Let the Land Speak

by Jackie French

  But back in 1840 there was a choice of land around the river ford where Gundagai was built, including the high ground of what is now Mount Parnassus. Why risk a flood?

  The answer is water, and a degree of European arrogance and ignorance.

  Water’s blessing and water’s curse

  Gundagai’s town plan was laid out in between 1831 and 1838. It was gazetted as a town in 1840, fertile land on the rich Murrumbidgee River flats, good for growing the grass that would be sold as hay to travellers, or for vegetables and gardens.

  These days, cheap and flexible plastic and PVC piping as well as reliable pumps mean that it’s relatively easy to get water from a river or creek to a house, hotel or farm. Yet as recently as the 1960s I remember the labour of hefting great metal pipes and the challenge of screwing or welding them together.

  But back in 1840 the only cheap (though labour-intensive) method of getting water was to dig a water race, a channel dug into the ground that directed water from a high point on a creek or river to a lower point. Gullies would be crossed with pipes of hollowed logs, or even bark. (One of these built in the 1850s begins on our property and its remnants wind more than three kilometres around the hills down the valley.)

  But that means that the end point of the water must be both downhill and downstream. Other landowners would fetch water in buckets, tempting them to be as close to the river as possible. And, of course, there was that good alluvial soil. Even if the hotel owners didn’t grow crops, they needed areas of good grass for travellers’ horses and bullocks.

  And floods cleared the land, too. Those lovely river flats were relatively free of large trees, ready to clear to build or farm. It’s likely the track towards Melbourne from Gundagai followed the course of the river not just as an easy way of navigating across unknown land (for tens of thousands of years humans have used rivers as easily identified routes) but also because those flood-swept river banks may have been easier to make a track along for bullock trains than in the more heavily timbered country above.

  Flood warnings to the strangers on the river

  There are references to white settlers being warned by the local Wiradjuri people back in the 1830s that they were building on a dangerous place. But new settlers hadn’t grown up with a tradition of understanding this land.

  Some, perhaps, might know land lore from Britain – how thistles could indicate a fertile paddock; red sky at night, shepherd’s delight – but they didn’t know this land. If they had noticed the evidence of past floods they’d probably have assumed that they’d have warning, as rain fell day after day and the river began to rise. They might lose their buildings, but the shanties of that time were easily and quickly rebuilt from local materials, stringybark roof and wattle and daub walls. The buildings near the river had lofts or a second storey, where people could easily scramble out of the reach of the water with some of their goods. There would be plenty of time for families and even horses and stock to get to high ground. It was worth the inconvenience of rebuilding or repairing flood damage to have fresh water close by.

  But the Murrumbidgee doesn’t flood like one of the relatively short English rivers. The Murrumbidgee river system is 1500 kilometres long, with a large hilly to mountainous catchment upstream. The floodwaters of the Murray and Darling systems can take months for the water to come down the channels. Heavy rain upstream of Gundagai can create a wall of water, or, if the rain eases and then returns, several walls of water.

  In Gundagai’s early days the Murrumbidgee flooded every few years. Travellers were stranded for a week or so till the water went down, but the floods never rose more than about half a metre. A larger flood hit in 1844, rising to a metre and forcing people up onto the roofs. Some voices urged moving the town to higher ground.

  But in those days when travel was by horse, bullock or feet, the town had to stay clustered around the school, store, saddler, dentist, wheelwright, carpenters’ workshops and hotels. Their owners stayed – and so did the rest of the town.

  In the years after the 1852 flood Gundagai was moved to a safer spot. Yarri and Jacky Jacky were given bronze medallions to wear about their necks and were entitled, it was said, to demand sixpences from everyone in Gundagai. There is also a fine gravestone in the Gundagai cemetery that honours Yarri and one of the local reserves is called Yarri Park in his honour.

  If this seems a trifling reward for such efforts, it’s worth remembering that many foot soldier veterans of the Battle of Waterloo in 1814 and in Crimea a little more than a decade later ended up begging on the street. Officers, on the other hand, were granted land, pensions and their descendants even given military scholarships in perpetuity. The British Empire was not a place of social equality. Nor was it a place where Indigenous expertise was respected.

  Predicting a flood in that particular month didn’t need much skill, not if you had experience of rain depressions like that. But predicting the severity of that particular flood, and that it would come in a few weeks’ time and be high enough to sweep the town away, required a deeper knowledge.

  Indigenous predictive ability

  It is likely that the elders did know exactly when and how and why the flood would happen. They knew their land well.

  Almost from the first European settlements in Australia there are records of Indigenous people giving colonists accurate warning that devastating floods were coming. In late February and early March 1799, settlers along the Hawkesbury were puzzled by yells and gestures from the Bidjigal people. The settlers and the Bidjigal were almost in a state of war – any Bidjigal coming near a farmhouse was in danger of being shot. Yet they still appeared, desperately trying to get their message across.

  On 3 March the flood arrived, turning the farmland along the river into an inland sea, with only a few roofs and hills visible above the swirling water. Men clinging to rooftops fired their muskets to tell the rowboats where they were.

