The northern rivers region of New South Wales has some of the most beautiful landscapes in the country.
Lush, rolling hills in every gradient of green. There’s the ancient rainforests, mountain ranges, famous beaches. A subtropical climate. In the long golden afternoons, there is magic in those hills.
But on 28 February, everything changed. After six months of rain, the rivers overflowed and flooded.
Paradise was lost. Rivers changed shape, carving wider into steep new banks, gouging out roads. The land slipped and slid in the hills, taking houses with it. In the towns, people were left traumatised, their homes trashed.
In devastated Lismore, flood-affected residents were taking the first steps towards recovery when, on 30 March, it flooded again. Tentative hope turned to disbelief.
Now they are in limbo, exhausted, disoriented, waiting on decisions. Houses are not habitable, scattered across the region. Sleeping in caravans, tents and sheds, or couch-surfing in the overcrowded houses of friends.
A university town with a vibrant arts community, Lismore, known affectionately as Lovemore, is a diverse place full of colourful characters and lovely old wooden cottages.
In the “rainbow region”, there is “a kitsch vibe” and a strong sense of community, resident Douglas Haigh says.
But right now, environmental lawyer and NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson says “it is like a war zone”.
“At the moment the only available cooked food in Lismore is [from] a voluntary kitchen,” Higginson says.
Danielle Toms speaks for many when she says her mental health is “balancing on a pinhead”. She needs a safe place for her children and pets.
“Beyond the resilient, strong mask I kid myself with, I’m just totally lost and don’t know where to turn – and more than anything I just want to go home, even if it doesn’t look like the home I once knew,” she says.
This is, in every sense of the word, a watershed moment for Lismore. In the magnitude of this disaster, the question of what to do about Lismore can no longer be pushed aside. This has to be the catalyst for change. Can they continue to live on an active flood plain where they get jittery every time it rains? Is Lismore still viable as a town?
“With fast velocity flood waters it is demonstrably getting worse and the occurrences are more frequent,” town planner Peter Cumming says. “We actually have to deal with it.”
Cumming believes there is a case for relocation. “But the difficulty is making that happen. And you’ve got to act quickly to do that.”
He says disaster-prone Queensland is far more prepared.
“You have got something like the Queensland Reconstruction Authority in place to organise it,” he says. “It has the finance, the acquisition power to actually make it happen. New South Wales hasn’t got that.”
He says Lismore needs experts who know what they are doing. “Not politicians. And you can’t just rely on a council with no money. They need guidance and hope with firm actions and firm expert opinion.”
Higginson agrees, saying a rapid response is needed.
“People need to know within the next six months,” Higginson says. “Are they rebuilding? What are they doing? We are literally at a dysfunctional stand still. We are compounding the trauma by having no plan and no response. What we need is a community adaptation plan.”
She considers the idea of relocation and land swap as an option.
“The government needs to immediately source that land, secure that land, and then offer a fair swap to landholders who are down in those lowest areas,” she says. “The ones that really get smashed and where people were rescued off their roofs holding on for their lives. No matter what we do, we can’t make them safe. The swapped lowlands should be regenerated to nature, cultural, park, recreational, educational and marketplace lands. ”
For those on the lower slopes, she says “we need to assist them to raise their homes and buildings in the safest way with appropriate materials”.
“We need a whole of catchment and [a] rehabilitation plan to retain rainfall, reduce run-off, lower flood heights and delay flood peaks.”
The Queensland Reconstruction Authority was behind the moving of part of the town of Grantham in the Lockyer valley, where 21 people died in a flash flood in January 2011. Mayor Tanya Milligan says it’s been a success.
“We have 111 families on higher ground that can sleep at night, that are safe,” Milligan says. “Is that a win? Yeah. That’s 111 families that weren’t in [evacuation] centres and places of shelter in times of an event we have just come through.”
Milligan says it was “a huge, huge ordeal”, and the first challenge was securing political and financial support. With $9m each from the state and federal governments, the council bought 935 acres for $30m. “Eleven years on, we still owe $6.3m,” Milligan says.
