A harsh sun shines down across the still partially flooded Lismore, spreading the smell of mud and sewage through the humid air, as Mark Bailey holds an album of vintage East German stamps that is dripping brown.
“Everything in there’s fucked,” he says, as he hurls it onto a pile of ruined goods and furniture he had been amassing at the front of his store, just like many other shop owners along Molesworth Street in the centre of town.
While each pile looks a similar shade of brown, the muddied faces of Queen Elizabeth, Karl Marx, Michael Jordan and gold prospector Edward Hargraves on loose stamps, faded banknotes and sports cards are visible up close.
Bailey believes the collectibles in his pile are worth about $5m, at least they were, before flood waters rose above the ceiling of The Penny Man – the shop he manages as a partner – earlier this week. Now, he will throw everything out, save for some antique items he believes he can salvage.
The shop was uninsurable, given its position near the riverbank in flood-prone Lismore, and had only been open since December.
When the evacuation orders were issued on Sunday night he did not have enough time to organise a truck to save the valuables in his shop. He says he felt sick waiting days for the waters to recede, knowing he would be returning to millions in damage.
“I’m not mad at anyone in particular, every shop has a different story along here,” he says. “We won’t be reopening here, and I would be surprised if half of the street ever does.”
He is yet to lodge a business activity statement for the business, and is worried he won’t qualify for the government support grants he already knows “won’t scratch the surface” of the true cost of what he has lost in the floods.
As the nation’s attention largely turned from the news reports of Lismore’s residents returning to their ruined homes to the heavy rain and flood warnings in Sydney on Thursday, the mammoth cleanup task continued at homes and shops across the northern river.
Next door to The Penny Man, opposite the local MP Kevin Hogan’s electorate office, is the Mega Choice discount variety store.
Its pile of ruined stock is a rainbow of children’s toys, costumes, greeting cards and cleaning supplies – it still looks brown.
While the store’s owners have been stuck in Ballina, locals have begun helping bring the aisles of products out onto the street. Underneath a sign next to the checkouts that reads “The store with more”, are bare shelves, with ruined goods strewn across the floor.
Few businesses have been able to reopen, contributing to the food access issues that have been driven by severed supply routes and seen empty supermarket shelves in neighbouring towns. Free meals are provided at a church and by Sikh volunteers who drove into town.
While the waters have receded, some parts of town are still inaccessible. As emergency services continue to survey the damage, everyone is dreading the discovery of more bodies.
On Wednesday, police revealed how search teams in south Lismore earlier had heard a faint call for help from inside a home where water had reached the eaves. After a constable dove through an open window, they discovered a 93-year-old woman floating on a mattress, with “no more than 20cm of room between the roof and the water level”. She was pulled from the home on a boogie board and then onto a rescue boat.
However, many of the stories of local rescue operations, and the most up to date death toll, are taking days to spread, due to the lack of internet or patchy mobile coverage.
For the most part, locals are still focused on cleaning up their homes. In the streets of Lismore that are now accessible, the piles of ruined possessions continue to grow.
After lunchtime on Thursday, Orion Street sounded a bit like a tip.
At one house a man emptied a large storage container full of muddied toys on a pile on his frontage. Next door, a woman hurled broken furniture and books from the second floor of her elevated Queenslander-style house. At a neighbouring house, broken timber chairs were balanced on a refrigerator door, which still had family photo magnets stuck on it.
The task of cleaning up the town and others in the northern rivers will take many months and probably far longer than the floods of 2017, the most recent disaster milestone in the region’s collective memory. It was then that Lismore’s levee was breached for the first time, however these last few days have set a new, terrifying benchmark.
Back on Molesworth Street, Mark Bailey surveys what is left behind and ponders the future.
“You look around and see this is like Cyclone Tracy without the wind,” he said. “We can’t just let something like this pass without changing things.”
