The whole east coast knew it was going to be a wet summer. Around Byron Bay, La Niña jostled with Omicron to work her way into every other conversation. People speculated about how excited the farmers must be for the rain, what it meant for the summer tourist rush, the surf and water quality. Despite the days and nights of torrential rain, word around the traps said it wouldn’t trouble the height – or destruction – of the 2017 floods that put Lismore in the national headlines. They were wrong. When the floodwaters inundated towns and cities across northern New South Wales in the early hours of February 27, no one could’ve predicted the chaos, confusion and deafening silence that was to follow.
When Covid consumed the world and began lurking in the back of our psyche, it created a division that was felt acutely in Byron. Neighbouring Mullumbimby is infamously known as the anti-vaxxer capital of Australia, but while there are distinct towns north, south and inland of Byron, we’re all one big community – the Northern Rivers. People live in Ocean Shores and work in Ballina. Live in Byron and work in Lismore. Live in Main Arm and work in Tweed. Live in Mullum and work in Murwillumbah.
After two years of Covid news, fatigue, outbreaks, lockdowns, breakouts and breakdowns, there was a palpable rift between those who were happy to do their part to protect the vulnerable among the community and the vocal minority whose distrust of authority had been inflamed by check-in and mask mandates. And, as with anti-vax people the world over, their stance was usually explained away by a tangle of paranoia, misrepresented science, conspiracies and a confused cry for sovereignty over their bodies.
Late last year around Christmas and New Year, the abstract threat of Covid that had felt so distant for so long, finally came knocking. Omicron tore through town and by the end of January everyone seemed to have had it. Most avoided any serious symptoms and having survived the conqueror of worlds, people dared to entertain some optimism about life returning to normal. Well, they were wrong. Before we had time to wrap our heads around Russia invading Ukraine, lurching us back into a familiar uncertainty about our future, the rain started and didn’t stop.
A few things cascaded to make the flooding so much worse than anyone expected. When floodwaters filled in fast under the cover of darkness, it caught nearly everyone off guard, even those who clearly remember the 2017 floods. The flood knocked out power and phone reception, which meant thousands of people never received the SES text messages warning of rising waters and advising evacuation. So they went to bed because their place was fine in 2017 and this was nothing to worry about. If they were lucky, they woke up with wet feet in pitch darkness – no streetlights, no ambient light at all – and were forced to climb onto their roof as the rain continued to pour and screams for help filled the night.
Floodwaters hit 14.4 metres in Lismore – two whole metres higher than 2017. One Lismore local explained it to me like this, “In 2017, the flood was shin-high on the ground floor of my mum’s place. This one was chest-high upstairs and came in the dark of night.” A friend of a friend sat in her living room, calmly reading a bedtime story to her kids who sat on chairs, legs crossed so their pyjamas wouldn’t get wet by the rising water rushing into their Mullumbimby home. They waited as long as they could before kayaking to the RSL, which by then had become a refuge centre.
In the coming days, reports of the destruction began emerging, but they were eerily slow. Even in Byron, mostly there was silence and whispers because critical communication infrastructure was down – internet, phone. We stayed at home while the rain and silence continued because roads out of Byron were flooded anyway. We could see fuel and fresh food running out before the desperate pleas for help started appearing on community Facebook groups. At first, calls came for anyone with a boat who could launch it anywhere near Mullumbimby or Lismore to hurry. People were missing. The entire community in the hills out the back of Mullumbimby in Main Arm and Upper Wilsons Creek were cut off from the outside world after a kilometre-long landslide reshaped the valley. They remained cut off for at least a week. Army helicopters flew over to assess the damage and check in on some residents, but the on-ground rescue, recovery and emergency supply deliveries were organised and executed by locals. The community response to the flooding was immediate, unconditional and as monumental and overwhelming as the government’s inaction.
While anyone with a boat went house-to-house rescuing whoever was still stranded, there was no word from the government. As news of trapped communities began to emerge, painting a gruesome picture of death, destruction and ongoing danger, the government still appeared to do nothing. As floodwaters subsided in Mullumbimby and Lismore, they flooded Ballina, Lennox Head and smaller towns downriver like Woodburn, Coraki, and Broadwater to name a few. Rumours swirled around Lismore that the ADF would arrive any day. An initial deployment of 60 soldiers, for the entire Northern Rivers region, followed by another 140-odd a week later, was grossly inadequate. Those in charge of deploying the ADF wildly underestimated the scale of the disaster or weren’t empowered to respond.
