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‘It will rain now and we will have little people in tears’: Hope amid fear for Lismore’s children
Flooding has left its mark in different ways on the children of the Northern Rivers. But the adults in their lives are shaking their heads at their strength and resilience.
Ollie Rogers lost all his toys when the Wilsons River flooded his house in East Lismore on February 28.Credit: Jacklyn Wagner
When Ollie Rogers turned up at a sand-play therapy session in Lismore last weekend, the first thing the four-year-old did was ask the therapists if the flood had got them too.
“Then he recreated the flood with toys,” his mother, Cassie Rogers, says, her voice tinged with regret. “He filled up the sand with water.”
Ollie was three when Lismore was hit by the record-breaking flood of February 28, which inundated thousands of homes, including his own in East Lismore.
His parents woke him up just before dawn on that day, as the water rose around their house. They got him to put his Paw Patrol tracksuit on over his pyjamas, then his mum handed him and his 12-week-old sister to relatives in kayaks, who took them to higher ground. Ollie lost all his toys when the water finally entered his house, except for a green bucket filled with trucks, which floated, and his books on a higher shelf.
Children affected by the Lismore floods (left to right): Ollie Rogers, Harlem Mumford, Brielle Writer, Jahkaiden Anderson, Violet Twomey and Elodie Rogers.Credit: Jacklyn Wagner
“Since the flood, he’s needed us around all the time,” Cassie says. “He used to play independently, but now he needs us in his proximity. And for ages, he wouldn’t sleep in his room.”
He also went from loving swimming lessons to refusing to jump into the pool and insisting on being held once he’s in the water. His preschool teachers tell Cassie he needs more hugs too.
Lismore paediatrician Chris Ingall says the floods in February and March have left their mark on the children of the Northern Rivers.
He was working at Lismore Base Hospital on February 28, as survivors started arriving. He treated children for injuries they suffered when they were pulled out of holes in metal roofs, and days later, for infections they developed from the floodwater they had entered when being rescued. In the months that followed, children who already had anxiety needed extra medication and counselling, while others developed the condition for the first time.
“Any heavy rain now that could lead to a river rise leads to strong emotion, in all kids,” Ingall says. “The kids just remember the rain on the roof, and being picked up off a roof, or watching the devastation from the rain on the roof.”
Jahnaya Mumford with her eight-month-old son Harlem, who was born a week after the flood.Credit: Jacklyn Wagner
Along with local photographer Jacklyn Wagner, Ingall has organised for 12 local children who survived the flood to feature in this year’s Our Kids fund-raising calendar for the Lismore Base Hospital’s paediatric units.
The youngest is Harlem Mumford, who was still in utero when his heavily pregnant mother was forced to stand in water up to her chin for hours, awaiting rescue, with the ashes of her stillborn daughter strapped to her stomach. It was all she managed to save. Harlem was born a week later.
“I had his room all set up for him. Everything was organised, and then it all went to shit,” Jahnaya Mumford recalls. “He spent the first seven months of his life living on mattresses on the floor.”
Last weekend, once more sleeping in their damaged home, Harlem’s nine-year-old brother was hit with severe anxiety amid fears of another major flood on the Wilsons River.
“When the [State Emergency Service] knocked on the door to tell us we had to evacuate, that was it for him,” Mumford says. “He had a massive panic attack, where he was hyperventilating.”
Further east, in Meerschaum Vale, the rain last weekend caused anxiety levels to rise in the Writer household too. The February flood had left the family isolated on their rural property when Brielle, then aged two, suffered her first asthma attack while painting in the garden with her four-year-old sister. There were no helicopters available to help them.
Brielle Writer, with her mother, Elizabeth, suffered an asthma attack during the flood.Credit: Jacklyn Wagner
“I ran outside and she had stopped moving,” her mother, Elizabeth, says. “I picked her up and she was gasping for breath, turning blue, and had started to go limp.”
Elizabeth, who also has asthma, treated her daughter with her own Ventolin. She and husband Josh battled intermittent phone reception to call for help but the emergency was not a high enough priority for an air rescue because the immediate danger had passed. Brielle continued to have six sudden, silent attacks every day, for the next three days. Her mother could not let her out of her sight.
“It was petrifying,” she says. “We could see the army helicopters flying over our house. At one point I was contemplating getting up on the roof and jumping up and down, trying to flag something down.”
