Children of the Brisbane floods: where are they now?
Ten years on from the heartbreaking Queensland floods, Frances Whiting returns to the traumatised children she met to see how they are doing and discuss their memories of that time.
QWeekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from QWeekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
The last time Qweekend met these children, the rushing water still roared in their ears, and waves crashed like open jaws through their dreams at night.
They were survivors of the heartbreak summer of 2010/11 when a devastating flood swept through Queensland, leaving broken hearts and lives in its muddy wake.
The so-called Summer of Sorrow would leave its mark on every Queenslander one way or another, with 29,000 businesses and homes partially or completely inundated, and 35 lives lost to the swirling waters – seven of them children.
Like an unwelcome, belligerent house guest, it left its muddy footprints wherever it went, and nowhere more so than South East Queensland’s Lockyer Valley.
On January 10, 2011, a wall of water cleaved through the Valley’s heart, up to eight metres high and, for those who saw it, utterly terrifying.
The wave (which began when heavy rain on the Darling Downs high on the range flooded the rivers and towns of Grantham, Helidon and Gatton nestled below) was described by witnesses as an “inland tsunami”.
Baby Montannah’s rescue lifted Queensland's spirits
Troubles that almost sank 2011 flood hero
In nearby Ipswich, residents in Gailes and Goodna also lost their homes, with Goodna State School’s then-principal Margaret Gurney recalling her staff driving around the streets looking for flood-affected students who hadn’t turned up for the first day of school on January 27, 2011.
They found one family living in a car, and several more too embarrassed to come to school without a uniform, says Gurney, now Assistant Director-General of Education Queensland for State Schools.
“It was a lot for those kids to take in,” Gurney remembers, “and we had to work very quickly to establish a sense of safety and comfort within all our schools.’’
Grantham State School, for one, had become a refuge for the community on January 10, with almost all the school’s students and their parents turning up to its hall carrying their sleeping bags and their pets – dogs, cats, pigs, goldfish – to spend the night.
Almost all, because two of Grantham’s kids – Garry Jibson, 12, who was in Grade 7, and his little sister Jocelyn, five, due to start Prep later that year – didn’t turn up with the rest of the students to hunker down that night. Both children, along with their mother Llync, had died in the inland tsunami trapping them in the vehicle they were travelling in earlier that afternoon.
The flood would swallow up children, send them scurrying onto rooftops, racing to higher ground clutching toys and soft pillows, see them standing shoulder to shoulder with their parents sandbagging properties as the water rose from their ankles to their knees to their chests – and it would also send many of them hurtling into adulthood long before their time.
Ten years on from the flood – and nine years after we met them – Qweekend caught up with the Children of the Flood who still vividly recall what it felt like to be caught in those deeply troubled waters.
SHERIDAN DE VOS, 21 AND LARA CRAIG, 18
“Wow, my room was so tidy,” Sheridan de Vos laughs, looking at a photo of her 11-year-old self posing for Qweekend at her home in Goodna. “You know,” Sheridan smiles, “I cut out that photo from the magazine and had it laminated.
“I kept it stuck inside the cupboard for a long time – I think I must have thought I was famous – but now I don’t know where it is.” Sheridan laughs a little harder as she peers at the picture.
“Oh my God, that is a very pink bedroom, that is not how I remember it. Did I make that Selena Gomez poster? Yes I did, and I still have that butterfly night light.”
Sheridan was not at her Goodna home when it was inundated by flood waters on January 10, 2011.
She did not see the house engulfed by its muddy tide, the furniture overturned, the wood panelling ripped from the walls, or the lighting fixtures swaying drunkenly from the ceiling.
Instead, the Year 6 Goodna State School student was visiting her grandmother at Redbank Plains, and her parents later decided it was best that she stay there.
In 2011, Sheridan told Qweekend: “Mum and Dad (Laurie and Dirk) didn’t want me to see it, they said it was too dangerous, so I stayed at Nanna’s while they cleaned up.”
Not only did they clean up, the couple also repainted Sheridan’s bedroom and filled it with replica furniture and fittings to those she had lost in the flood.
Here’s 11-year-old Sheridan again:
“I asked if I could have the same bed, the same colour walls, the same curtains. I did that because I worked out if my room was exactly the same as it always was, I could pretend that the flood never happened, you see? Like a trick.”
Today’s 21-year-old Sheridan shakes her head at her younger self.
“It’s funny how you think as a kid, isn’t it? I obviously had it all worked out,” she says, “you know, how to keep my life exactly as it was.”
Only, as her mother Laurie told Qweekend at the time, things were not exactly the same in their household as they had once been. Sheridan, Laurie Gilbraith said, had changed since the flood; she had become far more defiant and rebellious, with Goodna State School later stepping in to organise counselling for its affected students.
