Phones started pinging across Lismore last Tuesday afternoon as a fresh wave of fury and confusion crashed upon the northern rivers town.
Nearly 16 months after the first of two catastrophic floods inundated the New South Wales town – claiming five lives, swamping thousands of homes and robbing residents of untold treasured possessions – many survivors are still to learn which of the long-promised government assistance packages might apply to them.
Will the state government’s Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation offer to buy their home and ensure no one else relives their trauma on that piece of land again?
Will they be offered money to raise their homes, or retrofit them with more flood-resilient materials?
Or will they be left adrift to seek what shelter they can from a housing market in crisis?
Kay Armour was among those hoping to be offered a lifeline.
Armour and her partner are living in a caravan in the back yard of their South Lismore property, a dwelling the 65-year-old retiree describes as “bloody freezing”. Along with the addition of the caravan, there are many glaring differences in their yard’s appearance today compared with the way it looked before February 2022.
Her fruit trees, a hills hoist, a shed and a six-foot high wooden fence were all picked up and carried away as water raced through this fast-flowing flood plain.
Armour scored an unwanted water tank that washed in from somewhere else – as well as a newly broadened western outlook after the house next door was plucked off its stumps and smashed into a neighbouring property.
A wall of water entered the second storey of her own home – to a height of 1.6 metres – and took “just about everything” she owned.
Several other homes in the street were washed away. In an interview with NRRC chief executive David Witherdin last November, local media cited a single street as an example of one “very likely to be eligible” for the buyback. It was Engine Street. Armour’s street.
“I’m not a person who thinks I’m entitled to anything,” Armour says. “But I always felt, due to all this, that we possibly could be eligible for a buyback.”
But as the months passed and no one from the NRRC contacted her, Armour’s hopes began to evaporate. Last Tuesday she felt them finally extinguish with an automated text from the NRRC.
The message invited her to follow the link to view its new flood mapping. The map showed an aerial view of town with a few major highways marked and every other street only vaguely discernible. Superimposed over the map were different shades indicating priority zones for the spending of the $700m joint state- and commonwealth-funded resilient homes program.
Armour and her partner couldn’t agree which colour covered their home. She thought yellow; he thought white. But one thing was clear: they weren’t covered by the dark maroon that indicated the highest priority. Almost nothing in South Lismore was dark maroon. Most of the area was “priority 4” and, thus, not being considered for buybacks.
It was not the information Armour and her partner expected to receive. But at least that text jolted Armour out of limbo.
“We have to get out of here, whether we are helped or not,” Armour says. “I don’t think it is safe to live here.”
Now Armour is set upon fixing up and selling the place for which they paid $260,000 seven years ago. She is not sure what they will get back on the open market, nor what that could buy them today. All she knows is that they have to move on. She just wishes they could have done so earlier.
“It has been a traumatic time for everyone,” Armour says. “And they’ve strung it out for us.”
The question of what to do next is one that hangs heavy over another South Lismore retiree, Jilly Witham.
Witham, 71, lives just across the old railway tracks on Kyogle Street in a timber workers cottage she once shared with her daughter and granddaughter. It had a cabin out the back that she rented too, and a lush garden, and was full of vintage paperbacks and cool old records she would sell for a bit of extra cash.
Her garden is now a wasteland. The cabin is destroyed, along with the books and records. The water rose into her ceiling. Her daughter won’t come back to town.
“I can’t see a future living here for me,” she says.
Witham too had been anticipating a buyback.
“I’d sort of let go of the house in my mind,” she says.
She planned to buy a good van and drive around for a while. Hunt around for a house in a small town somewhere. Maybe north Queensland.
Then Witham got that NRRC text message and that “silly map”. She could only laugh, she says.
“This has just really wiped me out mentally,” she says. “I don’t want to be here any more. I just feel really stuck.”
Last week Witherdin, the NRRC boss, said 800 people in the northern rivers would receive a call by the end of the month offering a buyback at pre-flood value. The owners of 500 properties, he said, would miss out due to a lack of funds.
It is not just Lismore where flood survivors are floundering.
Miriam Torzillo, an organiser at the community-led group Reclaiming Our Recovery, says people in towns such as Coraki, Woodburn, Mullumbimby and up in the Tweed were in a similar boat. In Brisbane, flood recovery centres say stress levels among those most devastated by the floods have reached heights not seen since the flood waters receded.
But in Lismore, Torzillo says there is fury and confusion – and “the place is rife with rumour”.
Some homeowners have seen neighbours offered a buyback, but are yet to receive a call from the NRRC.
“Now they are realising they may not get an offer and are wondering what that means,” Torzillo says. “Was all the talk moving people out of harm’s way, was that just a fabrication?”
Witherdin was not available for an interview but the NRRC responded to questions with a statement.
“The NRRC released flood mapping data which indicated homes most at risk for a buyback offer based on the greatest risk to life for both residents and emergency service responders, in locations predicted to experience more frequent, high and fast floods in the future,” a spokesperson said.
“Homeowners are being contacted in all seven LGAs to inform them of the prioritisation based on the greatest risk to life in most flood scenarios, with the most homes being prioritised in Lismore, followed by Tweed.”
They said, as of Wednesday, 150 buyback offers have been accepted and 11 settlements have been completed. Of the offers that have been made, 60 went to homeowners in South Lismore.
