This time was going to be different; we were prepared. I felt proud of us as I witnessed the entire Lismore CBD packing up, lifting things to above the 12.12m record, ready to brace for what happened just under five years ago. We all had a flood plan. We moved our cars higher up. But this time was different: it broke all records, and it’s broken our town.
A friend said to me as I plugged my phone into my emergency power pack, taking refuge in the roof cavity of my home in South Lismore: “Don’t worry mate, the army have arrived, shouldn’t be too long.”
That was the early hours of Monday morning on 28 February. We hadn’t slept as we watched the water engulf our home. We had called 000 and the State Emergency Service, with no luck – they were overwhelmed. We heard the evacuation centre was already full as we tried to work out where we would go once we got out. We had more than 10 people on the outside attempting to get us boats. We waited more than six hours as the storm raged on the other side of the tin roof half a foot from my face.
We were saved by a man, a civilian named Brad on a jetski who had travelled in from Ballina. I caught his attention by banging on a window neck-deep in flood water – the only safe exit. We didn’t see one SES boat on the way out as we ducked below power lines to safety. This week, on day nine, I saw my first army officer clearing out a primary school.
The Liberal government has failed us. They can’t even face us. Wednesday was our “leader’s” opportunity to experience what our people have endured over the last nine days – it was his opportunity to listen. Instead Scott Morrison thinks it acceptable to throw money at a problem in the hope it will go away, then fly out of the site for his next curated media coverage. He placed a ban on media filming the visit, his office says out of respect for victims, but conveniently it would also conceal the response he must have known he would be met with – an admission of guilt. His visit feels more like a bad case of Mondayitis than a genuine wish to help taxpaying Australians whose lives have been destroyed.
We heard of SES ranks being thinned because of vaccine requirements; the army were staging media shots which appeared on Morrison’s Instagram to broadcast what a great job they were doing, uniforms mud-free. Civilians were chartering helicopters to get us essential items like clean water, food and fuel.
On Wednesday more than 200 northern rivers people showed up to communicate what our community needs, to seek answers for the inadequate and fatal response. Scotty slipped in the back door of the council chambers – he did not face the group of passionate yet peaceful protesters. Instead he once again left us high and dry to “dig deep and help one another”, with a couple of grand and nowhere to spend it.
We don’t need the disaster relief agency boss blaming “people who want to live among the gum trees” for the place we choose to call home. We will not fall into the river without first dismantling the true problem: those who profit from the decisions which contribute to the reality I and 90% of my community find ourselves in … again! I don’t know how we will bounce back from this.
You can massage the narrative all you want but THIS IS WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE LOOKS LIKE. This is what happens when we don’t commit to a global effort to combat the climate crisis. This is Lismore’s second natural disaster in five years. This is the whole coastline in devastation. It’s not “getting harder to live in Australia”, it’s getting harder to live with the decisions of our past generations who have refused to listen to climate scientists and the Indigenous elders, who warned us this is where we were headed long before I was born. It’s getting harder to swallow the blundered responses Scotty vomits with zero thought, consideration or compassion.
We are deeply disappointed in the lack of leadership. We will not be fed this mediocre deflection of accountability. The current government doesn’t care about us; Morrison let this be known to the northern rivers community loudly on Wednesday with his cowardly silence. We are not an inconvenience. We are humans who demand inspiring, honest leadership. We demand more.
• Kate Stroud runs a one-woman creative studio specialising in vision hunting and visual communications
