Losing everything changes you, says Margaret Kloostra.
“You have to rethink things,” she says. “What are the things that are truly important to you?”
Kloostra’s 79 years have afforded her ample opportunity to consider that question.
The retired social worker, midwife and nurse has lost almost everything on four separate occasions: a house fire and three floods. Those disasters robbed her of two pianos, photo albums and the university certificate she so proudly achieved as a mature-aged woman originally denied the opportunity to complete her high school education.
But the floods that inundated south-east Queensland in early 2022 will be the last time Kloostra loses just about everything – at least in the home on Goodna’s Enid Street in which she raised her four children.
The house in which she treated clients, read Dutch-language books, wrote passionate letters to the editor and cultivated a lush sanctuary of a garden for half a century has been bought by the Queensland government. Soon it will be razed.
On the surface, Enid Street looks as normal as any other in Goodna – a working-class suburb on Brisbane’s outskirts that realised the dream of home ownership for successive waves of migrants for generations.
However, following last year’s devastating floods, the street has been deemed an unacceptable risk. Of 15 homes, 12 are understood to have accepted voluntary buybacks from a joint state and federal government scheme based on mitigating risk to life and property. This week, bulldozers moved in.
Enid is not the only street in the state from which homes will disappear. It’s not even the only street in the block likely to vanish. The Queensland government hopes to see 500 homes resumed following last year’s floods and, according to the Griffith University climate justice researcher Prof Susan Harris Rimmer, the fate of Enid Street will become increasingly common as global heating fuels more frequent natural disasters.
“Buying back these houses and rezoning the land is the responsible thing to do,” she says. “It’s just got to happen at a larger scale – and faster.”
But Harris Rimmer knows that the gut-wrenching process of separating people from land and home has “impacts in all kinds of ways”.
“From that one street,” she says, “there will be ripple effects.”
‘I’ve just realised I’m homeless’
For nearly a year, Enid Street has been existing in a state of limbo.
Grass grows waist-high in once manicured lawns, vines snake their way up the sides of houses, junk mail piles up in letterboxes. Cladding has been stripped, sinks and windows removed, squatters moved in. A small, hand-written sign saying “Be Back Soon” is stuck on to the garage of an apparently derelict home.
“That’s to keep the thieves away,” owner Allan Kunst explains.
One impact of leaving Enid Street upon Allan has been the separation from his wife of 38 years, Lynette, this past year.
They had disagreed about whether to relocate, having had similar discussions when the house went under mud and water in 2011.
“We grew apart … but that was the catalyst,” Allan says.
The Kunsts are among the owners of 183 homes in south-east Queensland who have had government offers on their houses valued at their pre-flood worth – prices which were soaring on the backs of interstate buyers seeking investment properties.
For many in Enid Street, that saw them offered a figure in the vicinity of $400,000.
Allan and Lynette will split the money. And while 200,000-odd dollars is a fair chunk of change, it doesn’t leave a couple of retirees with bodies feeling the toll of a lifetime of factory work in a commanding position to buy another house in a suburb whose median price last year was $465,000.
Allan has purchased a second-hand Jayco Freedom caravan, small enough to tow on the back of his Rav 4, almost big enough to contain what could be salvaged of his belongings.
“I’ve always had somewhere to live,” Allan says. “But after all these years, I’ve just realised I’m homeless.”
‘It wasn’t voluntary at all’
In Enid Street, the voluntary buyback has elicited almost every possible emotional reaction.
Chris Onyeajum uses the words “miracle” and “life-saver” and “saving grace” to describe the scheme.
Chris, his wife Ronnella and their eight children came up from the New South Wales south coast in 2018 but had since moved closer to Ipswich and were renting out their Enid Street home when it went under last year.
Still, they witnessed the trauma of disaster and experienced the hopelessness it leaves in its wake.
“For months and months and months you go there and you don’t know where to start,” Onyeajum says. “Not only that, you have a mortgage there, all the red lines that was put into restructuring and building, insurance is skyscraper level – there’s so many things that made our lives miserable.”
Accepting a way out, he says, was “a no-brainer”.
Several other homeowners, though, feel deeply embittered about how the scheme was run.
“It wasn’t voluntary at all,” Chris Bullbrook says.
Bullbrook says he felt pressured into accepting an offer by a deadline imposed upon him and over which there was no room for negotiation. He and several other homeowners who had been paying for home insurance had their payout included in, not additional to, the pre-flood market value offer on their homes.
“If you’re insured, you’re penalised,” he says. “If you’re not, you’re rewarded.”
Bullbrook is living in a shed, separated from his wife and family.
“I can’t rent, ’cause the rent is astronomical,” he says. “I can’t buy. I’m 63 years of age and I’ve got nowhere to live.”
Money also can’t replace the sentimental value of homes that had been in some families for decades.
Guillermo Fernandez moved back into his childhood home in Enid Street with his wife, Luz, and their five children five years ago to care for his ageing parents, Luis and Adriana.
After fleeing the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1984, Luis and Adriana worked hard in a country whose language they didn’t speak to save enough to buy the house in Enid Street that became a home they thought they’d never leave.
Luis and Adriana are now looking to pitch in with Guillermo’s sister to buy a home. Guillermo, Luz and the kids are renting in the private market.
“It’s been an emotional rollercoaster for everyone,” Luz says.
Guillermo and some of his siblings plan on one last camp amid the ruins of their family’s sanctuary.
“Just to have a night here ourselves,” he says. “Just having a bit of peace and talking about memories.”
For his father, returning to that lane is becoming increasingly difficult. Luis suffers dementia.
“Dad knows that where he is living is not his house,” Luz says. “And sometimes he cries, saying that he wants to go home. That was their haven.”
Moving into a ghost street
Others have made it their haven since the flood. Christopher Meiklejohn and Kiarah Taylor and their three children are among several young families to have moved in in recent weeks.
“It’s insane out there,” Taylor says of the rental market. “We’re just happy we got a house.”
The young couple may be enjoying life on their quiet street, but questions remain about its future.
Ipswich council says it is concerned about homes that remain identified as high-risk in areas like Enid Street, but will continue to provide normal services even if only a few homes remain after the scheme concludes.
For now, eerie silence reigns in Enid Street. And for Margaret Kloostra, that’s an all too familiar feeling. She recalls 2011, when she returned to her home after the floods.
“I walked into this ghost-like place – it was the weirdest thing. There was just this nothingness and loss and destruction. It was almost as if you were on the moon.”
In the shell of her home Kloostra sat down in 2011 to write those impressions. The computer which held those thoughts was destroyed by flood water last year, the raw detail it contained obliterated.
But Kloostra has been afforded more opportunity than most to reflect upon what is truly important. For her that was community, the neighbours suddenly and unceremoniously snatched from her for good.
“Everything’s gone, the people have gone,” she says. “It all just dissipates and there’s no saying goodbye. And I find it so unsatisfactory and such a shame.”
On this level, once again, Enid Street is a microcosm of a future fast becoming reality.
Harris Rimmer says a growing body of evidence shows that people who experience disasters need not only economic but emotional support. They need community.
And as the country grapples with a rental crisis and the region’s population booms, we need to learn the lessons of Enid Street, she says.
“We need to stop sending our most vulnerable populations into the most dangerous places.”
