‘It’s just maths’: uninsurable, disaster-hit pockets of Australia pose existential questions requiring radical answers

Jenny Wilkinson in her water-damaged Taree home, where she’s lived for 25 years. She doesn’t want to move, she says, but with the floods she could reconsider. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The Guardian

On Tuesday 20 May, as rain pounded Taree and flood waters rose, eight people wheeled a grand piano on its castors across one of the town’s main streets and into an office block.

The piano, worth $20,000, was saved and still sits in the office nearly two weeks later, with employees working around it.