A River with a City Problem is such a fantastic name for a history book. Margaret Cook's history of flooding on the Brisbane River and its tributaries is in high demand at the Council library service thanks to our fresh flooding this year.
What we didn't understand at the time, but learned in 2011, is that this story had two big 'ifs'. If the rain fell above Wivenhoe Dam, and if the amount of rain didn't exceed the capacity of the dam. Neither of these 'ifs' were the case in 2011. Massive amounts of rain fell in the Lockyer Creek and Bremer River catchments, flooding Laidley, Grantham and Ipswich before flowing into the Brisbane River downstream of Wivenhoe. At the same time, the deluge in the dam's catchment forced its operators to release water in the midst of the flood. As a result our house had over a metre of water. We were lucky, many of our neighbours fared far worse.
Margaret Cook tells us we were not the first to make this mistake. The first British colonists knew they were settling on a floodplain in 1825. They were attracted by the rich alluvial soils which they thought would grow cotton for the empire as well as plenty of food for the penal colony. Riverine flooding is not a problem in nature, it is a way of periodically inundating country, laying down new soil and shaping the landscape. The Turrbal and Yuggerah people who had lived here for the thousands of years before that had plenty of stories of flooding and explained where the waters came to. But they knew how to live with flooding, camping by the river when it was low and moving to higher ground in flood seasons.
Not so the British colonists, who immediately built permanent structures on the floodplain and planted European crops there. Any flood would devastate the settlement. The colony suffered such a flood in 1841 when the river rose 8.43m above its usual height. At this point colony's population was around a thousand persons and it was just about to be opened up for free settlement. This didn't seem to spark any caution in the colonial authorities who proceeded to subdivide and sell land on the floodplain, covering this lovely fertile soil with roads and houses and even building luxury housing on what is now Orleigh Park in West End, right on the river.
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| Would you build a house here? |
In 1893, when it was home to around 100,000 people, the city flooded twice. On 29 January the river rose to 8.35m at the Port Office, near the city centre, inundating the CBD and much of the settled area of the city. On 15 February it rose again, this time to 8.09m, sending almost everything back under water before most people even had time to clean off the mud. The Bremer River at Ipswich rose to 24.5m and 23.6m. The floods were devastating, a massive landmark in the history of the two cities.
In 1893, many of the suburbs which were flooded in 1974 and again in 2011 were still farmland. This included major parts of Yeronga and Fairfield, where I live, as well as Rocklea just down the road, Graceville, Chelmer and the Centenary suburbs further west, and many of the lowest lying parts of Ipswich. You might have thought 8m of water would make even property developers think twice.
They did abandon Orleigh Park, with owners progressively selling to the Council and allowing it to create one of Brisbane's most popular parks. However, the subsequent reviews and inquiries focused almost exclusively on how to prevent further flooding. The river was dredged and straightened, levee walls were built and eventually, after much debate and delay, Somerset Dam was started in the 1930s and finished 20 years later as a post-war economic stimulus. Brisbane residents were encouraged to believe that these measures would save them from future floods, even though hydrologists and engineers warned that they wouldn't - Somerset would at best reduce flooding by about .5m (provided the rain fell in the Stanley River catchment) while the benefits of the changes to the river itself were similarly modest. A cycle of dry years added to the sense of invulnerability, punctured dramatically in 1974.
On 29 January 1974 the river reached 5.45m. While this was almost three metres lower than 1893, the city's population was now over 700,000. Fairfield, Yeronga, Rocklea, Chelmer, the Centenary Suburbs and many more were now densely settled. Thousands of homes were inundated. I remember it well. 1974 was the year I started High School. We were high and dry at Sunnybank (or as dry as you can be when 600mm of rain falls in a week) but my scout group went down the road to Rocklea to help with the clean-up, walking through mud and stench to help residents put their sodden stuff on the footpath. We could smell the mud from the train on our way to school for weeks afterwards.
You might have thought this would make governments and property owners pause. But the Bjelke-Petersen State Government was literally in the pockets of property developers and the Brisbane City Council led by Clem Jones was not much different. The Commonwealth Government made flood adjustment funding conditional on developing floodplain landuse plans that took account of flood levels, so Bjelke-Petersen chose instead to forgo the funds and accuse the Whitlam Government of discrimination. We were assured that Wivenhoe Dam, already under development and completed in 1985, would save us from a repeat. Floodplain development went on as if nothing had happened and people rebuilt their flooded homes unaltered. In 2011 the flood was a metre lower than 1974 but flooded thousands more homes, many built in areas sparsely populated when they went under in 1974.
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| My house in 2011. Thankfully we live upstairs. |
Part of the reason Margaret Cook decided to write this book is that it seemed that in the wake of the 2011 flood, nothing had changed. The Commission of Inquiry set up to review the response to the flood was meant to review everything, including land use decisions, but ended up with a forensic investigation into whether the Wivenhoe Dam engineers followed the dam's operations manual to the letter. Despite the inquiry's expert advisors saying they had done a good job, the lawyers found otherwise and the subsequent class action reached an ambiguous conclusion over a decade later. What this did was allow people, including politicians and developers, to talk about the flood as the result of dam mismanagement, not of vast amounts of rain.
Over and over again Cook uses terms like Dam Dependency, the Somerset Dam Syndrome and the 'flood-proofing myth'. This is a specific example of the myth of Progress, the idea that humans can 'improve on' nature, that we can control natural forces and bend them to our will for our profit. Every few decades (and more frequently as climate change accelerates) Nature reminds us that it is not so. We can't stop the rain from falling, or tell it where to fall. We need to learn to live within our limits.
Why are we so slow to learn this? The answer, as far as I can see, is that ignoring this reality makes some people very rich. Property developers build on flood-prone land, with the full approval of local and State governments, and sell the product to unsuspecting home buyers who assume that if the housing has planning approval then it must be OK. By the time the flood comes, the developer is long gone, sitting safely in his or her hilltop home counting their money and enjoying the distant water views.
And this, although a rather crude stereotype, is kind of typical of our present day hyper-capitalism. It applies to our big agri-business companies, our media oligopolies, our pharmaceutical companies, and most of all to our massive fossil fuel companies. They don't just get lucky and cash in on our ignorance, they spend millions of dollars fostering that ignorance and buying friendly governments (almost entirely legally, the law being what it is) to ensure they can go on profiting long after it has become clear such profits are unconscionable. You wonder, how do they live with themselves? Well. Michael Leunig, as usual, suggests an answer.
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