Desperate locals said they hadn’t seen any uniforms and had no way of knowing what, if any, help was on the way. When the uniforms did finally arrive they were ordered to stage a photo op, complete with studio lighting, that ended up on the Prime Minister’s Instagram feed. While politicians defended the smattering of ADF sent in too late by saying flood recovery was outside their scope of work, I wondered what the hell I was doing there. What the hell were any of us doing there? Where was the coordinated response from trained disaster response professionals?
The receding floodwaters revealed more than just the absolute ruin of thousands of homes and lives. It laid bare something shocking and still unexplained – the negligent inaction of layers of state and federal government. It may be naive to believe the government will help its citizens when they need it, but the government response to disasters in the past has been increasingly well coordinated, especially with the increase in bushfire. So why were the people of the Northern Rivers left to rot in flood mud for a week without a trained, organised response? People in desperate need of emergency services couldn’t call 000 because the network was down for a week. Others who could get through were told emergency personnel couldn’t get in to help. And because it wasn’t deemed a state of emergency for a whole two weeks after the peak of the flooding, there was no help on the way.
The disgust at the total lack of response from the state and federal government in the first weeks after the floods was palpable. Still is. I still can’t make sense of the inaction. There is still no reasonable – or even unbelievable – explanation that justifies leaving thousands of people in the devastation of a disaster zone without power, phone reception, vital supplies, let alone financial aid.
Fortunately, there was something shining far brighter than anyone in a position of power. Despite two years of division, the Northern Rivers community pulled together to help and protect one another. Before they had to ask, people affected by the floods were rescued by their community. Despite the drastic changes to the region over the last few years as housing prices doubled in six months, despite the ‘us versus them’ sentiment simmering in most tourist towns, when people needed help, there was no hesitation from neighbours and neighbouring towns.
I got a message from a mate, Simon, on Wednesday when he could finally get through floodwaters in Ocean Shores to get to the top of a hill and into phone reception. He said, “A few of us are heading out to Lismore to help some people do a bit of a clean-up. We have some spare seats if you’re free.” It doesn’t sound like much. A carload of mates with a trailer of shovels, brooms, rakes, gumboots, gloves, a wheelbarrow, some buckets and fresh water. No one really knew it at the time, but the same thing was happening with thousands of other people up and down the coast and across the Northern Rivers. The result was a people’s army – the Mud Army.
That first day I went with my Mud Army crew to help with the clean-up efforts in Lismore, my brain couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. At first, just strange things from a weird dream, like a fridge stuck four metres up a tree. But it quickly turned into a nightmare, we turned a corner and drove headlong into total chaos. It looked like it’d been bombed. Buildings on the main street were falling down. Every street we drove along and passed was lined on both sides by mountains of rubble. Not rubble… the sum total of people’s lives – everything they owned, waterlogged, covered in toxic mud and sewerage and hauled out into the street to rot and bake in the sun. And that was just the start of the recovery process, let alone the rebuild. Entire neighbourhoods were covered in the sepia filter of flood mud – houses, trees, sheds, caravans, cars, supermarkets, the local library, everything up to the gutters. The sun was out and the air was thick with the fetid smell of floodwater – a ripe mix of raw sewerage, dam mud, cow shit, stagnant river water and wet paper, wood and fabric.
The first thing that hit me, the biggest thing that I realised I didn’t understand before seeing it myself, was the scale. Every street we drove past in Lismore was ruined. Every house had to vomit its contents onto the street. Every household had to clean and scrub, strip back and rebuild. It wasn’t just the scale of the floods and how far-reaching they were – from southern Queensland down past Ballina and beyond. The scope of work faced by everyone affected by the floods was overwhelming. The first house we visited had a highwater mark a foot below the gutters – it was a two-storey Queenslander on stilts. Every single thing they brought into the house when they moved in a few months earlier, had to be dragged out and dumped on the street.
The clean-up process was functional chaos. We had a group chat and when anyone heard of someone who needed help, they dropped their address and that’s where we’d start. We’d arrive not knowing if they had power or water, if the owners were there or if a family member or friend was organising the clean-up as the owners dealt with the emotional and psychological toll of losing everything, sometimes including beloved pets. The first step was clearing a path from the house to the street so all the big stuff – furniture, rugs, carpets, mattresses – could be hauled out of the way. Then it was onto the smaller things, side tables, lamps, clothing, books, boxes once in storage washed into the corner of the living room along with kitchen goods, kids toys and debris washed in through broken windows.
