Exclusive suburbs hard hit by flood

A month ago, I enjoyed a work Christ­mas lunch at an up-market jetty restau­rant over­look­ing the Bris­bane River. And then, at the height of Brisbane’s floods, I watched in fas­ci­na­tion as the jetty hous­ing its out­door restau­rant, floated down the Bris­bane River, col­lided with a bridge and sunk. Iron­i­cally, it was called Drift.

Stranded in our own lit­tle out­ly­ing semi-rural sub­urb, we could only watch in hor­ror and dis­be­lief as we saw footage of famil­iar stomp­ing grounds swamped by water. Friends phoned to say they were leav­ing their home with the water lap­ping win­dow sills. In another pic­turesque upmar­ket sub­urb, two more friends and their fam­i­lies had left their homes with one say­ing water was expected to reach roof height. The South African cou­ple were rent­ing the prop­erty but as many in the sub­urb, sub­merged in the 1974 floods, were unable to get flood insur­ance. They man­aged to remove a few items includ­ing trea­sured paint­ings, a wash­ing machine and fridge but feared the worst.

As new­com­ers to the coun­try, we bought our very first home in this sub­urb. We believed it was the per­fect envi­ron­ment in which to set­tle – and it was. Close to an excel­lent local school and kinder­garten the area was an exclu­sive lit­tle enclave in the bend of the Bris­bane River.

There is one entry into the low lying sub­urb, green fields hous­ing a pony club hugs one side of the road and on the other, are gum trees grown for feed­ing koalas at the world-famous Lone Pine Koala Sanc­tu­ary (which also expe­ri­enced some flood­ing) fur­ther up the road.

Jacaranda trees bor­der the roads and a beau­ti­ful park is a cen­tral fea­ture, com­plete with a lake where my chil­dren delighted in feed­ing ducks and our golden retriever enjoyed chas­ing them. It was the sort of sub­urb where chil­dren still played in the streets and there was a sense of com­mu­nity I have not encoun­tered since.

Yet old timers steered clear of this sub­urb as they remem­bered the dev­as­ta­tion of the 1974 floods where the entire area was sub­merged. We were told our dou­ble storey home came off com­par­a­tively well with the upper level remain­ing intact. We heard these sto­ries but they were more folk­lore than real­ity. It was sim­ply unthink­able that it could hap­pen again. In any case, we were told the inland Wiven­hoe Dam had since been built and that would cer­tainly pre­vent a repeat of the for­mer devastation.

Prices soared – entry level for the priv­i­lege of liv­ing in this exclu­sive pocket was around the $600,000 mark. It seemed untouch­able. And then the unimag­in­able hap­pened. Days of tor­ren­tial rain filled up Wiven­hoe Dam until it reached 190 per­cent capac­ity. The sluice gates were opened and the del­uge of water was head­ing to Brisbane.

So dis­be­liev­ing were some home­own­ers that their homes could pos­si­bly be swamped, that many were caught unawares. They were warned by more know­ing neigh­bours their homes were about to go under but they sim­ply could not fathom it would hap­pen to them. At the tail end of the Christ­mas school hol­i­days, many other fam­i­lies were away. They returned to a scene rem­i­nis­cent of an apoc­a­lyp­tic movie. Mil­lion dol­lar homes were swal­lowed by a brown, swampy mass of muddy water.

Fur­ther along from the river entire streets were sub­merged. Water had appar­ently bub­bled up from man holes and inun­dated low lying areas. Mirac­u­lously oth­ers a mere metre or so higher, were spared.

The after­math was dev­as­tat­ing, the cleanup insur­mount­able, yet the sense of com­mu­nity that so attracted us to the area many years ago, was as strong as ever.

As a friend said, give it five years and peo­ple will start to for­get once more.

Only time will tell.