Finally, the family managed to get through the floodwaters to get to town for the steroids Brielle needed to bring the asthma under control. Doctors believe severe rain events likely trigger her condition.
“To this day, her older sister hovers over her, saying ‘Mummy, is Brielle doing bad breathing?’ She knew something was really wrong with her sister. They both freak out every time we get large amounts of rain, worrying if everybody is going to lose everything again.”
Like Ollie Rogers, four-year-old Violet Twomey escaped the flood in her pyjamas, saving just one toy – a cuddly one called Pegasus, from My Little Pony. She had it in her arms when her father lifted her onto their East Lismore roof to escape the water.
Violet Twomey, with her parents, Heather Mandy and Cristen Twomey, and Pegasus the pony.Credit: Jacklyn Wagner
She has autism and cerebral palsy, and spent two weeks with her parents living at an evacuation centre before moving to emergency accommodation in South Ballina, where the family still lives. They are doing a 90-minute round trip, four days a week, to take Violet to preschool in Lismore.
“I can’t give her her house back, or her pets back, or her things back. But I can at least give her preschool,” her mother, Heather Manby, says. She and her husband were determined to get Violet back into her routine after the flood, to help her recover.
“She is really resilient. She’s had health problems on and off basically her entire life – a lot of trips to hospital, a lot of doctor visits, a lot of procedures and blood tests – and she’s just learnt to cope with it ... I think it means you learn to be more resilient, otherwise if you fall over, you fall apart.
“She still has nightmares, and now every time she sees something that’s broken, she says, ‘oh, the flood did that’.
“She goes through listing all of her stuff that’s gone, which is really sad. Also our pets are in foster care ... and sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night saying she misses the cats, which I totally understand.”
The Department of Education has provided extra counselling services at public schools in the Northern Rivers and trauma training for staff, to help the thousands of students affected by the events of February and March. It has also kept school communities together, operating as their own units even when billeted elsewhere, to give children familiarity and security.
More than 30 schools across the region were badly damaged during the floods and at least nine are still operating from temporary premises. One of them is Our Lady Help of Christians primary school in South Lismore.
Forty of the school’s 160 families lost everything in the flood, which also laid waste to the school’s buildings and resources. Principal Michael Piccoli says his staff put up many of the affected students and their families in their own homes, and worked hard to set up an alternative school site within 10 days, so children could get back to class and parents could get on with rebuilding their lives.
“It was really emotional,” Piccoli says of that first day back, “the parents in tears at the front gate ... the fact we could do that as a school, that we could give their children consistency and put normality back in their lives.”
“It will rain now and we will have little people in tears.”
Piccoli says he has been floored by the resilience of the children and their parents. Within a week of returning to school, the children were letting teachers know that they just wanted to get back to learning. But the trauma is there, and surfacing more now than it did in the immediate aftermath.
“It will rain now and we will have little people in tears,” he said. “We are seeing little people act out in ways they wouldn’t normally act out in. But we have families who have moved eight to 11 times, or are living in a caravan in their backyards.”
Ingall says the community is “absolutely exhausted”, but is optimistic that the children who survived the flood will recover from its trauma too.
“It’s a matter of time,” he says. “Hopefully nature will be kind this summer. Time is a wonderful balm, for children in particular.
“Children usually keep adults in the mainstream, and take them through things, rather than the other way around. They are amazingly resilient. They live in moment. It’s only when the roof is pounding with rain that it surfaces.”
Cassie Rogers with her children Ollie, 4, and Elodie, 11 months.Credit: Jacklyn Wagner
Cassie Rogers says she feels her year of maternity leave, that time she had hoped to spend with her children, has been stolen from her. She had to return to work early, one day a week, to help fund the repairs to the house and often finds her mind is elsewhere, even when she is with Ollie and Elodie, who is about to turn one. But she says they have helped her get through it.
“Having kids, you look at the bigger picture and you’re thankful for the small things,” she says.
“I took Ollie to the showgrounds when they had clothes and food they were giving out, and he picked up a small car and he was so excited, because he had this tiny Matchbox car. It changed my perspective on everything. Yes, we lost a lot, but we still had each other.”
The calendar can be purchased from ourkids.org.au/calendars-purchase.php