Lynne Morgan is standing in ankle-deep water outside the house her father built in Seymour, about 100km north of Melbourne. She racks her brain about when it was built, but then remembers it was finished just before the birth of her older sister, who has just turned 70.
Flood water from the Goulburn River first appeared in the corner of her back yard at about 4pm on Thursday. By 6pm, her whole yard was under.
Morgan, 66, thought the house, in President Street, would be safe. It had survived the last big flood in 1974. But her family told her she should get what she could off the floor just in case.
She left the property late on Thursday, and when she returned early Friday the house had been inundated. It is one of dozens of houses and businesses in the town that have been flooded.
“I was here in the ‘74 flood and it didn’t go in the house, so I assumed it would be alright,” Morgan says.
“But it doesn’t pay to assume, as they say.”
Further down the street, Arthur Reid – who relies on oxygen and struggles to walk without assistance – and his wife, who he says can barely move from a recliner in the lounge, decided to stay put when evacuation warnings were issued on Thursday night.
Reid built the house in 1985, and it would have been closer to ground level had council not forced him to change his plans. He’s glad it did: it meant flood waters peaked well below his front door.
“I bloody didn’t think so at the time, it cost me an extra $7,000,” he says, laughing.
Reid expects chainsaws and a generator in his shed have been destroyed, but is grateful the damage wasn’t worse.
Not far from Reid’s place, it is. The Goulburn River snakes its way along the western edge of town, but the week’s driving rain engorged it to the point where it swallowed the local footy oval and businesses in the main street.
While bushfires are often said to be capricious, destroying some properties while sparing others next door, flood water is different. It does not discriminate. It goes where it must.
At a clothing shop in Wallis Street, the high-water mark can be seen halfway up the calf of a mannequin wearing jeans. Next door, Michael O’Sullivan, the branch manager of the local Ray White real estate agency, is propped on the handle of a squeegee. He’s been using it to push water out of the carpet in his office and through the front door.
O’Sullivan points down the road to the railway tracks, saying he remembers standing up there as a 12-year-old boy watching the flood waters flow by in 1974.
“None of us thought the same thing could happen again, because so much work has been done to improve the water flows since then,” he says.
“But there was just too much rain.”
On Friday, large parts of the country woke up to water. Heavy rain had hammered towns and cities across Victoria, NSW and Tasmania through the night and into the early morning. Thousands of people fled their homes; many sat in darkness as they lost power; some armed themselves with sandbags and shovels to fight the rain.
On Thursday afternoon Railton, a small town in the north-west of Tasmania was quiet. The council was nervous – the area has been hit hard by flooding before. In 2011, 60 homes were inundated. In 2016, three lives were lost.
At the Railton hotel – the town’s two-storey pub, which backs on to the creek – a dozen punters were inside having a beer. The mood was relaxed.
“One guy showed me a photo of the pub from the 2016 floods, the water was at the door,” publican Caroline Broomhall says.
They were prepared, but it was still a sleepless night.
“I was up watching for most of the night,” Broomhall says. “I was watching it come across the road, it came up to halfway, and then I went back to bed. I got up another hour later and it was dissipating.”
Kentish council’s mayor, Tim Wilson, says it is too soon to tell how badly the area was damaged, but that he thinks about 20 homes had been affected.
“We’ve had torrential rains over the last two days – 220ml in about 48 hours,” Wilson says.
“We were hopeful the town would escape with the improvements [we’ve done] but it didn’t. Last night there were a few heavy flows through different streets.
“We don’t know how many houses have suffered … at least 20.”
About 50 minutes west of Railton is Wilmot, a quiet farming town situated inside an emerald-green valley. After the storm hit, its 300 residents spent almost 24 hours with mudslides on either side locking them in.
“We were without power, which means no phone, no internet,” says resident Michelle Enchelmaier. “You have to have a line of sight [to a telecom tower] for the internet, but with wind events and rain events we lose that.”
Enchelmaier and her partner were prepared: they had boiled some water, set up camp lanterns and were ready for the outage to hit.
“The hardest part is my partner works with a company from Queensland,” Enchelmaier says. “We couldn’t get enough internet coverage for him to send a message to work. So we ended up driving to Devonport.”
In June, the town was hit by strong winds, and residents lost power for up to four days. They are now used to snap isolations.
In preparation, farmers went around checking the creeks to make sure they were clear, neighbours offered each other sandbags, people checked on friends living alone, and everyone went to the supermarket to stock up.
Pam McCaskie and her partner only moved to the area two years ago. They lost their power for 18 hours. After suffering through two outages this year, it was time to buy a generator, she says.
“The rain was heavy – we’ve got an amateur rain gauge and it recorded 345ml,” McCaskie says.
When the power is out there isn’t much to do. She did a crossword while her partner Geoff slept.
“We could work on our [renovations], but we weren’t motivated,” she says.
Now large parts of northern Tasmania just wait – for the water levels to drop, and the clean-up to begin.
Wilson expects the damage bill to be huge. “We’ll have over $1m in damages in Kentish,” he says. “On some of the roads, the top layer has been peeled off. There are bridges that are damaged.
“It’s not just our municipality – we’re seeing further damage and it’ll keep coming.”
