The rainforest country of the northern rivers has long been a heartland of alternative thinking and lifestyles.
But residents of Lismore say that when putrid flood waters inundated their homes and destroyed their businesses for the second time in a matter of weeks, it shattered any vestige of the idea of “normal” they had set for themselves, sending them adrift into what feels like a parallel universe.
As the water – thick with oil and sewage – recedes once again, it leaves behind a carpet of filth and detritus. Trauma, too, runs thick. The litter will be removed and streets cleaned, but many people fear that trauma will never fully heal.
When water overtopped the Wilsons River levee on Wednesday morning, Ella Buckland, her eight-year-old daughter Myla and partner Joshua Howard were sheltering at her mother’s house on a hill in Lismore.
The young family lost their home when the New South Wales town flooded on 28 February. They had been staying with Buckland’s mother since.
Others are in the same predicament – couch surfing and crashing with friends and relatives weeks later. In Lismore, they’re known as “flood refugees”.
Buckland says her family are “riding a very strange wave of emotions”.
When the water receded after the first flood, there was trauma and exhaustion. But once Buckland and Howard managed to wrap their heads around their situation, they began tearing down walls, applying for insurance and rebuilding.
Then the water returned.
“We had a terrible couple of days over this last flood,” Buckland says. “Just complete desperation and loss of all hope – for us and for the town.”
Buckland is not alone in her despair. East Ballina psychologist Jane Enter, who practises in Bryon Bay, says she is dealing with widespread trauma across the region.
“There’s a lot of existential angst: ‘Are we going to survive? Is it going to be OK? They have never experienced this kind of weather for this long,” Enter says.
“You’ve gotta remember that there was flood in 2017, fires in 2019 and then Covid.
“People are punch drunk.”
Some are busy getting drunk, or at least heading in that direction. For many left without homes and work again, there doesn’t seem much else to do.
Matthew Stanley lives with his girlfriend Tyla Moore and her mother in a rental house on a hill in the Lismore suburb of Goonellabah.
Though their home stayed dry, all three were left with no income because they were cut off from their casual jobs when their workplaces went underwater.
Stanley works for a hire car company in Ballina. Moore and her mother work as cleaners. She recently landed a job in the Lismore Square shopping centre, scrubbing mould which covered its walls after the last flood.
Stanley is keeping positive. On Thursday he waded through chest-high water to retrieve some possessions from the Gollan Hotel, where he and Moore had been living until earlier this year.
His rescued possessions mainly consisted of his “mad little esky” and an assortment of sours and pale ales.
The beers aren’t just for Stanley and Moore.
Friends – a young family with children – had been crashing in their lounge room since their house flooded in February. This week, their home flooded again.
“They don’t know how to think any more,” Stanley says.
“I don’t know how they’re gonna bounce back. I keep telling him to go get a job, go to Brisbane … but that means relocating his family.’
Matt Lewis and Steve Miller are also on the beers on Thursday as they clean their neighbouring homes.
For Miller, it is the same house he grew up in and one that last flooded when he was three-and-a-half-years old, back in 1974.
He has vague memories of that disaster – but Miller will never forget the flood of 28 February 2022.
In the early hours of that morning, water rushed through his home, eventually coming to within centimetres of his roof. As it rose through the second floor, Miller donned a lifejacket and was about to swim for higher ground.
Then he heard the screams of his elderly neighbour.
“I swam from my front steps to her house,” Miller says.
“She was standing on a chair in her kitchen as the water was rising.
“I said: ‘Bev, we gotta go.”
He told Bev to hold on to his jacket and the pair threw themselves into the flood water. The first rays of light had broken through and a friend in a tinnie saw them struggling in the water.
Miller went from rescuer to being rescued.
“If it hadn’t have been in daylight, we would have fuckin’ drowned,” he says.
Miller also wonders if he would have been able to save his neighbour in the dark, or if he would have had to have gone it alone and leave her to her fate.
“What a cunt of a decision that would be to make,” he says.
Miller’s not a man for expressing his emotions. “It is what it is,” he says of the floods.
“What are you gonna do, sit around and cry all day?”
Nevertheless, he told Bev to leave her home when the heavy rain set in this week.
“I said: ‘I can’t go through that shit again’,” Miller says.
The kind heroic community response to disaster that Miller describes undoubtedly saved many more lives.
But former Lismore councillor and solicitor Eddie Lloyd says that narrative has been used by state and federal governments as a smokescreen for the “inadequacy” of their response.
“What gets lost in this wave of celebration of the community response is the trauma,” she says.
“It’s the people in the boats that are hearing people screaming out of their fuckin’ rooftops – it’s friends helping friends in life and death situation.”
Lloyd says she has “no doubt that every single person” who went through these situations is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“We need trauma counselling for climate change,” she says.
Instead, Lloyd feels as if she is on the frontline of a climate crisis that is being denied by the words and actions of the Australian government.
“I feel like I’m a victim of domestic violence with this government that continues to gaslight me, questioning my reality,” she says.
“It makes us feel like we’re in a parallel universe.”
Lloyd says she is not alarmist, but she is now very alarmed. Her gravest fears, though, are for her eight-year-old son Ryder.
“He has Asperger’s and ADHD,” she says. “He can’t really accommodate much change in his brain.”
But change has been thrust upon Ryder. His school may not reopen for another year.
Buckland too fears most for daughter Myla and her mental health.
In “a great achievement” for Myla’s wellbeing, Buckland made the call to evacuate her house on the night of 27 February and so managed to avoid a near-death experience.
But when Myla re-entered the classroom, she was exposed to the harrowing accounts of her peers, many of whom had been plucked from flood water and had also lost their homes.
All of which has left Buckland and Howard in limbo.
Do they repair their home or sell it for however much they can get and leave town?
“The question I keep asking myself is: do I want my child to grow up in a town that’s completely broken by flooding?” Buckland says.
It’s a huge decision to make, Buckland says, and one that could make her uproot her elderly mother and daughter and leave their support networks and friends behind.
All she knows for now is that, whatever decision she makes, there will be no return to life as it was.
“After the first flood I just kept thinking: I want it all to go back to normal,” Buckland says.
“Now I am like: what is normal? How many years ago was normal?
“The new normal is not knowing what is coming and accepting that everything is impermanent.
“That’s the new normal.”
