The street has scars.
Some are obvious, like the shells of cars scattered in yards, the abandoned homes or the silt marks on 3-metre-high signs that tell you the road is prone to flooding.
They're still there, six months after an indiscriminating brown tide swallowed houses, possessions and cars alike.
Children will tell you the floodwaters looked like chocolate milk.
Adults will tell you they looked like "the worst nightmare you can dream".
Mill Street in Goodna — a 1 kilometre stretch of businesses, rental properties, homes and homeless shelters — reveals almost every conceivable type of suffering that this disaster unleashed.
While the suffering is far from over, some scars are harder to see.
Some are subtle. Like the loose lock on the back door, where looters kicked it in. Or the cautious way Allen Kunst walks out to the footpath every time a car drives past, wary it might be a looter.
"Some people drive round here with no lights on thinking you don't notice them," he says.
"But mostly no people drive round here at all.
"That's why every time a car goes round the corner you look."
He's sitting down for breakfast: a banana, one single scotch finger biscuit, a slice of fruit cake and an orange from his beloved tree.
Allen loves oranges. What he doesn't like is mud.
His house was inundated up to its roof in the February flood and since then dried-up flakes keep falling from the exposed ceiling beams onto his ground floor, making him cough.
Each day Allen sweeps and wipes down his stripped floorboards, door frames (still without doors), and his walls (stripped of gyprock).
"I've done a lifetime's worth of cleaning," he says.
"I've got a phobia of mud now. Any time my hands get dirty I want to wash them straight away."
It seems unjust, but don't ask Allen about justice.
This is the second flood he's endured.
He wanted to leave after the first in 2011, to take the insurance money and find somewhere else, but his wife didn't want to.
"So I stayed," he says.
Allen repaired the house, but his wife moved out and on.
"We're estranged. That part of my life is over."
Living in a shell
Allen is again living in the skeleton of his house without walls and with dangling wires.
He's hoping to be approved for the state government's buy-back scheme but is not holding his breath.
He stares out the window at his orange tree, the same way he does every morning.
"I'm thinking about moving my bed to the shed so I can wake up somewhere different," he says.
Allen says he wants to move to the Atherton Tablelands, where most of Queensland's red-fleshed oranges are grown.
But he doesn't want to move because of that.
"I just want to be up high where it won't flood," he says.
The Tablelands are 800 metres above sea level.
"I'm 65 in 26 days, so I haven't got much life left in me, I think I'm getting tired."
Allen is tired of floods. Tired of cleaning.
"A new life is waiting. I've got to get out of here."
The looting hasn't stopped
A few houses down, Rebecca Richards is waiting in her living room for someone to dare to break into her house again.
"The looting just hasn't stopped, they come every three weeks just kicking the door in," she says.
"Like there's nothing here, I'm not sure what they're looking for."
Rebecca has rented her home on Mill Street for 12 years, but hasn't been living there since the floods.
She returns each day to sit and do the crosswords in her living room on a table made of scaffolding, surrounded by walls stripped bare.
Today she's thinking of one word: nine letters meaning out of mind.
"Forgotten," she says.
She's living two suburbs over in her third temporary home since February, trapped in limbo waiting for insurance claims to be finalised so she can move back to Mill Street.
"The community is amazing," she says.
"I've never seen a community that wants to physically help you like this."
That's why it hurts Rebecca so much to see her neighbours suffering.
A family two doors down lives in a temporary donga in the front yard, another neighbour sleeps in a tent in his carport.
"The looters burned his place down," she says.
"Australia's not a third world country but the people out here are living like they're in a war zone.
"It's devastating."
Every day Rebecca comes down to do her bit.
"In February everything was brown; it smelled like a mix of a cattle truck and a sewage plant mixed together."
Now there is fresh mulch in her garden and while there is no gyprock inside her house, the floors are swept and the windows are clean.
Every afternoon when she leaves, she pushes two broomsticks against the back door to stop the looters from kicking it in.
Rebecca loves her home.
Her neighbour Colin Swilley, "the British bulldog-turned-Aussie battler”, loves his home too.
He has owned the low-set brick house for decades and is trying to bring it back to its former glory.
"One day you're a plumber, the next you're a furniture repairman," Colin says.
This morning he was a roofer, fixing the gutters that were torn off. Later in the day he was a painter, scraping the flood-marred paint off the bricks in his hallway.
In the evening, he was laying fresh carpet in his living room.
He does every job with the painstaking efficiency of an old-school tradesman dedicated to his craft.
Colin's proud of his work.
"We may not be water resilient but we're resilient to life," he says.
There is a hint of a cockney accent still in his voice even though he moved here almost 40 years ago.
One of the first friends he made was a builder, the same builder who helped him hang new gyprock in his home after the floods.
"The floods forced him off another job so he did mine instead," Colin says.
"We got the plaster walls and the gyprock but that's all we've been able to do so far.
"That's our money gone."
The walls that have not been fixed are lined with cracks.
They look like your fingers do when they've been underwater too long.
Colin lives in his home surrounded by jobs he needs to do, with sheets hanging over his windows instead of curtains.
When he first moved to Mill Street, Colin wondered how he would go living on such a small property.
"I didn't think I could live so close to people but it's been really nice."
That's why he stayed here after the 2011 flood, even though he couldn't afford the insurance premiums that rose to $2,000 a month.
Colin has applied for a government grant to lift his house, rather than the state's buyback scheme.
"I like this place and I wouldn't give it up for the world," he says.
Helen's Haven
Go down Mill Street from Colin's house — past a burnt-out home with a camp in the driveway, past a watermarked dance studio (now for lease), past a string of smash repair businesses — you'll find Helen's Haven.
It's a homeless shelter and food bank run by the Goodna Street Life charity.
It's full of people; recovering addicts or people who were sleeping rough.
Six months ago, it was full of water.
Now, almost unbelievably it's back to "100 per cent capacity".
The red house has been scrubbed clean.
Its crisis accommodation units have been repaired and it stands like a beacon of hope in a street lined with abandoned houses and damaged possessions.
"We might not have the nice lounge or the nice chairs but we're doing what we do and that doesn't cost money," founder Helen Youngberry says.
The charity is still housing three families who were displaced by the floods.
They've also been hanging gyprock for free to help other families return to their homes.
For 10 weeks after the floods, Helen's Haven fed whoever turned up for free, all while trying to repair its facilities.
It's been tough, Helen says, but the biggest struggle "has been making people understand that it's not OK but it will be".
"During the floods we'd go around giving everyone cups of tea and laughing and sometimes that's all it needed,” she says.
"A bit of cheer, or me falling down in the mud, for people to realise that it will be OK."
That's why Helen says it's important this isn't just a sad story.
And she's right.
This is a story about a terrible disaster.
It is a story about immeasurable loss and unbelievable suffering.
But it's also a story about how – despite all that horror – people found joy and pride in the smallest things.
In their rental homes doing crosswords, or in their work, or in helping others.
Or, even, in oranges.
