In late 2022, I found myself driving into the town where I was raised.
I was going home for a holiday, to see family and recharge for the year ahead.
It was a regular humid wet season day, a storm was blowing in the distance and the river was flowing fast; it was nothing unusual for this time of year and nobody anticipated what the coming weeks would entail.
Fitzroy Crossing, in the remote north of Western Australia, has been through many highs and lows, often finding itself at the mercy of social and economic policy created thousands of kilometres away. Before the floods, it felt like it was already at a low point.
The town felt, and looked, tired. The welcome sign near the bridge was buckled and bent and a large mural at the shopping centre had been graffitied, signs of an ongoing crime wave.
Friends I spoke to said the town was in a rough spot, describing a community that seemed to have lost some of its soul.
The wet season sits rather symbolically at the turn of the new year, it holds ecological, cultural and civic significance to the towns and communities in the north. Put simply, it often signals a renewal in the environment and social fabric.
What the Kimberley experienced in January 2023 was more of a hard reset.
We all thought we'd been through this before: a tropical low; a minor; a moderate; and then a major flood warning. We'd grown used to the floods because our town and community were built for them.
Homes on mounds and stilts, shops on high ground. It was normal to expect to be cut off via road for a few days, a few supply runs out to surrounding communities via chopper while the roads dried out, then life would go back to normal.
But this time, the water kept coming.
By the second day of 2023, it was clear this flood would be different. Images of cattle floating down the rising Martuwarra Fitzroy River were being shared on social media, communities were being evacuated and the regular excitement that usually comes with the wet season had turned into fear and worry.
My community was about to endure the largest flooding disaster in WA history and it dawned on me that I was the only journalist on the ground to cover it, and I only had my mobile phone with no tripod and no mic.
I'm in my final year of a journalism degree at Curtin University and work as a casual at ABC Kimberley. I'd never done any TV crosses or reported on a story of this scale.
My first cross to the ABC News Channel saw me shouting over the wind into a phone wedged on the top rung of a ladder with an inland sea of rising floodwaters behind me. Onlookers looked bemused, and I couldn't blame them, as I walked up the road with a ladder over my shoulder and a phone in hand.
I was staying just north of the Fitzroy Crossing town site when the waters came up and cut me off. My dad's boat was the only way to get around and it was on that boat I saw the full extent of this disaster for the first time.
Floating up a road I'd driven on just a few days before, I saw inundated homes belonging to family friends, water flowing through the supermarket, shops and community facilities under water. Nobody had ever seen this in Fitzroy Crossing before and I felt a sense of sadness that this was happening to my town.
Over the coming hours, I walked through flooded streets, waded knee-deep through the rooms of my childhood home and saw community members save their belongings by loading them into kayaks and makeshift rafts.
Reporting in your hometown can be tough, but this was something completely different. The feeling in Fitzroy Crossing in those early days of the disaster was one of isolation — roads were cut off and flights were restricted due to the weather. News had come through that more volunteers and ADF personnel were on the way, but that help would still be days away.
I don't think I fully acknowledged it at the time, but I felt a sense of obligation to make sure this story was getting the attention it deserved. In a physically isolated town, I was glad to be working to make sure it wasn't isolated from the minds of Australians.
When it became clear the bridge over the Martuwarra Fitzroy River, the only sealed road through the region and a town icon, was destroyed, the sense of sadness and uncertainty in the community was abundantly clear.
One person, in a car, assessing the damage, summed up the emotion of the town: "The bridge is broken, I think all the hearts are broken too, for the Fitzroy mob."
As the waters receded, the personal toll was becoming clearer. I talked to dozens of people who were affected in different ways. These were people I had connections with, who were friends and family. People who held me as a toddler or who taught me in school.
"Everything's just mud, just like everybody's house," said resident Patrick Davies when he was describing his home.
"I don't have a bed, I don't have a lounge chair, I don't have a TV unit, I don't have a fridge," explained a former colleague and local radio broadcaster Ronita Jackamara.
My life was made a bit easier with an ABC mobile journalism kit and tripod managing to get to me on a government flight. I finally had a microphone and I didn't have to use a ladder as a tripod! A far cry from getting around on foot, local organisation Marra Worra Worra also gave me the use of a vehicle to get around town.
Over the coming days, a plethora of ministers and politicians, including the prime minister and the premier, would fly into Fitzroy Crossing.
Other than during the prime minister's visit, I was the only journalist in town to put the questions the community had about the recovery to government. Just me, a phone and a wireless mic.
I got into a workflow with my colleagues in Broome and Perth. I was sending the video and interviews back via the web and would work on and record the script for the TV news that evening.
Sifting through the uncertainty of the weeks following the disaster was my goal, over the days that followed the PM's visit, I explored the flood's impact on food and power supplies, sewerage, the rebuilding of the roads, the rescue of native wildlife and many of the stories from people who had lost so much in this disaster.
As the days passed, a story emerged of a previously challenged community coming together.
Meetings saw people from all walks of life offering support and advocating for each other, divisions and past feuds dissolved and many tears were shed. In adversity, a sense of community spirit was flourishing.
It was a juxtaposition of my feelings toward my hometown when I arrived back just a few weeks before, and it fuels my hope for the future. These floods took so much and broke the bridge that connected us, but in so many ways it's bought the community closer than ever before.
Traditional owners say the river, the Martuwarra, is a living ancestral being. Some elders described the river as "angry" and the flood was its way of showing it. They say that only by coming together and rebuilding a stronger community, can the town flourish once again.
Reporting on a natural disaster of this scale in my hometown was a difficult task but I'm incredibly grateful to have been the person to report on my community in its time of need. I'm thankful for the dozens of people who spoke to me, who gave me a hand when needed and who shared their stories.
I left Fitzroy Crossing with a sense of hope for the future of my hometown, there is a long way to go but if the sense of community spirit and camaraderie continues the future of this small and unique town will, I believe, be strong.