  In 1806, according to the Sydney Gazette and Advertiser of 27 March, the Hawkesbury flooding was even worse, rising over twelve feet (roughly four metres). Nor had the settlers changed where they lived or how they farmed to accommodate the threat. They lived with ‘a false sense of security which many had imbibed, from the supposed confidence that there would never be another heavy flood in the main river, though without assigning any cause for such an idea’.

  Australia is a land of climatic extremes. Our valley has an average of a thousand millimetres of rainfall per annum, but the actual rainfall has usually been far above or far below that ‘average’. In 2003 we had a ten-month period with only 10.5 millimetres of rain, as well as bushfire winds and temperatures above forty degrees for most of three months, even reaching fifty-six degrees one day. We have had 584 millimetres of rain fall in a single day, more than 250 millimetres in an hour. Years like the one in which I write this with neither drought nor flood (at our end of the valley, at least) are the welcome exception.

  Our society has inhabited this land for more than two hundred years, yet the arrival of a flood – in the same places that have had floods irregularly but frequently – still takes both planners and bureaucracy by surprise.

  Queensland, 1974

  The radio had talked of the river rising in Brisbane all day. At last, about 6 p.m., I called to check that my family was okay. In those days you still needed to go through an operator for an interstate call.

  The operator put me through to my mother’s house. My younger brothers and sister were fine, the house well above flood level. The operator called my father’s house, but there was no answer.

  I was about to hang up when she whispered, ‘Would you mind keeping talking? The water is rising all around our feet and I’m scared.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘I’m new, and the other women are just going on as though nothing is happening. They say we need to keep the phones working as long as we can. I don’t want them to see me cry.’

  We kept on talking as the water rose at the telephone exchange. When it reached her knees she
climbed up onto the bench – I suppose it was a bench, for I only heard what she described that night.

  ‘It’s black,’ she said ‘I didn’t know water could be so black. It’s swirling in through the door.’

  She lived with her mum and dad. No, she hadn’t rung them. She didn’t want them to worry.

  At last she said, ‘There’s a rowing boat. They’re taking the women near the door first.’ And then, ‘It’s nearly up to the bench now.’

  Half an hour later she said, ‘They’re taking me. Thank you. Goodbye.’ The phone went dead.

  I checked the newspaper the next day. All the telephone operators had survived.

  I suspect the telephonist remembers that flood. The planners chose not to.

  Queensland, January 2011

  The phone call came mid-afternoon. ‘It’s Ben’s mum here. I just want to let him know I’m all right.’

  We didn’t know what she was talking about till we turned on the radio and heard about the Townsville flood. We gave our friend the message when he came in.

  He called his mother back then told us her story. She was driving down to the supermarket when she saw a wall of water sweeping down the street. She did a swift U-turn, outrunning the flash flood and accelerating up the slope to home, beeping the horn and flashing her lights to try to warn others to turn back too.

  They didn’t. ‘They kept on going into the water,’ she said. ‘All those cars just kept going.’ She had grown up with floods. They hadn’t. They didn’t know the savagery of water.

  How had the Townsville tragedy happened?2

  Rain had fallen for most of the past month.3 The ground was sodden. The water from one particularly heavy fall could no longer soak into the ground and instead rolled down the slopes, funnelling into a flash flood.

  Three people died that day, including thirteen-year-old Jordan Lucas Rice. As the water rose around their stranded car, he insisted that rescuers take his little brother first. His heroic mother, Donna Maree Rice, died too.

  Within the next few days, floods inundated other communities in the Lockyer Valley, Ipswich and Brisbane, and along most major river systems in Queensland, parts of New South Wales and Victoria, and then in Western Australia. The initial damage bill was about $1 billion, with total losses of perhaps $30 billion. More than forty people were killed.

  Why?

  It had been a wet year in 2010, a La Niña year, when the cooler water of the Pacific current usually (but not reliably) brings rains to eastern Australia. A monsoonal low had crossed from the Coral Sea on 26 December and Cyclone Tasha had brought rain as well.

  Yet Queensland is hit every year by cyclones, tropical lows and storm cells bringing heavy rains. Every few years they coincide with a La Niña year, too. Why was this worse?

  It wasn’t. The Brisbane flood peaked at 4.46 metres in Brisbane City.4 It was only about the tenth highest in the city’s history, several metres below the 1890 flood and the two major floods in 1893, and probably lower than the 1974 flood too.

  The 1974 Brisbane flood was recent enough to mean flood-prone areas could be easily identified5, but the houses that had been flooded then were reoccupied. Worse, land that was even more flood-prone was built upon, as the demand for land and real estate prices in inner Brisbane increased. The ‘vacant blocks’ of my childhood along the creeks or on swampy land had been built on, and 20,000 houses in Brisbane were inundated.

  I grew up in Queensland. I grew up with floods, too. Two or three times a year the street we lived on became a short-lived river. We loved it, when we were kids. We dangled our feet over the veranda as the brown water lapped round the stilts of the house. Once we formed a human chain to stop my mum’s small car floating down the street. We tied it to the peach tree. The car was fine, once it dried out.