There was, she says, “lots of conversations, lots of sitting down and talking [to] community”, including vulnerable people trying to make life-changing decisions who were assisted by case workers.
“If you had a small block, you could swap it for a small block. If you had a large block you could swap it for a large block. It was all done by a ballot system,” she says. “So people would clear their block and give that block to the council.”
Milligan says if she was being brutally honest, that land “was worth nothing”. Those with insurance had the ability to build a new home. “But not everyone had the ability to do that. In a perfect world, it would not be at a cost to anyone.”
Those who didn’t have insurance, or the funds, stayed behind. And got flooded again.
Artist Victoria Lane lost her studio and her home on 28 February. She and her mother own 10 acres and a beautiful cottage they spent $150,000 renovating.
All of it went under. One of their horses died in the flood.
Now her 82-year-old mother doesn’t know if she wants to go back, and she has nightmares. Lane runs art classes in the studio, so if she moved away she would have no income.
“I don’t know whether to just put it on the market as a fixer-upper – would anybody buy it?” Lane says. “Then try and cut our losses, or if there’s a buyback system, yeah, I’m definitely interested, but it depends what that is. I can’t just live on a block of land in a tin shed. I feel like I have been working all my life to have nothing.”
Des Grace has lived in Lismore for all of his 53 years and he has had enough.
On the night of 28 February, he spent eight hours in a kayak tied to his house with his 15-year-old daughter, before climbing up a tree on to the roof. He had just had surgery for cancer and is still traumatised when it rains. In an extraordinary piece of luck, he had refinanced six weeks before the flood and “they insisted I got flood insurance – I’ve never had it before”.
He has since been able to buy a property in Tenterfield. “There were years where we’ve had six floods before between November and May. So I’m kind of betting on another one before May. I am a tough bastard and I’ve had enough. As a global warming realist I don’t have any doubts about the impacts, so I know these events are only going to get bigger and stronger.”
As for the rest of Lismore: “How long is it going to take to rebuild? And if they do rebuild, how many people can afford it?”
Tony Davies, chief executive of the non-profit organisation Social Futures, is concerned that in a land swap deal, those who could not afford to relocate would be left behind.
“To move a community like that, the community would have to be involved in the decision making,” Davies says. “Lismore is absolutely their home, a place they are deeply attached to. Any relocation of neighbourhoods has to be done in a way where the neighbourhood is preserved by the community connections.
“If you just build houses and don’t focus on the neighbourhood, you end up with incredible social dislocation.”
He says one of the greatest resources people in these communities have is “their social connection”.
“I think a big discussion needs to be had. If the costs are not subsidised by the community as a whole you’re going to result in a greater polarisation between haves and have-nots. The most immediate priority for me is proper disaster planning.”
Lismore councillor Big Rob says a government buyback won’t work as he believes the amount that a person would get for land on a floodplain won’t be enough to buy elsewhere, particular with house price rises.
The idea of a land swap “is feasible, definitely”, he says. “But there are too many competing interests, and just so many issues to address. We just need money, a lot of it, to find better solutions. Otherwise our best solution is to try and reduce the peaks of the big floods and minimise their impacts as best we can.”
Eli Roth never wants to leave his house in Union Street.
He saved up and bought it two years ago, when he was 27. He used to ride his bike past it when he was a kid.
“I bought this place pretty damn confidently,” he says. “The highest flood on record in 1974 never hit the floorboards.”
On 28 February he was rescued off its roof. Roth was born in Lismore and feels deeply connected to his community and to his elderly neighbour, Gary.
“My heart and soul belong to this town, this community,” he says.
The house backs on to the spectacular Lyster Creek – which engulfed his property five weeks ago.
“I told myself when I first moved here, I’ll never sell this place, because of the river view out the back – although it pretty much almost killed us,” he says.
“It’s saved me a lot of times as well. Just mentally, coming home after a hard day’s work or having a rough day and [I can] just go out and look at it. And it’s just like everything’s OK. Having a coffee in the morning and watching the sun rise over it is priceless.”
No matter what happens, this is his home.
“Even if I’m left with a vacant block with a caravan on it and still paying my mortgage – I’m staying. And I think a lot of people feel that same way.”
