How Kempsey, NSW, survived 19 natural disasters in one decade
Hit by nineteen natural disasters in one decade, the people of this poor, overlooked NSW shire provide a lesson in resilience to us all.
Among the eclectic mix of entries in Kempsey Shire Council mayor Liz Campbell’s diary, a surprising theme emerges. There was the opening this summer of a newly rebuilt bridge that had been swept away – twice – in floods. Within days, Campbell was in a nearby village checking on a couple of residents. They were still stoically living in a tent months after their home was destroyed in a catastrophic blaze that scorched almost half of Campbell’s council area. So many volunteers pitched in to protect the community of Willawarrin from that blaze that in March, around the time of a planned ladies’ lunch to support rural women enduring fire and drought and just weeks after minor flooding upriver, Campbell was also due to attend a thankyou parade in the volunteers’ honour. Both events had to be postponed when disaster struck again and Covid-19 hit Australia.
A mayor’s life? Forget budget meetings and ribbon-cutting. In the nine years Campbell has been in charge in Kempsey, a local government area that skirts the mid-north coast of NSW and shares its name with its main service town, there has been a succession of emergencies – and a heightened sense of déjà vu. Over the past decade, 19 natural disasters have been declared in the region. While a single catastrophe can involve years of recovery, the residents of this shire have dealt with multiple floods, fires, storms and intense drought – only to learn that they are also among the communities most vulnerable to the health implications of coronavirus. With a small population, a lower socio-economic base and a council that relies on outside sources for a considerable chunk of its funds, it sounds like a formula for, well, disaster. And yet somehow Kempsey and its people are still standing.
For a diminutive community – not quite 30,000 people spread over a council area the size of Malta – this part of the continent is home to a surprising abundance of Australiana. The only place in the world where Akubra hats are made, it is also the spot where Nestlé has produced Milo since its invention in 1934, and it’s the location of a newish centre honouring one of Australia’s most beloved performers. “I know a spot in Australia, it’s the best place you ever could be,” Slim Dusty sang in his ode to his birthplace, Song of the Macleay. “And there’s a big clean country town of Kempsey, and if you come here once you’ll want to stay.”
Set on a picturesque bend of the Macleay River, halfway between Sydney and Brisbane, the town sits within a wider council area known for its scenery. From pristine beaches at South West Rocks to normally lush farmland and subtropical rainforest, this area also produces an abundance of food. The Macleay Valley Food Bowl precinct alone claims close to 650 local agribusinesses.
But fortune does not always favour the most worthy. With a median weekly household income almost half the national average, according to the 2016 census, the sixth most disadvantaged council area in NSW is a study of resilience. Its main service town, with its drive-through McDonald’s and single railway platform, was once the biggest place around but in recent decades it’s been overshadowed by coastal Port Macquarie, which hosts the commuter flights that once landed in Kempsey. Now bypassed by the busy Pacific Highway, the same town that recently welcomed its first cinema in 35 years is also down to three pubs, all in West Kempsey, after the last one closed in December. “Kempsey has not grown hugely over the last 40 years,” federal MP Pat Conaghan says. “I know people look at Kempsey quite often and say [disdainfully], ‘Oh Kempsey!’ Just like a lot of rural towns, they don’t get a fair go. I think sometimes we’re considered the poor cousin.”
Throw in a profusion of natural disasters and, in 2020, Kempsey sits as comfortably in a Slim Dusty verse as it does in a Dorothea Mackellar poem, with its mix of beauty and sometimes terror, a place of droughts and flooding rains and overflowing waterways. “I would have seen a dozen floods, growing up there,” says Conaghan, 49, who remembers his mother mopping up mud at the pathology office where she worked on the deluge-prone side of the Macleay River. “They’re accustomed to floods. We expect them every five years.” Or as Phil Lee, president of the Macleay Valley Historical Society, says: “Slim Dusty wrote a lot of songs about floods but not fires.”
For as long as anyone can remember, flooding has been a regular event on the flatter western side of town. “I lived at South Kempsey and went to Kempsey High School and I don’t know how many times we were isolated and couldn’t get to school,” says long-time SES volunteer Greg Gill, 58. “When you’ve got a river that has a catchment of 11,500km, floods, except in the middle of droughts, are very common here. People are regularly isolated. And the crazy part is that happens before we even get to minor flood height.”
