AS he stood at the back of his house at Phoenix Park, surveying the swollen and rising Hunter River ripping by, John Wright was a portrait of calm.
After all, John Wright has lived and farmed on this river bank, opposite the historic village of Morpeth, for all of his 80 years, and he has seen the rise and fall of the Hunter many times.
"I've lost count of the floods we've had in my time," Mr Wright said.
By 11am Wednesday, the river had reached about 10.4 metres, according to the gauge on a pylon of the Morpeth Bridge, which is 124 years old and, like John Wright, a local legend.
"It's not a flood yet," he said. "But it won't take much to come over the banks. If the rain continues, I'm pretty sure we'll have a flood over Phoenix Park."
Did that worry him?
"No," he replied. "What's the good of worrying? It's the life you choose."
Actually, it was the life John Wright was born into. He is the fifth generation of Wrights to farm this soil, which has been enriched through the years by floods whooshing across the land.
That rich soil has provided a living for the Wrights since the 1830s. John Wright is renowned for his vegetables and the brooms he lovingly creates from millet grown on his property. He is known as the Broom Man.
John Wright believes he is the only person in Australia to undertake the whole process of making a broom, from growing the millet to hand-sewing the head in a rustic shack he constructed, including using cast-off timber from earlier incarnations of the Morpeth Bridge.
"I put in an acre of millet, and that keeps me going for a year," he said. "An acre makes a lot of brooms."
But now he has created and stitched together a new farm-grown product: a book.
John Wright has chronicled in words and photos not just his life but that of this section of the Hunter River. The book is brimming with stories of local events and characters through the years.
"It's a bit of everything really," Mr Wright said. "It's my memories, and I have a love for Morpeth, so it has a fair bit to do with the book."
The book is titled, From The Old Bailey London 1774 to Broom Making In Morpeth 2022. My Story.
The London reference explains how the Wrights came to be in Australia. John Wright's great-great-great grandfather Joseph Wright was transported to Australia in the First Fleet after being convicted and imprisoned in London for stealing lead.
"When I was a kid, if you said you were a First Fleeter, it was frowned upon," John Wright recalled. "Now it's something special."
John Wright believes his forebear couldn't write. On his marriage certificate, reproduced in the book, Joseph Wright signed with an X. Six generations on, written words are used to remember Joseph Wright.
"I think he'd be proud," said the author of Joseph Wright.
As well as containing historical images, the book has many photos that John Wright has taken himself.
"I've been taking photos all my life, because I thought I should record things," he said.
As a teenager, John Wright was given a camera by his aunty, and "I would take the film over to Mr Drinkwater, the chemist at Morpeth, he'd send it off to Kodak, and I'd wait anxiously for it to come back".
Those captured moments often feature the river, showing off its serene beauty and in flood-fuelled anger.
Framing those photos are John Wright's recollections, including his memories of the biggest flood he has encountered, the disaster of 1955. In the book, he writes about walking across the Morpeth Bridge and what he saw: "The roar of the raging current passing under the bridge, the sounds of large objects crashing into the steel piers of the bridge, live and dead animals, hay stacks, some with fowls perched on them, fuel tanks partly submerged, lots of 44-gallon drums, timber, trees and logs."
John Wright doubts history will be repeating with this latest downpour, even with more water coming down the Hunter and the nearby Paterson River. But he is prepared for his fields to become a lake, and for the little stall, where he sells his veges, bales of hay, brooms and now his book (for $40), to get wet feet.
"I reckon we'll have water in here next week," he said, pointing out that hadn't happened since the 2007 flood.
For now, the customers keep rolling in. Josh Guion has driven from his farm by the Hunter River at Woodberry to buy a load of hay.
"We've got to move all the cattle to higher ground, and there's not enough feed in the paddocks," Mr Guion explained.
Many of the paddocks on his 40 hectares of land are already covered by water so, in buying the hay, "we're trying to get on the front foot".
For John Wright, he is making literary hay while the rain falls, talking about his book.
He said he had been writing it for about three years, but the seeds of the stories had been planted long before that.
"It's all been handed down, word of mouth, from every generation, so I thought before I fell off the perch, I should put it down so it's not lost forever," he explained.
John Wright's partner, Sondra Jones, had been observing him working on the book for years.
"He's had little scraps of paper everywhere," Ms Jones said, adding she wondered at times if the project would ever be completed.
"He absolutely loves making brooms, but he's been longing to write this book for as long as I've known him.
"It's wonderful. It's nostalgic."
In a way the book is more than a memoir and local history. It is a love story for the part of the Hunter John Wright calls home.
While he is disappointed to see more and more local farmland being sealed under houses and roads - "I guess that's what they call 'progress'" - he is determined his place by the river won't meet the same fate.
"I don't care what I was offered, I won't sell it," he said. "Money won't buy this land."
But John Wright's words honour his home by the Hunter.
