Not again! Amid our flooded ruins, anger turns to despair

The sound of rain used to soothe me. Now it gives me PTSD.

Today it’s raining again. We are in shock. Have the once-in-a-hundred-year climate catastrophes been fast tracked to once a month?

On February 28, our region got to see what decades of climate and housing inaction looked like close up. On March 28, exactly one calendar month later, we got the call again. How can we recover when we are underwater, under mud and totally under resourced?

Lismore residents prepare for another flood only weeks after the last inundation.Credit: Getty

I live in Mullumbimby. Thousands of people in our region have lost their homes. They lost their furniture, their cars, their wedding photos. Their precious things, their hard-won belongings, the inheritances, the children’s drawings, lay crushed in giant mounds outside their homes. Like terrible middens of loss. More than 22,000 men women and children in our region are without a home.

Mudslides and landslips have blocked roads, and destroyed homes. I met a man who used to be able to drive to his home, now he treks over a raging rapid on a rope, backpacking supplies in by foot. It takes nearly two hours each way.

In Lismore, when the CBD got wiped out, people lost their businesses and their jobs. Many lost their beloved family pets. Our kids have lost their schools.

My 12-year-old’s high school is in Lismore. It’s gone. This once-well resourced school, where my other children went, now has nothing. They scrambled to create learning options in a temporary location. But it’s not the same, it’s sad. Many of my daughter’s friends have also lost their homes.

On the three days a week Ivy’s now able to attend she waits for half an hour at a bus bay outside her ruined school. Yesterday she told me she can’t handle the smell. She told me it’s so strong it makes her feel sick. It’s the smell of death. The remnants of sewage and mould, of mud and lost hope. It’s making people sick.

My friend recently had a lump removed from her breast. It didn’t stop her volunteering for the cleanup as part of our mud army. But now she has a serious infection from contact with dangerous bacteria. Faeces. You can’t see it, but you know it’s everywhere. We’re breathing it in.

A man whose cut became septic has lost his leg.

My friend Rhonda is a parent of two young girls and a carer for her mother. She lost her home in Chinderah and has had to leave the region to find safe affordable housing. She is an Aboriginal woman, a traditional owner who can no longer live on country. She had just finished chemo for her cancer and the stress of the flood gave her a heart attack. She’s only 38.

I visited Majeeta. She has lived in a home lovingly built with her late partner by the river in Ballina. She has been there since 1979. Her property has never flooded before. Her insurance premiums increased by 70 per cent last year, so she was advised by her insurance company that it might be more affordable if she dropped the flood cover. She’s a pensioner in her 70s. She has tried to make her house habitable. She has to. She has nowhere else to go.

Neither has Joan, a woman in her early 80s in Ocean Shores. When I meet her, she’s sitting in a camp chair on concrete in a house that has been gutted. She has two broken ribs from a fall in the mud. She won’t leave. She has an anxious little white dog who adores her, and she won’t abandon him. She has relied on the care of her neighbour but when I see her she tells me she hasn’t eaten in two days. It’s three weeks in and no one from her aged care service has come to see her. She’s had no government contact or support. She’s in enormous pain, but she’s stoic. “Other people have it harder,” she says. Do they?

Like middens of loss: Streets in Ballina lined with flood damaged possessions on March 8.Credit: Janie Barrett

We help organise a Jason Recliner, paid for by Rotary. We try to get her home care re-instated. We find an electrician to come check her home. She’s been using the power without a safety assessment. In the absence of government support this is community caring for community.

But it’s raining again, and we’re on our knees.

I have friends who lost their home living in a short-term holiday letting, paying $11,000 for four weeks. Even though most of it is covered by the insurer it seems wrong for the holiday letting market to be profiteering off someone’s misery.

On April 9, many people in short-term lets are out. It’s Easter school holidays.

So where do our community members go? Where do we live while people have fabulous holidays?

We’re not victims. We are survivors, but we are witnesses to a broken system.

This is the disaster we knew was coming. We have asked for help. And no one listened. We were in a housing crisis before the floods, but now it’s catastrophic.

Government inaction has made thousands of people in my community unsafe. We are tired of being resilient. We want action.

That’s why I’m travelling to Canberra. I want to be there for the budget. I don’t want them to forget us. Because I hold them accountable. Those smug men in suits who don’t know what it’s like to wait on your roof for help that doesn’t come.

I fear there will not be enough money to rebuild our towns. The scope of this disaster is so huge.

The community rallies to fill the gaps. We are selling raffle tickets on the front line of the climate emergency. But it’s not enough. We need real change.

We are living in the flooded ruins of our climate ground zero, and I can tell you, it bloody hurts.

This is what climate change looks like. It’s not abstract. It’s here.