Some people were ready to throw everything away, others wanted to go through everything item by item. Some people had insurance, most didn’t because it’s prohibitively expensive. On one trip to add to the roadside pile, a woman walked past with two dogs and asked if I’d seen a Jack Russell since the flood. When I said no, her shoulders slumped and she walked on. I wondered about the death toll from the floods. It was hard to imagine there were only four deaths, as reported in the first week, from such widespread destruction. Stories emerged of seven people found dead in a hotel, and more in a house in the hills. Someone said the morgue at the Lismore hospital was full but there was no government response and so I guess no official reporting on the death toll. It felt like they didn’t care. And then the National Recovery and Resilience Agency boss, Shane Stone, was reported to have said, “You’ve got people who want to live among the gum trees – what do you think is going to happen? Their house falls in the river and they say it’s the government’s fault.”
Although there’s fair cause to blame the government’s inadequate action to address climate change, no one affected by the 2022 floods was saying it was the government’s fault. When you’re still relying on the generosity of friends for a place to sleep while you continue clearing and cleaning your house, you don’t really have time or the mental energy to point the finger. His comments show he doesn’t seem to understand that people want the government to take responsibility in a disaster and protect the people it serves.
The second day, we went to South Lismore, one of the worst-hit parts of town. Most houses had piles of lives out the front, and the few that didn’t raised grim questions. The street was crowded on both sides by the cars of people there to help with the clean-up. We stepped into wet, muddy gumboots, grabbed gloves and started unloading the trailer. Before we made it inside to assess what stage this house was at, we heard some epic ‘90s dance tunes and rhythmic cheering coming from the house a few doors down. It was a crew of Samoan men and women who were going house to house cleaning and making heavy things look light. Amid the mud and sadness, they brought a heart-warming lightness. They were singing, cheering each other on, and putting smiles on faces when it was so hard to do.
The house had a rumpus room with a bar in it downstairs. There was two inches of mud over every bit of floor. It took 15 of us three hours of clearing debris, shovelling, hosing, sweeping, hosing, sweeping, and carting mud out the front to clean that one room. There was another room downstairs that was full of photo albums. Thousands of houses across the Northern Rivers were in the same position – the scale of destruction and the lives it has affected is enormous. And every one of them relied on their community to get back on their feet.
After we finished there, we wandered around the block. We saw a middle-aged woman tossing small items onto big piles out the front of her home and asked if she needed any help. She brought the back of one of her mud-covered gloves to her nose and burst into tears. “I’m sorry, it’s just been a lot.” She saw herself as one of the lucky ones. She got out safely and had almost finished the clean-up. We asked about the house over the road with no clean-up pile out the front. “It’s an old couple. Their son was there earlier. If they’re around, they’ll need help.” We walked in and the house looked like a time capsule from the 1950s. Beautiful paintings, furniture, floral curtains. It almost could’ve been a Wes Anderson film set if it wasn’t all covered in mud and pushed to one side of the room and already smelling of mould. Nothing had been touched and there was no one around.
Around lunchtime, the support crews for the Mud Army started doing the rounds with food and cold drinks – helpers fuelling the helpers. Two women parked out the front and opened their car boot to hand out curry and rice. Three kids wandered past with big grins holding cardboard boxes full of lunch packs made up of sandwiches and cans of soft drinks. Vans sidled up offering fresh fruit, rice puddings, and cold drinks. At one stage, pizzas started appearing, handed from one work crew in one house over the road to the next. Looking for the last house for the day, we checked in with some guys standing out the front of a house. They’d come up from Coffs Harbour. They heard “Lismore was fucked” so they loaded up the ute and got to work. They’d pulled a solar panel out of the debris and scrawled in the mud, “Keep smiling it is nearly beer o’clock”.
Over the weekend, as so many more people went out to help, more stories from further afield began emerging. Main Arm and Upper Wilson’s Creek were still stuck behind a landslide but an intrepid crew had managed to hike generators, fuel and urgent supplies in. A seismologist was called in to assess the area and recommended an immediate evacuation as the threat of another landslide was incredibly high. There were more calls for help from Coraki, a small town south of Ballina, which had only reachable nearly a week after the floods first hit.
