Wet Christmas

In hindsight, that bit last week about Bundaberg reaching 28 degrees on Christmas Day might have sounded a tad optimistic, but it did actually reach a top of 29 degrees, if only combined with the city’s worst flooding since 1942.

The seriousness of the situation was only brought home when we saw that American networks like CNN were running reports: 200,000 people affected; 22 towns and cities inundated or isolated; forced evacuations; affecting an area larger than France and Germany combined. Combined. And in some places, it’s only getting worse.

We’re a week out and Bundaberg still resembles a lumpy soup. At its height, a third of the city was under water, forcing nearly 400 people to be evacuated. The Burnett River - usually looking resplendent with moored boats, hundred year old bridges, daily trawlers of sea-faring fish folk and the sweet smell of molasses from the sugar plantation carried on the cool breeze - rose to a peak of 7.9 metres, swamping everything I just mentioned along with it. Aviator Burt Hinkler famously flew his aircraft underneath Bundaberg's old railway bridge: if he was still around to do it this year, he’d need to pack a snorkel.

The city of Rockhampton, around 300 km north of Bundaberg, hasn’t yet reached the height of its problems, with the Fitzroy expecting to peak at 9.4 metres tomorrow, taking hold of nearly 50 per cent of the city. The Herald Sun in Melbourne highlighted another rather terrifying prospect for those residents currently swimming away from their possessions and towards drier confines. Wendy Hilcher is an ambulance officer for the RSPCA, who has been rescuing people’s pets all week, but an attempted rescue on Sunday was aborted when she noticed a crocodile in the water. Brown snakes have also been spotted. “It's not just the safety aspect of getting to these places, it's what's in the water itself,” she said.

Scenes of cataclysmic flooding is a particularly familiar media sight nowadays: cars breached with only their rooftops on show; the two-way reportage with bone-dry journalists, usually with a lake in the background which used to resemble a shopping centre; then into the houses, where a defeated couple sludge through their possessions, some even managing a weary note of optimism: “I’ve never seen it this bad,” or “it’s a good job we’ve got some Wellies.” My girlfriend's reaction to seeing her old netball courts - the ones she played on as a child - completely submerged sparked a clearly more personal response. And expletive, it would seem. Once safe in Brisbane, she could only gasp in horror at the scenes unfolding, saying the word ‘shit’ repeatedly.

Complete helplessness, and a sort of resigned acceptance; those were my feelings when the rain hadn’t stopped since we had arrived a week previously on Christmas Eve. Quite alarmingly, we were told when we arrived that it had “been like this for two weeks,” and many agreed that, yes, they had never seen it this bad.

There is science behind all of this, by the way, as the east coast of Australia is currently enjoying a particularly severe La Nina affect (the opposite of an El Nino), which has something to do with cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that has caused Queensland’s rainfall to increase by six times over the December average. But when you’re there, in a state of limbo, during a religious festival, facing the relentless pitter-patter and steady drowning of a quiet country sugar town, you can’t help but feel a significant biblical overtone - real Old Testament stuff, that of great plagues, vengeance, apocalypse. The relief of having a one year old in our midst with the name Noah was at least a little reassuring.

As rivers swelled, peaked and spilled, the main concern was a swift exit from Bundy before high tide hits, the only roads are blocked and we’re done for. The house suddenly resembles a particularly serious scene from ‘CSI: Bundaberg’ with would-be forensic experts on the phones to police advice bureaus and relatives surveying the ground for clues, analysing depths and water gages like trainee meteorologists, discussing locations of evidently severe importance: “Kendall’s Flats is totally under,” says one. “McCoy’s Creek is up. If you get through the Isis in South Childers there’s further damage at Maryborough with the Bruce Highway blocked towards Gympie.”

We were restless, awaiting a parting of the waves, eventually fleeing a derelict scene just before the air lifting started. And if you need further proof of Australia’s vast meteorological unpredictability, when all of this was happening, a heat wave in South Australia saw temperatures reach 43 degrees. In Bundaberg, however, you could forget goannas running up gum trees, or even cricket in the garden, as the constant rain ultimately proved the season to be not too dissimilar from a damp, traditionally English Christmas.

Here are some more of our Bundy Christmas photos.

And my personal favourite...