ODE TO MY MATE’S OFT FLOODING TOWN

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by John Hood AC, editor writ large (acting)  |

with due inspiration from Dorothea MacKellar’s poem of 1906, no less pertinent.

Do I love my flood prone town?

Swift waters to one’s bane?

Oft ragged housing approvals,

Oft drought then flooding rain.

Do I love them muddy horizons?

Yet another inland sea,

Prolonged power cutoffs and terror –

Copping a new lake ’round me.

Nuff rainbows to poke a stick at,

More rains still foretold!

For flood and mud and famine,

The heavens pay us back threefold;

Over the drowned paddocks,

Watched from our rooves for days,

The muddy veil of submergence

Still rising, we worry ‘n gaze.

Do I yearn echoing swift water?

Cars, rooftops and lives carried off

Stark ‘n bobbing by down street river?

Contamination infection, dengue, encephalitis

A portent to another flood mud sweep-out

Should we survive the lonely night

Ruddy fool copped melioidosis wading through Brisvegas floodwater in 2011

Wise Gundagai black fellas recall

Murrumbidgee oft floods high big time…

White fellas best don’t camp on river sand

Know what’s good for you

Build wise on hill, not flood prone river sand

More floods come, houses again float down ‘Bidgee

White fella so gazed upon the hill…“Reckon black fella right”

Gundagai skedaddled uphill, views safe above wild ‘Bidgee.

Core of my fate, a’fore next tempest,

Another sodden land,

All you who have not copped her,

You will not understand,

Though Earth holds many beaches,

Wherever I may die,

Inland Aussie ain’t a beach

So my uphill thoughts do fly.

 

Murrumbidgee flood water levels for Gundagai, Australia, having held a naïve colonial record of suffering some of the worst flooding seen in Australian history during 1852 and 1853.  

“In the years after the flood the New South Wales Government agreed to help people move to safer land. By the end of 1859 everyone had left the old town and Gundagai had been set up on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, where it still is today.” [Source: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/gundagai-flood-1852]  Dem white fellas had finally listed to old black fellas wisdom.  So c’mon Lismore..adjacent Lismore Heights ne’er got flooded.

 

In the above poetically thieving outburst, one reflects upon the chronic housing approval of residential housing by recklessly ragged councils in known flood-prone areas still most relevant around Australia, notably:

  • Brisvegas
  • Ballina
  • Tweed Heads
  • Grafton
  • Coonamble
  • York-Beverley
  • Maclean-Yamba-Iluka
  • Lismore
  • Windsor
  • Richmond
  • Townsville
  • Bundaberg
  • Clarence Valley
  • Kempsey
  • Benalla
  • Bendigo
  • Echuca
  • Sale
  • Maribyrnong
  • Bunbury
  • Carnarvon
  • Swan (Perth)
  • Devonport
  • Latrobe
  • Launceston
  • Gawler
  • Murray Bridge
  • West Torrens
  • old Gundagai
  • etc…