Someone shared a call for help at the Coraki Club Hotel but when I arrived no one was around, so I wandered around the block. I saw a pile of supplies near the public toilets and figured there may be someone there organising the donations and volunteers. Next to a couple of pallets of bottled water, there was a shopping trolley stacked high with take away containers full of cooked meals rotting in the sun. A lot of restaurants not affected by the flooding were cooking meals and sending them out. The problem was no one had the capacity to organise distribution on the other end. I asked a couple of young guys piling water into the back of their troopy if they knew of anyone who urgently needed help. They’d come down from Ballina to deliver medical supplies and were off to Woodburn, which had just opened up again. The community was going above and beyond, but there was only so much we could do with no one to coordinate it all.
I helped out at the post office and they sent me around the corner to help a man named John pull out a kitchen and two rooms of built-in robes. A bloke from Sydney and his son wandered past and helped us finish it off in a couple of hours. John reckoned we saved him about three days of work. Three days he could use to help someone else. The ripple effect of people helping out was huge. My mind returned to the lack of government response. What could possibly be more important than helping Australians recover from an unprecedented natural disaster? There are thousands of hours of unskilled work ahead of flood-affected communities – muddy manual labour, grunt work – couldn’t the ADF, or at least the Army Reserves, help the community with that?
Down the road I helped a family clear out their garage, they were optimistically holding onto power tools and some machinery because “you never know”. They couldn’t believe someone came from Byron to help strangers. They sent me round to a house on the main street opposite the river. The bloke there was visibly shocked someone was offering to help too. He was nearly done clearing out his shed and wanted to get everything off the ground so the fireys could come in and blast the floor. He seemed up for a chat so I asked if he had much warning to get out.
“The last big flood that came through here was in 1974. All the old heads around town love talking about that flood. It wasn’t supposed to be as bad as ‘74 so most of the town was caught unaware. I barely got out. I mean barely got out. We were the last car out of town. The water was waist-high on me when we left. I almost did my daughter in too – she’s 16, only a slight thing, she almost got swept away.” His eyes welled up, he paused. Before they fled, he checked on his neighbours who were still home. A couple in their 90s over the back fence were aware the water was rising but were waiting to be picked up. The bloke next door to them was watching TV, unaware water was already in his house.
Once the phone reception came back, the calls for help came thick and fast. More calls for help came from Woodburn, 10 minutes south of Coraki. Floodwaters had only just receded there, nearly 10 days after Lismore. Crossing the bridge in town we saw a tarpaulin strung up to a lamp post – a makeshift shelter for people stranded on the bridge, the highest point in town, as they waited to be rescued by someone around town with a tinnie… like the one stranded on the footpath at the far end of the bridge.
The street we started working on was full of oldies, a lot of them 70-plus years old and they’d just lost everything. Towards the end of the day, we saw people halfway down a long dirt road dragging a door each with a call for help painted on them. They’d just been able to return to their dad’s place the day before and teared up talking about the amount of work ahead of them. The sign read, “61 Donaldson. Help needed. Army or anyone.” Within half an hour, three groups of strangers arrived and got stuck into cleaning up.
It took almost two muddy, exhausting, waterlogged weeks for authorities to arrive with a coordinated response. And in that critical gap, ordinary people stepped up to help. People without any crisis training or expertise worked around the clock to help people affected by this disaster. A community brought together stronger than ever, helping those in need just because they could. I saw teachers, board shapers, baristas, aged care workers, artists, writers, all the trades, photographers, chairmakers, social workers, graphic designers – anyone who could get there – pull on a pair of boots, grab a shovel, hose, spray bottle and cloth, or one end of a waterlogged mattress and do what was needed to help. And those who couldn’t be there on the ground cooked meals, organised fundraisers, started petitions, organised emergency accommodation, started a laundry train. They did what was needed. It’s easy to feel like society has given up community for social media, but one silver lining to come out of this disaster is proof, thousands of times over, that given the chance, people will help each other and surprise you with their generosity.
People affected by the floods still need help. Floods don’t end when the water goes away, there are months of work, repairs, bills, and heartache ahead of thousands of people. If you’re in a position to help, please donate to those who so desperately need it.
www.floodrelieffund.org