Crystal Thompson is trying to make her motel room feel like a home for her three children.
The pregnant mother was one of 15 people evacuated on Friday when rising floodwaters engulfed the tiny outback Queensland town of Urandangi.
"I don't think, honestly, anyone was expecting to get this amount of water anywhere … even being wet season," she said.
"I want to go home. This is very stressful, to be honest with you. It's a lot because we're such a small community."
Urandangi is just one of many towns across the state's north-west hit hard by the current flood crisis.
Ms Thompson helps run the Urandangi pub with her father, who chose to stay behind and face the floodwaters.
"It's actually reached to the point that it's gone through our houses, and it's in the pub," she said.
"So yes, we're losing everything."
A LifeFlight helicopter conducted a welfare check on Ms Thompson's father on Wednesday, who signalled to the crew that he was safe to remain in the flood-ravaged town.
In the meantime, Ms Thompson and other locals are being housed in a Mount Isa motel where they wait anxiously for more information about the fate of their community.
"We will be in here for a while because our water supply has gone under," she said.
"A lot of our sewage needs to be pumped out and you can't have anybody live in a town that's just been completely covered.
"I reckon [we'll be here] leading into months."
Hardship payments fall short
Residents affected by the floods have received Queensland government emergency hardship payments of $180 per person, but Ms Thompson said that money had not stretched far.
She has organised for her kids to go to school in Mount Isa as the family settles into a new way of life.
"We try not to show them [photos of the flooding] because it's too emotional for them to handle losing and worrying about animals and stuff like that," Ms Thompson said.
She added that the entire town was uninsured.
With just the 'clothes on my back'
Zachariah and Maxine Sowden are in a similar boat.
They were helicoptered out of the Gulf of Carpentaria community of Burketown on Saturday as floodwaters swamped their house.
"I was evacuated with the clothes on my back," Mr Sowden said.
"I didn't even have shoes. My thongs went floating down the river."
Thirty-seven homes in Burketown were inundated when record-flooding swept through the town on the weekend.
The Sowden siblings are now living with their mother more than 400 kilometres away in Mount Isa, unsure when they will be able to return home to assess the damage.
"Our house has been in the family for over 50 years, 60 years. I'm thinking we might lose it," Ms Sowden said.
Floodwaters are receding in Burketown but the airstrip remains unusable and the community is expected to remain cut off by road for several weeks.
Helicopters offer the only way in and out.
"It's a bit distressing. I want to be there, helping out the guys, helping out the community clean up," Mr Sowden said.
"I can't wait to see home and see what's actually going on. We lost buggies and cars and stuff like that.
"Nothing really we can do here except sit back and wait."
Damage assessments to begin
Burke Shire Council chief executive Dan McKinlay said essential workers had started to return to Burketown on Wednesday.
"[To] at least start to get a little bit of normality back into our devastated town," he said.
Mr McKinlay said staff from the Queensland Reconstruction Authority would travel to the town this week to begin damage assessments.
"The big focus is really trying to get houses back to the stage where people can go back to their homes," Mr McKinlay said.
"We've got severe water restrictions on at the moment. We've still got sewage issues we're trying to sort out.
"So certainly, we don't want to be bringing the bulk of people back until that infrastructure has been sorted out."
