The beauty and the terror of the inland sea flooding the outback

Even before the rains came, the desert began to stir, says Helene Aubault, who lives on the fringe of the Simpson Desert in Queensland’s far west.

“Our homestead looks onto the first dune of the desert. From there, it is only dunes to Alice Springs,” says Aubault, who manages and lives on Bush Heritage Australia’s Ethabuka Reserve with husband Kyle Barton, their daughters Gwenaelle and Camille Barton, and their nanny, Mehar Fegan.

Gwenaelle and Camille Barton playing Ethabuka Reserve on Wangkamadla Country.

The humidity that preceded the monsoons which have now flooded a million square kilometres of inland Australia was enough to prompt the first wildflowers on the dunes to unfurl into the autumn heat on February 22. Then the rains came, and the household of five prepared to be cut off for up to six weeks.

The girls were delighted. They dragged out the family’s kayaks for the first time in seven years and swam and played in the mud.

They hunted the frogs that appeared in the puddles the moment the rain settled on the sand and began to spawn and inspected the patrols of ants that escaped the waters upon the jump-up on which the homestead is built.

They enjoyed balmy days of 30 degrees, a relief from a long summer of afternoons in the 40s.

Within days, the dunes that stood above the waters were covered in a vibrant green, and shield shrimp – little desert crustaceans – appeared alongside the tadpoles and frogs in the puddles and birds began to appear. Honeyeaters and finches fluttered about feeding on the grubs and insects in the low scrub; high above them, sharp-eyed raptors circled, looking for a kill in the new life on the ground.

A flooded area of Innamincka Station, in north-east South Australia on April 8.Credit: Wrightair

Walking and wading around the homestead, the sound of this rush of new life is so loud and close, says Aubault, a French arid-zone ecologist, that it is hard to make conversation.

As graziers in western Queensland and north-western NSW count the terrible cost of floods in lost livestock and wrecked fences, and consider the years of rebuilding ahead, the waters still spreading across the landscape are also bringing new life to the dry interior.

Gwenaelle and Camille Barton playing at Ethabuka Reserve after the monsoonal rains.

With a nod to poet Dorothea Mackellar, ANU professor Jamie Pittock notes that Australia’s arid zones depend on cycles of deluge and drought. The water is not only bringing a pulse of life to the surface landscape, but also charging aquifers deep beneath the dry sands and slowly flowing inland and south.

Sam Rigloa, a staff member with Wrightair, looking at the flooded area at Innamincka Station in north-east South AustraliaCredit: Wrightair

“It will trigger massive breeding of wildlife, such as native fish, and it will mean that they can migrate and perhaps repopulate some of the river water holes where they may have died out in the preceding dry times,” Pittock says.

“It will improve water quality by flushing out some of the more stagnant river and pools, and there will be massive waterbird breeding events.

Flooding at Ethabuka Reserve on the edge of the Simpson Desert.

“We will see this extraordinary braided river system where the flood water will spill out across the plains into the swales, between sand dunes, into billabongs, into floodplain lakes, and eventually the water that remains in the main channel will end up in Lake Eyre.”

The water is expected to reach Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in South Australia by early May, with peak flows in late June.

Already the floodwaters of the Paroo River – which along with Bulloo, Cooper and Thomson catchments had its biggest floods in 50 years – have flowed south to NSW.

Garry Heffernan, a farmer at Ularara, about 12 kilometres from Wanaaring in north-western NSW, has had no rain, but is fully surrounded by the flooded Paroo River.

Coopers Creek in north-east South Australia on April 8.Credit: Wrightair

Heffernan says similar floods occurred in 2010, 1990 and 1974. From his property, the floodwaters will either peter out into lakes or flow into the Barwon-Darling River.

“I’m on a sunken island underneath the levee bank and when I walk around, I see water everywhere I go,” Heffernan says. “I can actually get out – I just have to strip off and wade through chest-deep water to get to my car on the other side.”

The flooding at Innamincka Station in north-east South Australia on April 8.Credit: Wrightair

Heffernan, who runs cattle and manages trees for carbon credits, is looking forward to the way the floodwaters will “smarten up” the landscape, revitalising the fish and yabbies in the river and attracting birds.

“The way everything greens up is just magic,” Heffernan says. “By late July, early August the clover will be a foot high.”

As the waters recede, Aubault and Barton at Ethabuka Reserve will be busy. Native long-haired rats and other small native mammals will surge in numbers in months to come and, in turn, the numbers of cats and foxes will boom. Predator suppression to protect native species will become crucial work.

The flooded Innamincka homestead in north-east South Australia on April 8.Credit: Wrightair

The Australian monsoon is the dominant weather pattern of the northern wet season and can bring widespread heavy rainfall across northern Australia. The weather bureau says the flooding last month was “exceptional”.

A large part of western Queensland received up to four times the March average rainfall, while in four days from March 23 to March 26, some areas had more than their annual average rainfall. This was followed by more rain in early April.

As of Monday, widespread flooding continues for western Queensland, north-western NSW and north-eastern South Australia, and the weather bureau says this will persist for weeks.

The “exceptional” flooding threw the spotlight on the capacity of the Bureau of Meteorology in remote areas.

Nationals Leader David Littleproud said the 27 residents of Adavale, 100 kilometres from Quilpie, had “no warning” of the flooding that devastated their town.

“The nearest radar’s 2000 kilometres away at Alice Springs,” Littleproud said at a press conference on March 31. “The Bureau of Meteorology didn’t have the data to be able to warn them, and it was literally a life-and-death situation.”

In an election pledge rapidly matched by Labor, the Coalition promised $10 million for a new radar near Quilpie.

A bureau spokesperson said its weather forecasts accurately predicted the heavy rainfall and flooding and its 69 radars nationwide were “just one part of a broad observation network” that also includes satellites, automatic weather stations, radars, rain gauges and hydrological monitoring stations and feeds into predictive modelling.

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