It's a hard rain

The heavy rains are moving south. Now Brisbane is expecting a deluge, getting out the sandbags. Here in Sydney we’ve had a wet summer, as was predicted, but nothing remotely like Queensland’s catastrophe. Queensland always feels like another country, but through Kukka we learned something of the lie of the land around Bundaberg. When Bundaberg was the first Queensland city to be flooded just before New Year we thought immediately of our sailing friends George and Kathleen who had left their beautiful wooden boat Kalalau moored at the mid-town marina. Photos on the internet showed that when the Burnett river rose to its highest level in 50 years nothing was left of the marina,  so when George and Kathleen arrived back in Australia on 2 January they had good reason to fear that they had lost their boat.

Over the past week they’ve kept us in touch with their story. It has a happy ending. Kalalau is not among the 25 or 30 boats which have disappeared without a trace from Bundaberg, some taken out to sea, others no doubt on the bottom of the river. Nor was she half sunk, sitting on a rock, or marooned in a sugar cane-field. She washed up among the mangroves on an island in the river and in the last couple of days has been salvaged by an expert local crew. Here she is being dragged through the mud and back into her element. She not only floated, but her marvelous teak hull was tight. Hallelujah, wrote George.  No water in the bilges! She looks like a battle-scarred veteran, they say, but nothing, fingers crossed, which can’t be repaired further down the track. I hope we meet Kalalau one day again on the water. That will be a precious moment. 

This morning’s news has Toowoomba, just west of Brisbane, knocked out by a violent flash flood.  People have drowned, swept from their cars and their houses. I watched a You Tube video of a solid young man in a singlet and shorts hanging on for dear life to a wire netting fence. A couple of rescue workers got to him, pinned him against the fence and stopped him from being pulled under the ugly, angry, dirty water. He looked stunned when they finally escorted him to safe ground. He was in town somewhere, somewhere normally hard and dry (until very recently Toowoomba was in drought). Was he driving his car when he saw the water coming for him? Was it a rainstorm that fell out of the sky, or did the river – what’s the name of the river near Toowoomba? – take him from behind like a surprise cavalcade? There’s another image of a white van upended and being pulled along like a bath toy on a body of water moving so fast it is throwing up a wake as it rushes around power poles and other obstacles. Such weird things are happening in Australia this summer, things you just don’t expect.