Nearly a year’s worth of rain in a day. The biggest flood the Northern Rivers and South-East Queensland has ever seen. Tens of thousands caught out, thousands displaced, countless homes destroyed, livelihoods lost, hundreds rescued, 22 dead. An unprecedented civilian fightback and an epiphany experienced on a grand scale that cannot be forgotten. The catastrophic floods of 2022 left an indelible imprint on the consciousness of all those who experienced it – from world champion surfers and Hollywood megastars to welfare recipients and the bottom end of the working class.
When the rivers burst their banks, pro surfing’s elite were among the first to answer the call. “It was full on,” recalls Joel Parkinson of what greeted him as he rounded the bend on the Tweed River on his jet ski. “Every house was completely inundated. I never expected the Tweed River to do that. I’ve seen it do its thing, but I never knew it had that in it,” he said.
Joel spent the next 12 hours whisking people to safety from rooftops, cars, and anywhere else above the flood. When he got home he found his wife’s car had been stolen and the house robbed while his family slept inside. He barely gave it a second thought, waking up the following day and doing it all again. “I just went, for me, losing a car – whatever. They lost their cars, their house, they lost their toothbrushes. Everything,” he said.
Mick Fanning was another titan throughout the rescue and relief effort; pulling people to safety on his ski, helping coordinate donations and run a relief centre, quelling unrest between volunteers and police when it threatened to break out… even forking out to buy building supplies for poor and vulnerable people in his community. It was a similar story in towns across the region as thousands of people descended out of the hills, like an army of ants, to pick up the pieces and begin rebuilding their communities. Food, water, medicine and tools poured into town halls. Makeshift command posts were set up in local businesses and community centres to direct the clean-up crew militias. Desk jockeys mucked in with tradesmen and demolition experts, women with men, hipsters with bikies, Sikhs with Samoans, vegans with cattle and cane farmers, entire football teams, entire Jujitsu dojos, all of them gloved up, gumboots on, picking through the soiled contents of a perfect stranger’s home. Dirty, dangerous work. The floods had inundated sewage systems, petrol stations, industrial and agricultural chemical deposits, and killed thousands of livestock creating an unimaginably toxic goop. Gastro, blood poisoning, eye infections and other ailments abounded. Rumours of lost eyes, severed fingers, even amputations circulated.
No sign of the government, no police. Just a lawless, non-hierarchical amalgam of humans from every conceivable walk of life ripping in for a common cause.
And it worked. It worked seamlessly.
When compassion is your compass, everything is so simple. The only question is how can I help? And the answer always comes swiftly. There is no room for ego in a mass upwelling of service and selflessness. When everyone pulls in the same direction, it becomes an unstoppable force of its own and you realise beyond any doubt, feel in every cell of your body, what the true meaning of life is, what is really possible, and what governments the world over are so desperate to keep secret. That they are little more than an obstruction to the people’s potential to build utopia. That compassion and community are the currency, not cash. That the best outfit is the one caked in mud. That the best gift is love and kindness. That the best job is the most meaningful one. And the most meaningful one is that which has an immediate and tangible benefit for those around you. That materialism is no match for mateship. That consumerism is nothing compared to community. That contentment is camaraderie and shared experience. That the people united will never be defeated. That people power is the world’s greatest resource. That politicians are parasites, centralised government is an abject failure, and revolution is simply communities taking responsibility for themselves. Don’t wait for someone to the job for you. Change comes from the grassroots and moves up, not the other way round.
The exercise in compassion and service over self, undertaken on such a grand scale was unprecedented. It was monastic. In a culture that has criminalised and ridiculed compassion, it gave us a taste of what life could be like and many of us – maybe all of us – never want to go back.
But we’ve been forced to by a rigged financial system hell bent on controlling us through artificial pressures like debt, cost of living, house prices, rent, pointless, meaningless jobs, productivity theft, political divides, and so on. Everyone who ripped in for their community knows this. They know how easily and differently things could be and they know exactly why it’s not.
The government fucked up, not lifting a finger. They gave the people a window into their true, untapped potential and a taste for what it feels like to stand on your own two feet. They will try and make us forget it, but they can’t. You can’t kill an idea… and the floods started our minds flowing.
Among the most sinister revelations was that in a world designed by property developers and politicians, driven by profit motive and nothing else, low-lying equals low socioeconomic. The worst affected areas were also the poorest – West Ballina, Wardell, Woodburn, Broadwater, the Indigenous mission on Cabbage Tree Island, Lismore, Coraki, Murwillumbah – home to single parents, the elderly, people on disability pensions, people caring for disabled family members, refugees, First Nations people, and those at the bottom end of the working class desperate to get a foothold in the property market.
When Prime Minister Scott Morrison belatedly arrived in the Northern Rivers, he did so in a blacked-out convoy of SUVs that ferried him, under heavy police guard, to and from a curated press conference in the Goonellabah Council chambers. Across the road was an evacuation centre overflowing with refugees from the flood, but he didn’t go there. Nor were media permitted to film any of his interactions with flood-affected members of the public. It was a savvy move. Anything else and blood might have been spilt. A Lismore resident waiting outside the council chambers for him summed it up best.
“Why can’t everyone be safe and we have a cheap place to live and support each other? Businesses are nothing without us. We’re nothing without them. It isn’t about money. It’s about all of us being able to survive,” she told me, breaking down in tears. “We actually need houses in the hinterland. We need safe places for every person so if there’s a 2000-year flood everyone is safe. There’s farms out there you can’t split up under 100 acres. Why can’t we? Why can’t we?” she asked. “It’s too much. It’s a lot. We’re watching 80-year-old women clean their houses and wonder why they can’t get help. We can’t even talk to someone we pay. He is the person we come to in crisis and if he’s a good Christian man as he pretends, get off your arse, get on a shovel. We don’t need your money.”