Gill has spent his life in Kempsey and still recalls the 2001 flood that left thousands stranded. Through his volunteer work with the SES he has a detailed list of the dozens of 5m-plus torrents that have stricken the town over its 182 years. The worst, and most notorious, occurred in 1949 when floodwaters reached 8.52m, killing six people and more than 15,000 head of livestock. More than 50 homes and shops were washed away and never rebuilt; decades on, the area where they stood has become a wide expanse of sporting fields.
Arthur Slack was a local councillor during the 1949 flood, which was followed, only months later, by another 8m-plus deluge. “I think it made an impression on him. I know that at home a lot of the talk was about flood mitigation and making sure that didn’t happen again,” says mayor Liz Campbell, Slack’s daughter, who grew up hearing many stories about that terrible time. “He talked about it in relation to how to rebuild the community,” says Campbell. “But in relation to how he felt about the loss and the things that he saw – the great devastation of the houses and people who lost their lives – he didn’t talk about it a lot at all.” In hindsight, she realised her father had been traumatised.
Decades on, Campbell, 67, still lives in her childhood home on the high eastern bank of the river, from where she has a close and protected view of the devastation that too often besets her town. The localised flooding that began in late 2009 set off a decade-long chain of disasters: storms and floods in 2011, a flood and multiple bushfires the following year, then more storms, floods and localised bushfires in 2013. The onslaught resumed in 2016 when multiple natural disasters were declared. And so it has been for many years, with severe fires in 2019 and right up to the arrival of 2020, when almost the entire council area was enduring intense drought.
Then, as the decade turned, coronavirus began its global spread, reaching Australia’s major cities and keeping its distance for a time from regional centres. Still, Kempsey was not immune. While comparatively few cases have been confirmed in the area, its residents have been deemed among the most vulnerable to the pandemic because of their age and general health, according to the Australian National University’s Centre for Social Research and Methods. As the centre’s associate professor Ben Phillips says: “If there were 100 cases in Kempsey and 100 in Bondi, you would expect a lot more trouble in Kempsey.”
It’s a familiar pattern and sometimes it can seem deeply personal. Of the 19 natural disasters declared in Kempsey since November 2009, many were statewide but more than 40 per cent were largely confined to this small coastal strip. And many have occurred under Campbell’s watch. “I’ve seen the effect it has on people and that does take a toll because you take on a little bit of everybody’s story,” she says. “You put on a protective layer [as mayor]. At the end of the day, someone needs to be the person who can’t crumble.”
Kempsey’s most recent natural disaster began on Friday, November 8. It was Kempsey Cup day and the local racecourse was packed by late morning. Although summer had not yet started, fires had been building upriver and as the first race of the day began, smoke and ash were settling kilometres away over the town. By the end of the second race, Campbell – whose council had only that morning approved a presentation by former NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins on preparing for fires – decided to leave; soon the entire meet would be halted. “I felt sick in the stomach and I went home,” she says. From the terrace of her beloved weatherboard house, for which she was suddenly acutely aware she had no fire plan, the view normally stretched for kilometres. Now even the river, just metres away, was obscured.
Local man Barry Parsons, 58, had passed by the races and by the time he returned to his home near Willawarrin, 30-odd minutes away, conditions were deteriorating. It was hot, windy and smoky, “like dusk at 2pm”, he wrote on Facebook. Just before 4pm he posted that it was “downright apocalyptic. No bird sounds. Just got winds and mandarin skies”. An hour later: “I haven’t seen a kick of flame yet but this is about as terrifying as it gets without it. Wind has really blown up, smoke and ash filling the sky.” Three minutes later: “Seriously looks and sounds like apocalypse out there. F..ked up being on your own in these times.”
Fire would burn in the region for two months and it would take another deluge of rain in late January to finally extinguish the flames. By then the toll included 67 homes, six bridges and countless outbuildings destroyed, 11 other bridges and kilometres of fencing damaged. And Barry Parsons was dead, his body discovered in burnt-out bush.
For a community more accustomed to the disastrous effects of water, this fire would provide its own challenges. “Getting back to normal life is quicker with a flood,” says Campbell. “The rain comes, the rain stops, the floodwaters subside. The feed goes. The businesses get back to business. And away you go – and your water tanks fill up, so that’s the upside. With fire, there is so much destruction. To grow a tree back takes years. And if it’s compounded by drought, to grow your pastures back takes forever. If your house burns down, getting the funding and doing the physical work takes a very, very long time. You can’t move on.”
