Fishermen have lost homes to the floods, nets and traps have been swept away, and now their livelihood is washing up dead on riverbanks and beaches along the New South Wales North Coast.
Day by day the industry is counting the cost — financial and emotional — as the flooding disaster turns into an ecological one.
OzFish Unlimited chief executive Craig Copeland estimates hundreds of thousands of fish have been killed in the Richmond River alone.
"We've got juvenile fish, we've got big fish, we've got all the major species. So we've got sea mullet, bream, flathead, whiting, and then all the small fish, we've got toadfish, all sorts of things," he said.
The reason behind the widespread fish kills across the catchment — already one of the most polluted in the country — is the lack of oxygen in the water.
"It's a bit natural in that after a flood, stuff in the wetlands decompose and comes out and chews up all the oxygen in the water," he said.
"Unfortunately we've got a flood plain that's made to drain very quickly.
The Clarence River has also seen a mass fish kill, and even further south fish are dying in the Macleay and Evans rivers.
Mr Copeland said the fish kills indicated that more work needed to be done to restore habitats along riverbanks.
Floods devastate fishermen
The majority of suppliers to the Ballina Fishermen's Co-operative rely on the river, whether they fish out of it or at sea.
Operations manager Di Foster said that the Richmond River had only recovered from the last major fish kill three years ago.
"With the river itself, the mud's not great this end of the scale. With the Richmond River, anything below Bungawalbin we've got the flood plains and everything off that. It's the mud coming off the farming land which is making the river really dirty.
"Anything in the bottom end's been washed out and if they're [aquatic animals] not already washed out they're suffocating with the lack of oxygen in the water now, and because of the mud [it's] just clogging everything up for them."
Ms Foster said more rain was needed to flush the mud out of the river and clear it up.
"Ideally we'd love to see a metre rise in the river to get rid of all that water. Cleaning it up [will] get the fish back, save what hasn't already died, clean everything up and encourage it to reproduce again."
No mighty mullet run, but prawns aplenty
A month or so out from the annual mullet run, catches are likely to be down at Ballina and affected rivers further south.
"Our mullet here in the Richmond River, if it was down in the bottom half of the river they've been washed out and they don't actually come back into the river," Ms Foster said.
"Once they're out they travel up the coast, so for us here we won't get a lot of mullet."
The fishermen are now relying on that clean water to come down the river to keep the remaining mullet alive and attract other travellers.
"Other mullet we'll see is the mullet that's been washed out from the Clarence and the Yamba rivers and then coming up here," she said.
While there will be less mullet this year, Ms Foster said there will unlikely be a shortage of prawns.
"[But] it won't be worth the guys going to catch because … unfortunately, it'll be an overstock on the market for the prawns."
Ms Foster said she was not sure of the cost of the floods to industry, but said it could be six to 12 months before it was viable again.
