Floods: This may make you wish you were a Queenslander.

I really didn’t expect to be wishing I was a Queenslander this weekend. But I did. Because of the volunteers. How many times have we watched horrors unfold on TV and wrung our hands and said “I wish I could help”. This weekend, Queenslanders didn’t wring and didn’t wish, they just got on with it. They put on their gumboots and their gloves, grabbed their shovels and helped each other. Or they stayed at home and baked and cooked for the volunteers.

Combined with the unimagineable personal stories of loss – particularly the children – that are now emerging, this story seems to just be hitting every emotion on the spectrum.

I asked Brisbane writer and MM contrib Kate Hunter to write about what it feels like to be a Queenslander right now…..

It only took a morning to haul the contents of a family home onto the footpath. A few sweaty hours and a bunch of mates, led by a heartbroken couple and it was done.

Mel and Rick are friends – well, close friends of my friend Robin. They have two kids. Their place was flooded. And when I say flooded, I mean the water flowed over the roof. Just about everything they owned spent a day and a night swirling around in muddy water before being dumped back down in a layer of silt and slime.

I drove out just after midday yesterday to help clean up. They had been in since the afternoon before and the rooms were wet and empty. The plasterboard was being ripped from the walls. Even in houses that had only a small amount of water inside, every bit of the plasterboard needs to be removed – it’s porous and floodwater teems with bacteria.

Thankfully, Mel and Rick are insured. Most of their stuff should be replaced – but new stuff isn’t the same. It’s the favourite pair of jeans. The Tupperware box that fits a slice perfectly that you want. So neighbour Maria took away countless bags of clothes to wash and dry. Along with some other girls I packed up baskets of kitchen things – cutlery, plates, lunchboxes, pots and pans. ‘Easy job,’ I thought, ‘I’ll just bung it through the dishwasher.’

Wrong. Even after going through on the fire-hose cycle there was still a thin, oily film of brown ick on everything. Apparently (I know this now), after a flood, you must hand-wash every item in hot soapy water and use a Chux on every square millimetre. My washing-up is often a little, well, hit’n’miss, but there was no getting away with it today. As soon as a pan dried, any streaks stood out like marks from a brown felt pen. Once everything has been hand-washed, then it goes through the dishwasher to be disinfected.

This was just one family’s home. Multiply that by 22, 611 (that doesn’t count the rest of Queensland, only Brisbane) and add the businesses, schools, libraries, farms, sheds, cubby-houses. The job is overwhelming, and you’d think the mood would be one of despair. But it wasn’t – not even at Mel and Rick’s place. It was busy and determined. There were even a few laughs. People arrived all day. They introduced themselves and asked what they could do. There were boofy blokes with generators and pumps, older ladies with sandwiches and muffins. Kids with bottles of water. And people keen to push barrow after barrow of smelly, wet plasterboard up to the footpath.

The drive home took me past the Mt Cootha Volunteer assembly point. The number of people traipsing up the hill in gumboots carrying brooms and buckets was incredible. I’m not much of a crier but I choked up a bit. Of course it could have been the smell of the dirty dishes on my passenger seat so I didn’t give in to the emotion and hurried home.

The clichés are all over the papers and the news and the internet. A flood of human kindness. A rising tide of generosity. But phrases become clichés because they’re true. People are desperate to help. If there were any problems today it was because there were too many volunteers.

Those who couldn’t go out busied themselves planning fundraisers, baking, packing up kits of hand gel and bottled water, washing dishes and clothes. They minded volunteers’ kids. My father offered his Gerni (high pressure water cleaner) to anyone who needed it. This is when my sisters and I knew we were in the middle of something extraordinary. Dad won’t let my husband borrow the Gerni.

If you’re not on Twitter because you think it’s full of people telling the world what they had for breakfast, you should have seen it today. The minute someone tweeted there was an elderly couple in Goodna trying to clean up on their own, helpers were on their way. Cleanup teams at Graceville need food? Muffins being mobilised. It was immediate and brilliant.

