lake Eyre. It will wipe the landscape clean, a conveyer belt of misery for many in an event of almost biblical proportions.

And, in time, the water will be gone altogether, evaporated along with our ability to believe that such a mammoth slice of land could ever have been inundated as it was.

But the smell, well, that’ll stay on for a while longer.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has set up a flood appeal. To donate, and I would urge you to, go to www.qld.gov.au/floods

 

It should be noted that Rick took the photos that accompany this post.  He really is a very talented man

In case you missed it last week, click here to see true Aussie spirit at work in this clip made by Australian farmers