For me the sound of rain has changed, as it has for many people in the northern rivers from a peaceful backdrop for slumber and a giving life force to a warning sign to not get complacent.
The sound now carries with it a weight, and a knowing, of the power that can hide behind it. I have seen water in places the mind can’t fathom in its absence, yet the evidence remains as a daily reminder. A tricycle high in the tree out the front on the verge, windows and doors to house after house, sky-high on stilts, silent, open and gaping, revealing the holes that have been left in so many lives.
We moved home this week, just shy of seven months since our carpet danced and we climbed through our manhole to escape the rising 14-plus metres tide. Just in time for the third La Niña season to be announced and the first flood watch of the season declared upon a community still deep in recovery.
I ponder my relationship to safety as I take my first bath back “home”, our tin roof amplifying the downpour. How I feel about possessions, not wanting for much after throwing everything off the deck to explode on the sodden pile down below, covered in mud, my life unrecognisable.
I reflect on how one night has consumed more than half a year and all of our spare time, energy and resources.
How all else has stopped, how the world became smaller, our vision hyperzoomed on disaster and recovery. It’s like a film in reverse as we attempt to build back towards what we had. It seems kind of mad.
“What is being home like?” I am asked by well-meaning people. My response, ‘“It’s like going back to a crappy ex-partner with a fresh haircut. They look great, there are corners of them that are cozy and familiar but you can’t completely trust them, you know their days are limited.”
The reality of coexisting in the flood plain. I unpack my new fridge and find a moment of joy as I see it complementing my new tiles and peppermint grout, then sigh and apologise to it. It feels like I am condemning the soul of anything I put inside these walls to a watery death. We are holding off getting a couch till the wet season passes – I have lost far too much velvet to the Wilson River.
The first month after the flood is out of focus in my mind. Details bled into one another as we stumbled through ripping out every wall, floor covering and fixed furniture from its foundation to a chorus of genres and generators.
Time feels as though it has become elastic, overlapping and unreliable. We are built back as flood-mitigated as possible, no plasterboard, no chipboard. Everything now goes through a flood lens filter, as you give it an asking knock to check its innards.
We make enough changes to the house that this ordeal feels psychologically “worth it” yet restrained enough knowing there will most likely be a next time as the climate crisis surges on, evident in countries currently living the reality we did just months earlier.
Dinner conversation always drain back to the flood. Where we’re going, what we’re going to do, how, when. It’s a tired, boring conversation going nowhere. The truth is we all have no idea. Still.
We have desensitised to the apocalyptic backdrop that has become the set of this insane life.
Some houses still haven’t been touched, proudly showcasing the highest hight on the chart, fudge-coloured ghosts waiting for answers. We’ve been left waiting for a bureaucratic process to filter down to those who are still living in tents beneath the bare bones of houses, in caravans in driveways with no means to move to higher ground as the impending flood may or may not approach.
A town wide awake, awaiting tangible answers to pull us from the limbo that is our reality.
Many people feel as though “back home” is not an option. That their efforts to build back may be in vain should the federal and state governments actually partner to deliver the funding necessary to implement land swaps or buybacks; time, effort and limited resources potentially wasted, big choices to be making with dangling options being pushed further and further back on a horizon that feels unobtainable, when held hostage waiting for the outcome of an inquiry we poured our heart and souls into.
The State Emergency Service and Bureau of Meteorology seem to be on their best behaviour after the initial findings, the warnings coming thick and fast at the first river rise. I am unsure if it’s helpful for a community steeped deep in trauma and broken trust. Tension in the air is palpable as we hold one another’s eyes in hopeful disbelief. Surely not again.
Is there a word for beyond exhausted?
Some use the word resilient, a word that has become offensive, worn and unwelcome. A backhanded compliment which dismisses the fact that energy is finite, that people only have so much within them during a certain period of time to face the same challenge, again, and maybe again.
A learned helplessness sweeps the air as we wait.
Living in a flood plain means not ever fully resting. Like an animal in the wild we await for the danger to stalk us again, counting millimetres, scrolling public forums and weather predictions, as the rain continues.
The northern rivers has just hit its second leg of an undetermined marathon. I was about to call for the water person, but we’ve had enough of that. We need a life raft and we need it six months ago.
• Kate Stroud runs a one-woman creative studio specialising in vision hunting and visual communications
