Monopoly passed the time – but our thoughts are with ‘Cookie’, who’ll never pass Go again

Poor Tom ‘Cookie’ Cook. He bravely clung to a tree, in contact with rescuers trying to get to him, before being swept away. So close to being saved. Gone forever.

Stripped shelves at the Byron Bay Woolworths. Picture: Matthew Condon

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

As TC Alfred moved over the mainland on the weekend, and without electricity or the internet, we played good old-fashioned Monopoly (Australian edition).

If ever a game reflected the ­nation’s real estate prejudices and cultural stereotypes, it was this – hours into the game Darwin remained unpurchased at the bargain basement price of $40, so too Hobart ($120), and everyone surreptitiously eyed off the Whitsundays ($320) and the jewel, Sydney Harbour ($400).

It had taken Alfred to get the family together around the dining room table, the children device-free since the last time we’d played a boardgame (the great Northern Rivers floods of 2022). And here we were again, intent on financially ruining each other, ruthless, merciless, familial affection a vague memory as the rain poured down outside.

The day before the game, on Saturday, there had been a foolhardy attempt to purchase supplies and have a stickybeak after days of isolation. It was a wilful ignoring of the warnings to stay inside. To hunker down and not make a nuisance of ourselves.

It was just a bit of rain, right? So out we ventured.

Low roads waterlogged in Byron Bay on Saturday. Picture: Glenn Campbell/NewsWire

The road into our nearest town – Mullumbimby – was covered in water but passable.

The town itself was deserted. Nothing was open. Gone was quite literally the world’s worst busker, his total inability to hold a tune let alone strike a correct guitar chord barely tempered by his portable, battery-powered mirror ball. Gone the whiff of marijuana down the main drag.

So on we drove on to Byron Bay, the M1 northbound closed but the southern lanes still open, car-less, truck-less and eerie. Where was everyone?

Into Byron the road was flooded, so we turned around, headed for the hills and tried a back road home. It, too, was shut. So we turned back again and, with the M1 shut off, there remained a single available access road to home. The one that flooded even if a wet tea towel was wrung over its surface.

If it was flooded; we were stuck in no man’s land, marooned, victims of our own idiocy.

Miraculously we made it back and hopped straight back into the paused Monopoly game. Our youngest had somehow set up a deadly thoroughfare with motels on the Barossa Valley, Kangaroo Island and Port Lincoln.

By Sunday the malice of ex-TC Alfred shifted from howling winds to a creeping low-pressure system, dumping ridiculous volumes of rainwater on the region just south of the Queensland border. Now the threat was no longer from Alfred’s violent winds, its blusterous temper, but the vindictiveness of its aftermath. Water, and a lot of it.

Before our internet blackout we’d heard everyone from Anthony Albanese down warning about flooding throughout Brisbane, the Gold Coast and of course far northern NSW.

Rising rivers and sandbags are a part of life here, this beautiful but occasionally perilous landscape of rivers, estuaries and creeks fed by its rash of ancient mountains, hills and valleys the remnants of volcanic activity reaching back for millennia. Long-suffering Lismore is slap-bang in the centre of an ­ancient caldera.

For those of us on higher ground it was impossible not to fret once again for Lismore, that river town still carrying yellow-edged bruises from its last battering during those 2022 floods.

All eyes were on Wilsons River and whether the Lismore town levee would break. Rainfall of up to 150mm was expected all day across the region, with isolated falls of 400mm predicted. (Statistics mind-numbing to a farmer friend in Young in southwest NSW who said their annual rainfall was 600mm.) Ours was just one of 16,000 homes without power in the Northern Rivers. Thousands of people were still living under emergency warnings.

And, moving around the Monopoly board, it was difficult not to think of Tom “Cookie” Cook, 61, the friendly woodwork hobbyist whose ute was swept off Wild Cattle Creek Bridge northeast of Dorrigo on Friday. He managed to get out of the vehicle and bravely clung to a tree, in contact with rescuers trying to get to him, before being swept away. His body was found on Saturday.

The ute that was swept off Wild Cattle Creek Bridge on Friday.

So close to his saviours. A voice away from life. Then lost.

With Alfred’s eye well and truly gone, we finally managed to get into Byron Bay for food and human contact.

Two giant Norfolk pines – deemed potentially perilous just 24 hours earlier – had been cut down and pulped in the park at Main Beach in front of the famous Beach Hotel. Only the raw stumps remained. This iconic vista now resembled a smiling 12-year-old who’d suddenly lost some teeth.

A pine tree stump at Main Beach in Byron Bay. Picture: Matthew Condon

In Woolworths, the shelves and long refrigerators were so empty and stark beneath their long banks of neon lights that it was like being on the set of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In a busy cafe, locals were breathlessly sharing their tales of survival. “We’ve been living like kings,” one woman said of life during Alfred. “Salmon. Red wine. All by candlelight.”

Her companion said she’d spent her time reading the recent Booker Prize winning novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the story of six astronauts rotating the earth in a spacecraft. “I could really relate to it,” she said. “The isolation.”

And another: “I played Scrabble with myself. I enjoyed it.”

The biggest drag, they all concurred, was sitting in the car to charge their phones and laptops.

It all paled against thoughts of “Cookie” Cook.

Back home we continued the Monopoly game half-heartedly, drained and wearied by Alfred, having endured the anxiety of his arrival, now left dumped in his soggy aftermath. We quietly walked away from the game.

Left unfinished on the dining room table none of us, by accident or design, had purchased, let alone taken advantage of, Brisbane Airport ($200) or the Gold Coast ($300).

It didn’t seem right.