Retirement dream to muddy mess: How Swan Reach Caravan Park owners are pushing on
Channel 10’s chief of staff Danny Adamopolous bought the Swan Reach Caravan Park as his retirement plan in October. By December his dream was underwater
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Danny Adamopolous and his wife Kendell bought the Swan Reach Caravan Park in the first week of October. By late October the flood warnings had begun, and by December the entire park was underwater.
The 48-year-old former TV cameraman, now chief of staff at Channel 10 Adelaide, had dreamt of purchasing the riverside park for years.
The plan was to fix the place up and run it with wife Kendell as a semi-retirement business but now, just days after the water was finally pumped out, the park is unrecognisable.
The reception office has been ripped apart by the force of the water, the ablution bock is damaged, many of the trees have died from having their roots submerged for too long and the sites that once housed caravaners and campers are a muddy quagmire.
“There’s a lot of damage,” Mr Adamopolous said.
“We spent six weeks cleaning it up, painting it, putting a new bathroom in the office – we did so much work.”
Mr Adamopolous said the park was uninsured against flood – as most parks in the region are – but that he hadn’t given up on his riverside dream.
“We’ve missed out on all of the revenue from December until now, and we were booked out solid for Christmas,” he said.
“That alone has cost us tens of thousands. We were building the business back up and now we’re behind square one, but the aim is still to be back up and running by next summer.
“What we thought would be a three- year project might now be a 10-year project, but we’ll get there.”
Mr Adamopolous praised the community spirit of Swan Reach’s residents, and said he’d been very impressed by the work of the government’s community recovery co-ordinator Alex Zimmermann. Mr Zimmermann, a former high-ranking police officer, was appointed in December to help lead the recovery effort along the length of the Murray.
“Sometimes people get gigs like that and you never hear from them again,” Mr Adamopolous said.
“But Alex has actually gone beyond and above. He’s been fantastic.
“Just his efforts in keeping everyone informed has made all the difference. He’s gone above and beyond.”
And he said that while the Great State vouchers launched to encourage people to return to the river were a good idea, they’d come too early for most tourism operators in the Mid-Murray region.
“This is the area that’s been hit the hardest,” he said.
“People here are going to need time to rebuild – they’re not ready for those vouchers yet.”
He said it would take many years for Swan Reach to get back to where it was before the flood, with the shacks and houses along the spit known as Marks Landing being hit particularly hard.
“I worry for a lot of the people around here,” he said.
They’ll never get insurance again, and if they do it will be so cost prohibitive that it won’t be worth it.”
The battle to save a century-old River Murray home
They called it Trantor, after the planet science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s created to be the centre of the galaxy.
And the 113-year-old stone home was indeed the centre of Ian and Gerri McLaughlin’s galaxy – a dream location on the River Murray where the couple could live their retirement years surrounded by children and grandchildren, enjoying the serenity of Swan Reach.
Then the water started to rise.
At first Mr McLaughlin thought it might reach the front garden. Then he came to terms with the fact that it was coming over the veranda, and he even filled a few cracks in the wall and threw down some sandbags.
It wasn’t long, though, before the McLaughlin’s realised that the home they bought on a whim back in 1995 was going underwater and no amount of work was going to hold back the might of the Murray.
This week Mr McLaughlin was picking through the rooms of Trantor, trying to get his head around the damage that weeks of sitting water have inflicted.
There’s a line about a metre and a half up the walls marking where the river came to, but even above that line there’s mould and mildew.
The floorboards in the McLaughlin’s bedroom were lifted by the water and deposited randomly around the room.
“A floating floor,” Mr McLaughlin laughed, trying to find some humour in the situation.
The dried-out body of a dead frog sits at the foot of the bed. It may or may not be adding to the smell in the house, a distinctly swampy funk that permeates much of Swan Reach now that the waters have subsided.
It’s not the first time the McLaughlin’s home has been inundated. In fact, given its age, it’s weathered the floods of 1917, 1931 and 1956.
This one, however, could be different.
The carpets will have to come up, Mr McLaughlin, said, then the beautiful pressed tin ceilings will have to be removed. As will the kitchen and all the cabinetry. Only then, after everything has been stripped, will the assessors and experts make a call on whether Trantor will stay standing for another century or whether its days on the river are finished.
“My wife hasn’t been back – she just doesn’t want to see it,” Mr McLaughlin said as he walked through the house.
The McLaughlins only bought the house they’d name Trantor thanks to a set of fortunate circumstances.
They were living in Adelaide and looking to move to the river. While out inspecting houses they happened to drive past the old home. There was a for sale sign out the front and the door was open, so they stopped for a look. Mrs McLaughlin fell in love, and after five or six years of commuting to Swan Reach on the weekends they quit their jobs in the city and moved to Swan Reach permanently.
“The settlement date on this house was the fifth of March, 1995 – my wife’s 50th birthday,” Mr McLaughlin said.
Over the years they set about improving what was once the town’s general store, fixing up the house, outdoor areas and garden. Mr McLaughlin also carried out extensive off-grid solar work to provide power to the house and his electric car, with the car feeding power back into the home at night time.
The shed where he tinkered on these projects is now unrecognisable.
The McLaughlins began emptying the house in November, and on December 5 drove away for the last time.
They’ve moved in with their daughter in Callington, and their worldly belongings are split between that house, a shipping container, a granddaughter’s house and a friend’s place in Swan Reach. There is, as Mr McLaughlin said, “stuff everywhere”.
Whether or not that “stuff” can be moved back into Trantor will depend on this weekend’s inspections.
“The verdict on the house is unsure at the moment,” Mr McLaughlin said.
“It will be stripped this weekend – all the timber, all the tiling, the plaster, the tin ceiling. Then they’ll drill some holes in the floor to assess the moisture, then an engineer has to come and give a report.
“So we’ll either move into a brand new house at some time, although I can’t see it being this year, or depending on the cost the insurance company might just pay us out.
One option would be that they would then demolish and sell the block.”
It would be a sad end for a home that’s stood sentinel on the river’s edge for more than a century.
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