Adrift in a parallel universe: Lismore struggles to find itself after another flood

Ella Buckland and her daughter Myla Hennessy lost their home and possessions a month ago. The second flood brought a ‘loss of all hope’. Photograph: David Maurice Smith/Oculi/The Guardian

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.