Top End author and poet Coral Hull sues Coomalie council for ‘deliberately’ flooding her yard

The prolific poet claims council workers also ‘trespassed’ onto her property by ‘opening a gate to the house yard and garden’ before digging ‘an enormous trench’.

Prolific Top End author and poet Coral Hull is suing the Coomalie council for the cost of repairing flood damage to her yard. Picture: Facebook

A prolific Top End author and poet is suing her local council after its workers dug a “large trench” she claims “deliberately” directed water into her house and garden, flooding her yard.

Batchelor woman Coral Hull — a published author of dozens of works of poetry and prose — lodged the application with the NT Civil and Administrative Tribunal in June.

In it Ms Hull claims the Coomalie Community Government Council “dug a large trench in order to deliberately direct water into the house and garden … so that the house yard and garden plus two boundary fences are being flooded”.

She says the council first undertook works to unblock a culvert in 2022 “knowing that storm water from the verge would have nowhere to go but onto the verge and then into the house yard and garden”.

She claims it was then the workers dug the trench she says further diverted stormwater into her yard.

“The council then trespassed onto REDACTED by opening up a paddock fence, walking up a paddock, opening a gate to the house yard and garden, where they dug our (sic) an enormous trench where I have a swing chair, fruit trees and chook pens,” the documents read.

“They knocked down a fence in the garden.”

Ms Hull claims the council later “paid for a contractor to repair the yard” but failed to complete drainage works resulting in “shallow but extensive flooding” to her yard last wet season.

“The water now ingresses the house yard from the unblocked culvert pipes and new trench that was dug and has washed out a quantity of the gravel that was placed there by the contractor,” she claims.

Coral Hull describes herself online as ‘a Christian writer with a supernatural testimony’. Picture: Cordite Poetry Review

“I can see that gravel has washed under an extended length (of) the boundary fence on the southern side, so that it is starting to fill in the trench of the Stage B drainage reserve works that have been done.”

Ms Hull is seeking an order that the council pay her the cost of repairing the flood damage, which she estimates at $2695.

In response, the council is seeking that the application be dismissed or in the alternative, that Ms Hull provide detail of the nature and extent of the work and “proof, including photos of any alleged damage”.

“The respondent will require time to engage an expert opinion on the cause of the alleged washout to the respondent’s (sic) house yard, garden and boundary fences,” the response reads.

“The respondent says that the applicant has not provided sufficient information, or any information at all, for the respondent to understand what the alleged Stage B drainage reserve works are and how those works relate to the claim, and the extent of the alleged damage to the applicant’s garden.”