There is also the associated fear factor. “Floods can sneak up on you,” says the SES’s Greg Gill. “With fire, everyone is scared of it; with the water, they don’t seem to be so much. People will drive into floodwater thinking they are going to be OK … They wouldn’t drive into a fire, would they? They would drive around and go in the opposite direction if they could get out that way.” By the second weekend in November, when evacuees arrived at a hastily established emergency centre at Kempsey Showgrounds, that fear was obvious. “The trauma in people’s eyes was horrible,” says Campbell. “And I have never seen that in floods. You don’t kind of flee from floodwater, or we haven’t here.”
Over the following 10 days more than 1000 people would register at the emergency centre as locals sought to make their evacuation as comfortable as possible. “People were donating beds, linen, food and clothes. We managed to house 75 people onsite, from bubs in cots to people in beds, simply on donations,” says showground co-ordinator Lisa Powlesland, working through her first emergency with the help of a work-for-the-dole team who had voluntarily returned to be by her side. Local businesses donated airconditioners and food. Animal welfare volunteers provided hay and feed. Kempsey racetrack, site of the curtailed Cup day not 48 hours earlier, was opened to anyone needing shelter or to move their horses, caravans or machinery to safety.
Up the road at Willawarrin, suddenly homeless residents were being housed at the local pub, which co-owner Gordon Anderson kept open with the help of a generator provided by officials in the otherwise powerless village. “People knock Kempsey Council but I tell you what, after this what the council have done has just been unbelievable. I have never met such good people. Anything we wanted we got,” he says.
“People say a lot of horrible things about Kempsey,” says the showground’s Lisa Powlesland. “But there’s nothing nicer than seeing the way this community has pulled together and been a real community.” For weeks the goodwill continued: from the beginning of December, to name one of countless examples, close to 200 volunteers were mending kilometres of fences in Willawarrin until social distancing rules halted their efforts.
“It’s a difficult time for the community because we were on a path,” says Campbell. “Something like this [fire], while it’s bringing us together, also puts back the things we were working on.” Some things that might be considered routine elsewhere – maintaining small halls, roads, bridges and sewers – have had to cede to mitigating disasters, even as council officials, on whom a lot of the burden of hazard planning is placed, try to maintain the range of services that make a community liveable. As Campbell says: “Keeping up business as usual while you go through a disaster is not that easy.”
So how do they cope? “It’s like any trauma: you go through the actual shock and you go through anger. You go through pain,” says Campbell. “You build up resilience. We live on a laid-back, quieter basis here, and we do have strong community spirit built up by things that happened to you.” Six months on, she says, thanks in part to the recent arrival of several container homes, most of the owners whose houses were destroyed over summer “have progressed to a stage where they are a bit more settled and have a bit of security for the next 12 months”.
Somehow, after so many knocks, and with a limited population and limited funds, Kempsey and its people are still standing. “They just get on with it,” federal MP Pat Conaghan says of his hometown’s residents. “Yes, we’ve had a lot of natural disasters but the people understand, particularly with floods, they know it’s coming.”
“And while it looks on the outside that we have had all these disasters, you become more resourceful in how you spend your money and what you do,” says Campbell. “You can’t cry and do nothing … For me also it’s about how you view the world and what has happened to you. I grew up in a home where positive mental attitude was talked about all the time: plan your work, work your plan. It’s not what happened to you, it’s how you deal with what happened to you.”
Or as the showground’s Lisa Powlesland says: “This is home. You’ve got two choices. You either pull your socks up and get on with it, or you can get out. And for a lot there’s no option to get out.”
There are many ways to judge a community’s strength: by its financial stability, for instance, or the way it responds to challenges. A symbol of Kempsey’s endurance can be found in a mostly ignored pillar in its small commercial heart. A plaque on this lofty pole tells the story of some of the community’s momentous episodes. The infamous events of 1949 are listed; so too the flood peaks of 7.68m in 1963 and 7.44m in 2001. Less obvious but of equal significance is the height of the pole, a staggering 13.89m. According to the plaque, this is the “probable maximum flood level”. It seems it would take a flood this mighty – as high as a four-storey building – to stop this town.