And every creek a banker ran, and dams filled overtop.
We’ll all be rooned, said Hanrahan, if this rain doesn’t stop. (End ital).
In fact the Queenslanders loved it. Not only because it broke the drought, but because they took a pride in overcoming the inconvenience and the hardship.
It was, as they say, a culturally enriching experience to be trapped in the Queensland floods last week.
Queues of cars banked up either side of floodways. Children played and motorists exchanged stories of previous floods. Water over the bonnet. Cars swept away. Rescues by boat. Fences and stock lost.
The stories were exchanged in rural Queensland accents. The urban Queenslander ends most sentences with “ay”; the rural Queenslander even begins some sentences with “ay”, and certainly ends phrases and clauses mid-sentence with “ay”.
But whatever the accent, the words usually conveyed good humour, patience, self-reliance and willingness to help out. They also conveyed a desire that government spend more on physical infrastructure … roads, bridges, water supply and the like and less on intangible programs.
Between intermittent thunderstorms, locals led my wife and I along obscure local roads to get around floods that had all but cut off the towns of Biloela and Monto about 150kms west of Bundaberg. That evening we struck an a dangerously fast flowing creek. As the water had risen behind us, we could only join the Queensland stoicism … pour a gin and tonic and wait.
After dark a truck driver offered to tow us through, but I didn’t share his sense of urgency, particularly after a couple of G and Ts. The rain stopped long enough to pitch a tent and an hour later the truck driver returned.
“”The next creek’s half way up the bloody door,” he said.
That would put it over the Subaru’s roof.
By next morning the first creek had dropped to an easily passable level, but the one that stopped the truck was still tricky. The floodwaters had lifted the bitumen that covered the floodway on the otherwise dirt road. It had lifted about 15 metres of bitumen and dumped it at a 45-degree angle a couple of metres downstream. Sundry road guide posts had been snapped like matchsticks.
A short time later two young women and a child arrived in a large four-wheel drive on the other side. They got out and joined our inspection of the stream. The conversation ranged over the state of the road, relatives down south, and the state of the world. We were bizzarely oblivious that the four of us were standing in knee-deep flowing water in the middle of the road.
“”I’ve never done this before, but I’ll give it a go and wait for you to cross,” the driver of the large four-wheel drive said bravely. They had spent 19 hours taking a relative the 100kms to Bundaberg for a flight home.
Dorothy Mackellar’s flooding rains were being treated with the same stoicism as her drought.
It was as well to experience the flood, because the urban Queensland experience has been homogenised. It is not just McDonald’s and KFC, but the shopping centres of Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton and Brisbane itself have become replicas: Just Jeans, Sportsgirl, Roger David, Cue, Events, Michael Hill Jeweller and so on.
With efficient transport, the mass market self perpetuates itself. Because it can deliver mass product to mass outlets, it can deliver it cheaply, which attracts even more of the mass market so even more outlets can be opened.
Indeed, just before Christmas Woollies in Dickson was selling Queensland mangoes for 66 cents each. We did not see them that cheap in Queensland anywhere.
Technology has pushed homongenisation in other fields. The splendid Queensland house of stilts becomes rarer with the prevalence of air-conditioning. And a lawyer friend of mine who practises in Cairns says air-conditioning has allowed more professionals and business people to wearing long trousers and ties. Apparently it is smart to copy your southern colleagues by doing something as dumb as wearing a tie in 36 degrees with 95 per cent humidity.
At least they cannot homogenise the weather.
(Ital) But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.