“Did Mum put that in the article?” Sheridan laughs. “I can’t believe it, but yeah, I do remember going to counselling because I remember getting out of class early to go with my two best friends.
“They asked to describe or draw our houses after the floods, and I think it did help me. I remember feeling better about everything once I wrote it all down.
“My Mum didn’t get any counselling and I think she should have because I think it was harder for her than me.
“I think there is still a part of her that is coping with what happened but in a couple of ways, it turned out okay for us.
“Because our house needed to be redone, the walls needed to be painted, we did have a lot of stuff that needed throwing out and I remember walking into my new bedroom which smelt new, and it was like a clean slate, like I could start again.”
In 2012, Sheridan was elected school captain of Goodna State School, and went on to Corinda High in Brisbane
Since then she has studied travel and tourism, currently works at her local grocery store, and intends to study to become a teacher this year.
“I feel really sorry still for the people who really were badly affected by the floods, and I knew some of them pretty well, but for me, the floods were kind of good because I loved staying at my Nanna’s.
“That’s how you think when you are a kid, it’s how things affect you, and at Nanna’s I got away with a lot of extra stuff.
“Nanna (Marie Barrett who now lives in New Zealand) let me stay up … and watch TV with her at night she spoiled me rotten.”
For Lara Craig and her family, the flood’s rushing waters brought a change in fortune – a new home to live in after their caravan was inundated.
As the journalist who wrote the initial Children of the Flood story, I remember well meeting Lara, and in 2011 I described her thus: “Lara Craig, heart-shaped face, pink dress ironed by her father’s callused hands, beams the smile of the newly wealthy.”
The Craigs – Lara, her brother Ryan, then 11, who has autism, and their father Kevin, then 33, a former oil rigger turned full-time, stay-at-home Dad, had been living in the Gailes Caravan Park when the creek the caravan park backed onto burst its banks.
Lara described grabbing her belongings – toys and a soft pillow – and comforting her brother who had left his favourite teddy bear behind – and legging it to the car, and then to an aunt’s house for safety.
Today Lara, who has just graduated from high school and hopes to study marketing and communications, says she remembers vividly the day they had to evacuate their caravan.
“We had our faces pressed against the back window watching the creek rise, and then Dad said we had to run.
“It was so stressful getting to the car, I remember Ryan so upset about that teddy and trying to comfort him, but afterwards things got so much better for us.
“We went from living in a caravan to a house (after the flood the family was moved into a housing commission home) and Mr Marshall, the principal (in 2012) at Goodna gave us all his old furniture and completely furnished our house.
“I just remember it was amazing, because the caravan had no doors, I had no privacy, none of us did, and then I had my own room, which was all I wanted and I could decorate however I wanted.”
Lara laughs, remembering.
“I covered my whole room in butterfly stickers … I guess I just felt free.”
NICK TAYLOR, 24, AND JAKE TAYLOR, 20
Aah, the Taylor boys … country lads through and through, greeting Qweekend with firm handshakes and offering a tour “of the shed”.
In 2011, the Taylor family – Kerrie, 38, Wayne, 39, oldest brother Matthew, 18, Nick, 15, and Jake, 11, were living on a 35ha property in Glenmore Grove, about 15km east of Gatton.
The family farmed corn, silverbeet, cauliflower, cabbage and lucerne crops, all destroyed when a massive wave of water hit their farm just after midday on Saturday, January 10.
Looking out from the lounge room at the time, Nick said, was “like looking out at the ocean from a boat’s window”.
“It was just water, water everywhere.”
With machinery, crops and their home under threat, Nick ignored his mother’s pleas to go with her and younger son Jake to a neighbouring farm and higher ground, opting to stay on the farm and help his father.
“He was pretty stubborn,” Kerrie says now, adding “still is”.
He also, even at that age, knew what he wanted, telling Qweekend he intended to leave school to become a farmer, and work the land side-by-side with his dad.
Fast forward 10 years and Nick Taylor is doing just that.
In 2016 the family moved to higher ground, in nearby College View, in part because of the flood and its effect on their livelihood, to another, larger property where Nick greets Qweekend all these years later with a “How ya going?”
“Been a while,” he says, adding that he has “no regrets” about dropping out of school to help his father.
“Nah, none at all, I am happy. I wasn’t really interested in school in the first place, and the land is where I belong.
“The flood just hurried things along a bit for me, because Dad needed a lot of help with the clean up.
“When the water went down a few days after it hit, it was just terrible. Everything was covered in filth, we had to get a backhoe to push it all away, all the crops were smothered in dirt, we had to replant everything, and we had to start all over again.”