Is it the Aussie spirit that’s getting us through? Are Brisbane people better than anyone else? Is there a generation of Queenslanders determined to show they have as much guts and compassion as their parents?

I have no idea. I just know that when my mate Robin walked into Mel’s sodden kitchen with a bottle of Champagne to toast friendship, I felt privileged to be there.
*About the author: Kate Hunter is an Advertising Copywriter – you can see her on The Gruen Sessions taking about the Effie’s (Advertising Effectiveness Awards). Kate has also written Mosquito Advertising, The Parfizz Pitch, a novel about a bunch of 13 year old kids who start their own advertising agency. You can see a trailer here or visit her website. She also wastes an inordinate amount of time on Twitter. Follow her here.

But while there is plentiful help in Brisbane, in some of the smaller, more remote flood-affected towns like Goodna, more help and volunteers are needed. MM Commenters Ooopsyboops sent in this clip taken in Goodna:

For a non-QLD perspective on the volunteer situation, Jo Hilder writes:

The media are touting it as Salvation Saturday here in Australia, or more specifically, in south east Queensland. For the last few days, the region has been overwhelmed by what for many are the worst floods in recorded memory. Today, as the floodwaters recede in most areas, the recovery begins in earnest.

Television reports have switched from showing devastation to reporting on how people are getting normality back. It’s going to take a long time. Houses have been underwater up to the roof, all belongings swamped. A thick layer of stinking silt covers much of the state. The search for 20 missing people goes on, and the grief for almost that many killed is nationwide. The media was going house to house yesterday asking people how they felt; a redundant question, really, when you think about it. Many people are learning their insurance will not cover the damage, and most have lost close to everything they own.

But something is happening, something wonderful and perhaps a little unexpected. People. People are happening. People who haven’t been affected are coming out of their homes and heading to flood drenched areas with brooms and boots. And, amazingly, even people who have lost their own homes are helping others. TV reports are showing teams of folks cleaning out one anothers houses, and surprised homeowners confessing that their helpers are people they’ve never met before. And it’s not just a few people…it’s thousands. This morning, television reports showed busloads of folks being dropped off at registration centres, volunteers all wanting to help clean up. People wearing boots and carrying their own brooms; grannies, little kids, mums and dads and tradesmen in high-visy vests. And it’ an amazing thing to see. A week ago, we  had a city, some towns, a few villages and streets, people defined into the organisation of their dwellings and businesses…but what we see now is something else. What we see now is community.

An the the media seem so surprised. They report this phenomenon as if they expected people to be as fragmented and selfish now as they might be in everyday life. They seemed to assume to find folks holed up and whining in their individual compounds, refusing help or to help, lamenting the loss of their trappings of prosperity. But of course, that’s not what’s happening. People are leaving their houses and going next door and helping someone else. They are holding strangers by the shoulders and saying “I’m so glad you’re all okay”. They are grabbing their brooms and mops and wandering into the house next door and starting the work. They are setting up BBQ’s on street corners and feeding each other with sausages on bread. They are no longer just people who live near each other, they have become neighbours.

Perhaps the thing that is surprising is that if prosperity divided us, made us selfish and self-centred and individualistic, it’s been adversity and the loss of all trappings of that prosperity that has brought out the best in people.

Once were people who lived near each other…..now are neighbours. Once were cities, towns, streets…now are community.

Truth be known, I’m a bit jealous of those helpers. As I sit here on the sofa a thousand miles away, wondering if I should have another cup of coffee or move to the deck to read the paper, I wish I was there.

I wish I had the opportunity to be swept up in something bigger than myself, to show my mettle, to feel caught up in the urgency of needing to help others in their darkest day. I know it’s that feeling that someone else needs you that makes you feel truly alive, truly human.

 

Jo Hilder is an artist, writer, wife and mother of four living and working on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. She is a contributing writer to the Burnside Writers Collective website in the US, and is currently writing a book about her journey through cancer in 2003. You can keep up to date with her via her Facebook page here or on her blog here.

A campaign has also been started to help connect Australians in need with those that can help- it’s called Flood Aid and you can find it here.