Gordon Richards is still a bit teary. The night the 83-year-old moved into his pod at the Wollongbar Community Village, in the New South Wales northern rivers, was the best night’s sleep he had since he waded out of his South Lismore house in February.
In the week that followed, he and his daughter Debbie Richards, who had been his carer, moved around crowded recovery centres, including sleeping in the poker machine room at the Cherry Street Sports Club, until they were moved out at midnight when that started flooding.
Debbie went back to the “trashed” family home until mould drove her into a box trailer in the carport. Gordon went to his other daughter’s tiny flat at Evans Head. All the services he had been getting at his home for the cancer – which had metastasised into his bones – stopped because there were no available workers in Evans Head. He was too scared to drive on the pothole-marked roads to get to his doctors.
He didn’t even tell anyone when he had Covid. “My sister was away,” says Debbie, who is based in Brisbane. “He was in the house with Covid for four or five days. How he got through it by himself I just don’t know.”
The women in the pod next door have brought Gordon spaghetti bolognese, taken his dog, Penny, for walks and kept an eye on them.
“They told me that if they don’t see Dad and the door is closed for a little bit too long, they will come and check. He was very depressed but he picked up pretty quick once he got here,” Debbie says. “That is such a relief for me.”
Wollongbar Community Village is what becomes of the broken-hearted – the last resort when all the normal rhythms and rituals of daily life are washed away, along with your home and your possessions.
It is a place where many remain traumatised.
“There’s some horrible stories of what some people have been through – people living in cars with children and stuff like that,” Debbie says.
It is basic, modest accommodation: containers, demountables and some caravans. But it is free, dry and safe. There are support and healthcare workers. A few dozen people reside there, with a waiting list of 600. When building work is finished, it will accommodate 256 people.
It was built on a sports field, with roads, plumbing and electricity installed on land leased to the state government by the Ballina shire council.
Another village in Pottsville is due to open and 14 more are planned as part of the government’s $350m investment in temporary modular housing for people displaced by floods.
For some people, getting back into their houses could be two or three years away, says John McKenna, the chief executive of North Coast Community Housing.
Resilience NSW says that there are still 1,355 people in emergency accommodation.
“All other temporary housing sites across the northern rivers are at various stages of design work, construction and operation,” a spokesperson says.
“Temporary housing units are enabling us to transition people out of emergency accommodation and into a medium-term setting, which we expect will be used for up to two years. Caravans are being provided to Woodburn residents in place of a temporary house site, allowing people to remain on their properties while they repair and rebuild. This change was made as a result of extensive community feedback.”
But there is no way of knowing how many people are staying in their destroyed houses or just camping through a wet and cold winter while waiting on insurance claims, tradesmen and materials – or just trying to rebuild and fix things themselves.
“Morale and wellbeing is really starting to suffer” says Tony Davies, the chief executive of local non-profit Social Futures. “People are really starting to lose optimism. In Lismore you can still smell the floods, you really can. There are still shops with mud on the windows.”
Davies says that an increasing number of people who were not flood affected but were renting are seeking homelessness support “because the landlord might have been flood affected and they need to move in”.
Michelle Herne is concerned about her parents, who lost their home in Coraki.
“They are living very roughly while they undergo the insurance roundabout,” Herne says, adding that they are sad “day after day”.
She says Coraki needs the mobile vans as much as Lismore and Woodburn, but after four months it is too little too late for many.
