A MIGHTY FLOOD OF MEMORIES
As a four-year-old I perched on the kitchen bench with three neighbourhood kids and watched as six-foot-high waves barrelled down our side yard, crushing the fence between my house and the neighbours.
Earlier that day my mother had desperately stuffed towels against the front door in a vain attempt to hold back the chocolate-coloured water that slowly crept across the carpet and inched its way up the walls of our house in Sydney’s Northern beaches.
Nearly 40 years later, my mother’s voice still chokes at the mention of the 1974 flood that ruined the home she and my father had built 18 months before and left us living in a caravan while we waited on insurance money and repairs to be finished.
With more than 16,000 people still isolated by floods across northern NSW, many will now have the same story to tell.
Since January 25, floods have again ravaged the North Coast with the NSW Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Michael Gallacher making Natural Disaster Declarations for 17 regional areas.
The scale of this latest flood disaster is hard to comprehend: $5 million damage to public infrastructure already, a figure that will rise as the full extent of damage becomes clear; homes and businesses ruined and aerial photos showing Moree swallowed by muddy water. One woman has died in floodwaters near Grafton and a mother of two also died saving her son in Roma, Queensland.
My family survived 1974. My parents did rebuild and life went on… but natural disasters have a way of carving their mark on you. You never forget.
Here on the North Coast where I have now made my home, each new flood lived through etches itself into the psyche.
You develop a finely tuned ear that can recognise the insistent, lead-weighted beat of a flood rain. You immediately start calculating which roads might close and which causeways will flood.
You look in the fridge and pantry, measuring supplies, and weigh up the likelihood of making it to work, and back.
Bellingen local, Cath Young, watched as the Bellinger River burst its banks and told The Hoopla: “After 10 years living here we can tell by the rain. The type of rain that is so heavy you cannot see through it – that is flood rain,” Ms Young said.
“When we lived out of town, in Thora, at the first hint of that kind of heavy rain it was straight to town to get supplies.
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