  It never occurred to us to be scared of floods; every house we knew was built above flood reach, the stilts allowing the water to pass instead of banking up. We all knew which streets turned into rivers when the tail of a cyclone whipped past, flinging corrugated iron and garbage bins against the fences. ‘Under the house’ was a great place to play on wet days, too, or hot ones, and the air gap meant the house cooled fast at night.

  Don’t ever camp by a creek bed, our teachers told us, in case a flood comes down in the night; if you hear a roar, get to high ground. Never play near the creek after rain, or explore stormwater drains. (We did, but not when it was raining.)

  Don’t go swimming after rain, Mum said, as we kids swam on unpatrolled beaches. Don’t swim at dawn or dusk – that’s when the sharks are feeding. They come close to shore after storms or when it is cloudy. Don’t swim in a thunderstorm in case lightning hits the water. Don’t feed those dingoes or try to pat them – just ignore them, and they’ll ignore you. These were just the elementary safety precautions Australians grew up with. Don’t live in a house on land that floods – or if you do, make sure it’s flood-proof.

  The flood-prone suburbs were only part of the problem in 2011 though.6 The water moved faster, and in different ways, than the 1974 flood. That was a preventable planning disaster, too.

  As land is cleared, water runs down the slope faster with nothing to impede its progress, and the faster it flows, the less soaks in, even when the ground isn’t already sodden. The more land that is covered in roads, footpaths, houses or even compacted ground in parks or paddocks, the more water will run off, too.

  By 2011 there was much more cleared land than in 1974. Houses had been built on flood plains that were labelled ‘never to be built on’ in my childhood, but were covered by homes and gardens now. Rainfall that the land might once have soaked into the land now flowed deeper, faster. Deadly.

  Dad’s last story

  My father was frail and living next to the river in January 2011, cut off by floodwater that wrenched half a kilometre of wood and wire and concrete boardwalk out into the river. If it had been left in the floodwaters it could have hit and knocked down the Gateway Bridge that spans the river. It may also have mown down riverside apartment houses like Dad’s. Dad watched from his balcony as a tiny tugboat pushed and shoved the concrete walkway out to sea. All I could do was stay on the phone as he sat on his balcony and watched the river rise.

  Dad was always a storyteller, and I can still hear his voice showing me the dramas as he watched the river, hour by hour: the police rescue boat racing after a family stranded on an out-of-control houseboat, the café that floated past, still with the tables set for lunch. It was his last story. ‘I feel guilty enjoying it,’ he said. ‘It’s better than watching TV.’ Dad died not long after.

  My brother provided shelter to other families whose homes were underwater. The power might have been off but the barbecue gas bottles were full, and when they rang to say they were safe I could hear laughter in the background.

  My nieces cooked and cooked. Another niece, a nurse, helped care for the residents in a dementia ward, as well as those who came to the nursing home for shelter. They were cut off for about thirty-six hours, and no other nurses could get in to relieve them. They kept on going: ‘It’s just what you have to do.’

  As the water receded, my brother and nephew joined thousands of others with mops, spades and hoses. My nieces kept cooking for the clean-up, linking via the internet with others to keep all the volunteers fed.

  More than 60,000 volunteers registered that first day; probably double that number just turned up.7 But the most extraordinary thing was that none thought of themselves as heroes. They just did what was needed – and did it with jokes and laughter, too. It was so very, very Australian, from the women in hijabs who gave out boxes of apples, to those of so many religious and ethnic heritages working side by side. Disaster can create community – as long as the survivors are in a country affluent enough for them not to have to compete for their or their family’s survival. September 11 made New York a village again.

  Australians respond well after natural disasters. We’re used to them. We volunteer money, time
, skills and even our lives, too. Australia’s major disaster agencies are made up of volunteers: SES and the local bushfire brigades, supported by other volunteer organisations like the CWA, Lions, Apex and Rotary clubs. When times are tough, any Australian club – be it a football, book, RSL, writers’ or office social club – may raise funds, prepare food or take in those who need shelter.

  I had thought in the 1980s and 1990s that what’s usually referred to as ‘just doing your bit’ was confined to country towns and the bush. But after the January 2003 fires, Canberra, too, behaved like a giant country town. When the Emergency Services Bureau lost power and was threatened by nearby fire by mid-morning on 18 January, Julie Derrett of ABC Radio 666 in Canberra, with her producer and the receptionist, took over coordinating the disaster, with a map spread out on the studio floor and reports phoned in from all around Canberra.

  My husband and I sat in the darkness that day. Torches can’t shine through air filled with ash. Above us the sky pulsed red and orange and yellow, a flame sky, as though the air itself burnt. Birds dropped, grey with ash, their wingtips burning.

  * * *

  How to read if it will rain

  The following indications work in this valley; perhaps they work elsewhere, perhaps not.

  Watch the termites. From late winter to late summer they will fly twenty-four hours before rain, dropping their wings and crawling to light - and down clothes and into your underwear too. We call them ooglies. If the ooglies fly for two or three nights in a row, there’ll be more rain coming after the initial shower. (If the sap-sucking bugs fly instead, you are due for days or weeks of dry heatwave.)