I always thought the government would step in when there was a disaster but there was nothing. It was all people from the community helping each other out.
Mullumbimby, NSW
My name is Eydie Smith. I’m a wedding planner from the Northern Rivers. I moved up here about five years ago after university. I love living in Mullumbimby – there’s such a beautiful community here.
When the flood waters hit in March we’d had a weekend of persistent rain. There hadn’t been any flood warnings, but everyone in town was a bit wary.
Over the course of the night the rain kept falling. I got up a few times to check the water levels. At 5am I got woken by a call from my neighbour and when I walked into the front room I could see the street was a river. The water was already over the bonnet of my car.
Our house is raised up on stilts, but the front room already had water on the floor. By the time I’d reached my bedroom it was already flooding. Our street had flooded once before, but water had never gone into people’s houses.
I was just in shock. I just kept thinking about my car, and whether I had the right insurance to cover flood damage. My head was all over the shop. We tried to contact SES for help but they were overloaded.
To get to the evacuation centre we had to wade through the rushing flood water. I’m 5’2” and the water was over my waist. I still can’t believe we did that – you just go into a weird state of adrenaline.
We were in the evacuation centre for 24 hours. You’d think there would be someone in command organising safety patrols to check people were okay. But there was no one to ask for help and no government support – someone had just opened up the RSL. At one point the water started lapping at the stairs to the hall – there was a moment we thought it would flood the centre too.
The next day the flood waters went down and my friends picked me up. Over the next few days we drove around to other towns checking on people, dropping off donations and helping people clear their houses out. I was still traumatised – I had so much adrenaline running through me.
I always thought the government would step in when there was a disaster but there was nothing. It was all people from the community helping each other out. I saw oil spills and cattle lying all bloated by the side of the road a week later. My story isn’t even that harrowing compared to what some people went through. Some communities were still cut off six days after the floods.
Many towns in the Northern Rivers are planned around flooding but no one had seen anything like what we experienced this year. It’s definitely driven by climate change. My family went through the bushfires on the south coast a few years ago.
If climate change continues to get worse we’re going to have nowhere safe to live and our communities will be devastated. The government has a responsibility to put measures in place to make sure all Australians are safe and protected from climate change.
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We have spent a summer trapped in our home with heatwave after heatwave hitting our city in the longest and hottest summer of my lifetime (and indeed the city’s lifetime). I have had to stop my three year old son playing outside day after day and we have all had to stay in the same room as it is the only air conditioned one. Summer used to be a time of fun, of outdoor barbecues for dinner, of freedom. Now it has a feeling of containment and dread. My job requires me to confront climate issues and victims of bushfire and other disasters and their experiences and the flood of climate information leave me feeling deep grief, distress and helplessness. My little son loves animals passionately and i dread the day I will have to tell him about climate change and about how so many of the creatures that inspire him are threatened by mankind’s very existence. I fear he will grow into an adult in a time of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, in a country weakened economically and fragmented socially by these disasters. That by the time he grows up the Great Barrier Reef we describe to him will be dead and gone. Having him despite my fear for his future was an act of hope and defiance, but that hope is hard to maintain when our governments will seemingly not act to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with renewables with the speed that will give my beautiful child the bright future he deserves. I hope and pray that this case changes the situation. And I thank these elders for bringing this action.
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