After the Flood: Scenes of Sodden Devastation in Lismore

They have a nickname for Lismore, the town in the NSW Northern Rivers that was decimated by floods over the weekend. It’s called “The Wok,” a nod to the town’s uncanny resemblance to a deep, bowl-shaped frying pan. About 30,000 people—mostly poor and working class—live at the bottom of the Wok. They are split down the middle by the Wilson River, which has a tendency to rise and burst its banks every 20 to 30 years. The locals will tell you there have been three other big floods: 1954, 1974, and 1989. The consequences always border on catastrophic but everyone who lives here knows the deal.

“This is a flood zone, right. We know it’s a flood zone, so the houses are cheaper but you take that risk,” begins Mick Woodburn, 59, who lost everything in the flood. “No one’s got no money here, mate.” Mick is a pensioner who was left disabled following a “catastrophic” congestive heart failure 10 years ago. Lismore is one of the few places he can afford on his $400 a week disability pension—some of which he donates to the Smith Family and Returned Services League.

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The Northern Rivers of NSW, which includes the likes of upmarket Byron Bay, Bangalow, and Brunswick Heads, has gone through a property boom in recent years. Poorer people have been pushed into the hills, with many taking refuge in the cheap housing provided by the town. Like so many other people we met in Lismore, Mick was caught off guard by the floods. In the age of the internet, this seems impossible. But, as Mick explains, even the best information available is just a guess. “We’ve had lots of flood warnings,” he says. “I’ve been here ten to 12 years. We get flood warnings two to three times a year, and we’ve never been flooded.”

Mick lives downstairs in a rental property, which he shares with his daughter and her two children. He has bad legs, which on the day we met him were a worrying shade of purple. Mick struggles to get up and down the stairs, meaning everything he owns was on the bottom floor. It’s all gone. “You can’t think about it,” he says, steadying himself. “I’ve lost everything.”

“What I’ve got I’ve earned and saved… but the last couple days, watching my life go out the fucking door, I’ll never recover mate,” he says. “Took me 40 fucking years to get my shit together. Now it’s all in one place—the tip.” At this point Mick pauses and excuses himself, this is all still a bit too raw to talk about.

The constant false flood alarms have created what many locals call a “boy who cried wolf” complex in Lismore. “The last couple of floods it was predicted to go over the levee and it didn’t so I was probably a bit complacent,” says Dallas Bryant of Bryant’s Mattresses, whose business was almost entirely flooded out. Nothing was insured because he just couldn’t afford it—premiums in the flood zone range between $10,000 and $40,000 a year. “This time they were right though,” he says. “They predicted it was going to go over and it did.”

At the nearby Nissan car dealership, Warren Richards, 58, wasn’t taking any chances. With hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of uninsured vehicles in his lot, Warren, his staff, and their friends and families spent three hours on Thursday afternoon taking the cars to higher ground. It paid off.

“Once [the warning] gets to 11 meters… [We’ve] been here a long time, so we knew it was going to flood. Plus it rained on Thursday all day. I was here in 1974, same thing. Day before the flood it rained all day,” he says.

Bowen Pies was spared by luck more than anything else. “The only reason we packed up is because we had a couple of customers come in from the country and said they’ve got a hell of a lot of water coming down from Nimbin, Goolmangar… There was nothing on the radio,” says Allan Foster, who co-owns the pie shop with his wife Tracy.

Tracy was here for the 1974 floods and says the warning systems were better in those days. “Back then they used to listen to the farmers. The cow cockies [dairy farmers] used to ring the radio stations and say you got a wall of water coming down the creek,” she explains. “Now they go off their technology, so maybe they need to revert back to listening to old timers who live out of town.”

Very few Lismore residents we spoke to, particularly the older ones, were using the internet to get information about the floods. Even those who were tuned in, they didn’t really get the memo. “We had no warning. Only north, south, and the [Lismore] CBD had warning,” says Mary Anne, 48, a mother of eight who lives in east Lismore.

Mary Anne and her family moved here two years from Casino. Three of her kids still live at home, including one with Down Syndrome. They’d never experience a flood. “It was scary, it was so scary. You knew you wanted to go somewhere to get the kids out but you knew that water was rising too quick to even bother,” she said.

With their power cut off by the flood, Mary Anne and her kids had to yell out to a neighbour to call the SES and get them evacuated by boat. All of their possessions were washed away. Now they’re now looking for an exit strategy from Lismore.

“I plan to move to higher ground. I couldn’t handle going through this again. A day and a half of rain and we lose our two steps here because we are so low,” Mary Anne says. She’s unsure whether they will be able to afford the move though. “We might be stuck here for a while. I just hope we don’t have to go through this again,” she says. “There is gonna be a rush [for properties on higher ground], a lot of people out here lost everything.”

Down at the caravan park they’re sticking it out. Carmen, 49, and her team are working 6 AM to 6 PM, trying to get the business back open by Monday. Whether by coincidence or design, the park, which is home to around a dozen permanents, is situated at Lismore’s lowest point. They were able to get all but a handful of caravans out before they were inundated. The water came quicker than Carmen could believe, “like gusts of water.”

“You have to smile otherwise you’re crying,” she says. “We did know that it was a flood zone area, we did know in the 1974 floods it got wiped out. We were told by SES that’s every 100 years—or 500 years they’re working on now. But it only happened to be 54 years now. But we were warned.”

Carmen’s accommodation, which is in the caravan park, has been targeted by looters in the flood’s aftermath. Elsewhere in town, scavengers have been picking through the tremendous mounds of soaked belongings on the street, possibly unaware much of it is still desired or waiting to be vetted by insurance brokers. Other locals are infuriated by the many “gawkers” who’ve arrived in town to peer in on their misery.

Back at Mick’s the cleanup is underway with help from a good samaritan, also called Mick, from Byron Bay. “It’s just that I’m so inclined and I have the opportunity to do it, and also it’s good to help people who are a little bit less fortunate than you are,” says Byron Mick.

Byron Mick is one of many who’ve descended on Lismore to help out and provide the kind of grassroots, community support that’s much appreciated by the flood ravaged. Lismore Mick is clearly deeply moved by their efforts. “The people around here have come… they’ve stepped up to the plate and helped us out,” he says. His voice cracks.

However, the offer of concessional loans for flood victims from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who landed here in a helicopter on Monday, was not as warmly received. “Mate, I wished I’d been there, I wish I had of knocked him on his arse,” Mick says. “I’m an old disabled pensioner but I would have got the first punch in for sure… Fuck off. Give us some fucken money to get us out of here.”

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All photos by Madison Davies