After the floodwaters receded, the family home was also uninhabitable, infested with snakes and “stinking to high heaven”, according to Jake at the time.
The family moved into dongas arranged by logistics services provider Linfox, and Nick never went back to Lockyer District High.
Today, while oldest son Matthew works at an agricultural firm selling farm machinery, and Jake works in technical support for Education Queensland, Nick remains where Qweekend left him a decade ago – working the land, beside his father.
“He’s his Dad’s right-hand man,” Kerrie says. “I remember worrying when he said he wanted to leave school but this is where he belongs, he’s a farmer through and through.
And these days, it’s not floodwaters Nick and his father are worried about – it’s drought. “We need rain so very badly here,” Nick says, “ridiculous, isn’t it?”
LIAM FOYLE, 15, AND LACHLAN FOYLE, 13
When Qweekend first met Liam Foyle, he was six years old and drawing dreams.
Beneath his Pop’s house in Grantham, which was still in disrepair a year after the floodwaters raged through it, Liam sketched scenes of hovering helicopters and stick figures, their tiny chalk arms waving from rooftops.
While he sketched, the little boy told the stories behind the pictures in a singsong voice that wavered at times in the telling.
Here’s an excerpt from his tales: “I saw mama’s car smash into the caravan, and the water was noisy and I had to cover my ears. Then the man came with a kind of rope and he pulled me up into the helicopter, they dragged me in by the waist, like they were going to stab me or something, but they didn’t, so that was good.”
Liam, now 15, and a student at Harristown State High, a keen angler and Xbox player, laughs at the retelling.
“What was I thinking with that stabbing stuff?” he says. “I don’t remember thinking that at all, but I was just a kid, so who knows what I was thinking?”
What Liam does remember very clearly still is the day he and his Mum Andrea Foyle, her sister Jess, and younger brother Lachlan, then aged four, left their home in Toowoomba to drive down the range to visit their Nan and Pop at their home in Grantham. It was the morning of Saturday, January 10, 2011.
“I don’t know why, but I remember about halfway down I started to feel really scared and I told Mum to turn around and go home.
“I remember this sinking feeling in my stomach and how badly I did not want to keep going.”
Andrea Foyle, now 43, confirms her eldest son’s uncannily prescient behaviour.
“It was really only spitting when we left Toowoomba and while the rain did get heavier, it wasn’t anything I was worried about when Liam just started yelling at me to turn the car around and he kept on and on about how we were in danger all the way down.”
Andrea Foyle (who with husband Matt has had another son since 2011 – Lucas, seven) smiles.
“Now of course, I wish I had listened to him and turned the car around.”
Instead, the family kept going to Nan and Pop’s (John and Kathy Mahon) where, a few hours after their arrival, the rain grew heavier and a strange stillness settled outside for just a few moments before all hell broke loose.
“What I remember now is just looking out a window with Mum and seeing this wave just come crashing through the trees across the road,” Liam says.
“At first I thought it was a bit like a cool water park, but then everyone started saying we had to run to the railway line and I think I started to feel a bit scared then.”
With brown waters and debris now rushing into the house and rising, furniture floating by and Andrea’s car spinning in the back yard in a whirlpool of water, the family tried to escape.
“We wanted to get to the railway line where the ground was higher, but it was like river rapids outside, and we knew we would get swept away, so we decided to get the kids up on the roof instead,” Andrea says.
For Liam, the time spent on the roof of his Pop’s house after being lifted up onto it by the adults, is seared in his memory.
“I remember standing there waiting to be rescued, then watching a helicopter come and hover above us.
“I remember it felt like hours we were up there, but Mum says it was about 45 minutes, and then this man (emergency rescue helicopter crew member Mark “Teabag” Turner) just dropping out of the chopper and wrapping Lachie in this big yellow rope and then going up again, and then it was my turn.
“Mum told me it was an army game.”
For his part, Lachlan Foyle remembers what most four year olds would remember – the hot chips they had for lunch that day, and watching a cow float by in his Pop’s back yard.
For about a year after their dramatic rooftop rescue, both boys had nightmares, particularly Liam, but today he says he can’t remember having them at all.
“I know Mum put a dreamcatcher above my head and that seemed to stop them, but while it doesn’t scare me or give me bad dreams anymore, the things I do remember, I still remember really clearly like it happened yesterday.
“So it’s still there, somewhere in the back of my mind, and I guess it always will be.”
‘What the f*** is wrong with you?’: Dinner party turns chaotic
It started so well, but then Frances Whiting made a decision that threw her dinner party into chaos.
Bucket list: Australia’s 100 most delicious food experiences
Discover the best dining, drinks, produce and foodie experiences near you in a mouth-watering new take on the Delicious 100 list and vote for your favourite.