Painting Fakes

  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.   I wish I'd read this book in 1994 when we bought our house in Fairfield, but of course it was only published in 2019, prompted by the catastrophic 2011 floods .  When we inspected the house and decided to buy it we knew that in 1974 the property had been covered in over two metres of water, flooding the upstairs of the house.  We were also told that the completion of Wivenhoe Dam in the 1980s meant an equivalent flood event would be about two metres lower, meaning we would only have an inch or tow of water under the house.  This seemed like a small enough risk. 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...

So after a weekend of wild weather across southern Queensland it seems that Brisbane is about to be flooded again .  Fortunately for us the event is being described as a "minor flood" with levels 2 metres below what they reached in 2011, so we should be high and dry, unless further rain intervenes.  Not so our friends in Maryborough and Bundaberg, a bit further up the coast, who are facing a lot more water than they did in 2011.  Thinking of you all up there. Ironically, although so far we have suffered no damage worth talking about in the storms that arrived this week, we did suffer a number of technological failures including of all things a blocked water main which meant our running water was reduced to a trickle.  I didn't mention the irony to the poor Queensland Urban Utilities guy who had to come out and fix it in the pouring rain on Sunday afternoon.  That would just have been annoying.  I'm hoping he got double time plu...

Recently my local paper featured a story about the Lifeline shop in our local shopping centre, finally re-opening after the January flood .  They were glad to be open again, but struggling for volunteers, and hoped that the community spirit that got us through the flood would bring them more volunteers. I've got some bad news for them.  The spirit of the floods will not continue.  People behave differently in an emergency.  There's normal life, and then there's what you do in a time of crisis. To some extent, this is sad.  The willingness of Brisbane people to help complete strangers back in January was one of the best things that's happened here in years, even as the flood itself was one of the worst.  The fact that we are now back to our normal routine - neither particularly good nor particularly evil - is a bit of a let-down. On the other hand, emergency behaviour is unpredictable.  We recently read stories from London of ordinary mi...

We moved back home on Friday, power reconnected.  Phone has been restored this afternoon along with our internet service and so except for an incredibly clean and empty downstairs to our house, we are close to being back to what passes for normal around here.  Our street, though, is eerily quiet.  The moderately loud neighbours on the upside haven't returned - perhaps they never will, being tenants.  The same with the tenants next to us on the down side with their young children and the dad with chronic sinus problems - they lost almost all their possessions and they're tenants too.  The man with the dogs next to them has lived here all his life and went through the 1974 flood here, so I guess he'll be back eventually but he had water almost to his roof.  The family over the road are having problems with their insurance company which is delaying their electrical repairs.  The shopping centre is still closed.  I'm guessing it could be months befo...

A flood makes you see your suburb in a new way.  I always thought of Fairfield as a flat place, and particularly of my street as a flat street.  The hill started on the other side of the railway line, where the streets climb quickly up to the top of the ridge.  Down on the floodplain the land appears to run evenly from the bottom of the ridge to the river. Now I know differently.  Our street dips, then rises again.  Because we are half way up the rise, we got half flooded.  Our neighbours at the top were high and dry.  Those down in the dip were submerged.  Those two metres make all the difference. When the floods first receded the mud painted a physical contour line on the street - below was brown, above was black.  Then as people started to clean up the mud line got blurred because cars and boots carried mud all over, and hoses swept much of it into the stormwater drains.  A new line emerged, of broken furnitu...

We interrupt normal programing to bring you this update from damp and muddy Brisbane. Brisbane's paradigmatic flood occurred in January 1974, when I was 12.  A rain depression in the Brisbane River catchment combined with a king tide to inundate large areas of Brisbane.  I remember going with my scout group to Rocklea in the days after it subsided and helping people clear out houses which had been completely submerged.  The mud and the stench was terrible. Our house in Fairfield stood in about 2.5 metres of water in 1974, filling the downstairs part of the house and covering the floorboards upstairs.  Our neighbours in low set houses were completely submerged.  We didn't live there then, of course.  When we bought the house in 1994 we checked out flood levels and were told that the building of Wivenhoe Dam lowered them by about 2 metres. Fast forward to 2010-11.  The La Nina weather pattern dumped huge amounts of rain on Queensland and town after...