Everyone across Bryon shire went to bed Tuesday night thinking they were going to be fine, Mark Swivel says.
“But people awoke in Byron to see the town centre flooded and shops underwater,” the councillor and lawyer said on Wednesday.
“They were thinking, ‘well, what the hell has happened here?’”
That question is being repeated across the nation, since people saw images of flood water inundating the tourist destination at levels not seen in living memory.
It still has the capacity to shock many in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, even after weeks of flooding that has taken and upended lives across huge swathes of New South Wales and Queensland.
Somehow, the thought of their favourite summer playground being underwater seemed unthinkable, right until it happened.
For many in Byron, they know they live in a flood-prone area but were seemingly unaware of the danger they faced.
On Tuesday night, after waiting out most of the pandemic to do so, John Mitchell and Karen Martin hosted their first event in two years, with bird expert Gisela Kaplan giving a talk and a book signing at their Byron Bay bookshop.
Despite days of rain and the last-minute arrangements, the event sold out.
“Since the big rain we had four weeks ago, there was a real sense of the town coming out of itself – a sense of: ‘let’s go out and have some fun’,” Mitchell says.
Swivel says there was sense it was going to be “a wet and tricky” night, but there would “be no real drama”.
He was hosting a dinner party – a nice, relaxing get-together. Then he drove a friend home at about 10.30pm.
“As the night went on, the rain got more intense, and people started to feel that something was awry,” he says.
“You could literally sense it.”
Between midnight and 1am, the reports started coming through on social media.
“Suffolk Park, where it rarely floods, if at all, you’ve got people standing in lounge rooms knee deep in water,” he says.
“In Bangalow you’ve got cars lost with flooding that no one was expecting.”
On the 2am news bulletin, Swivel says, “Byron doesn’t even rate a mention.”
Swivel speaks of anger and frustration about the emergency warnings. He says they did not come until after the emergency, and the forecasts were not accurate.
“There is real anger in the community – and it is constructive anger,” he says.
“What we are really looking at is the under-resourcing of services that the public should be able to rely on in a crisis.
“There has to be a limit to accepting what we experience.”
Martin says it is an anger that had been bubbling away for the last two years in a town that feels abandoned by a Sydney-centric state government.
Mitchell’s anger is directed at all levels of government and their failure to prepare for seasonal disasters that are only becoming more frequent and intense due to the climate emergency, but which are far older than the town itself.
“We can keep focusing on the awfulness and the tragedy – or we can start to understand what is actually happening here,” he says.
This is a message echoed by the town’s former mayor, Simon Richardson, who says Byron is a “living example of poor planning 100 years ago”.
“It’s actually below the waterline in a wetlands – you wouldn’t build a town there now for quids,” he says.
“The water gets captured in Byron like in a wok.”
Richardson stood down in 2021 after nine years as mayor and 13 years on a council which he says his rebuilt roads lost to landslides that they knew would not stand up to the next big downpour.
“We fixed those roads knowing they were going to fail again,” he says, “because we wouldn’t have been funded by the state government if we improved the roads and made them more resilient.”
Yet, if their infrastructure failed them, the people of Bryon proved resilient.
When Annick Muylle’s clothing store in Fletcher Street went under, so too did hundreds of thousands of dollars of carefully chosen clothing.
So the Belgium-born shopkeeper went for a stroll around her flooded town.
“The bakery was open, babies were in prams, people were walking their dogs,” she says. “I thought: ‘This is so Australian, to get on with life.’ After so much rain, and such a long night, to go: ‘OK let’s just walk the dog, or have a coffee, or put the baby in pram have a walk around’ – that was something positive.”
