Drought and flood bookend life in savage Australia (News Feature)

By Sid Astbury Jan 5, 2011, 8:17 GMT

Sydney - It is at times like these that Australians take comfort in a 1904 poem in which Dorothea Mackellar speaks of droughts and flooding rains being the yin and yang of her beloved country.

Half of Queensland, an area the size of France and Germany combined, is under water and 22 towns just about cut off.

The 75,000 people of Rockhampton are hunkering down for their second catastrophic flood in a decade as the engorged Fitzroy River spills over into their east-coast town.

Barry Moessinger had water lapping at his front door days ago yet was not stressed about what would come when the Fitzroy peaks in the next 48 hours.

'We've been through it before, we've been through a lot of floods,' he said. 'It's part of living here.'

Rockhampton Mayor Brad Carter endorses that frontier spirit, promising whoever will listen that Rockhampton folk will bounce back as quickly as their floorboards will dry.

'It was in November 2009 that we had the worst bushfires in history in this region and this community recovered very quickly,' Carter said.

Just as bushfires rejuvenate the land by getting rid of dead timber, flooding is refilling water storages depleted by a decade of drought.

Geoff Beechey is a boating enthusiast who, like Moessinger, is philosophical about the floods and the attendant power failures that are inevitable if your make your home in Rockhampton.

'I'd trouble with my generator last night and this morning it kicked in and it's working fine,' he said. 'I'm a yachtie, you see, and when you live on a boat you have to be prepared for that sort of thing. This is very similar.'

Cattle farmer Kristy Shaw is another who is stoical about having her life turned upside down by too much rain.

'I grew up down south where it flooded as well and, knowing what happens when floodwaters come in, it's just - you've got to start again, there's nothing, you've just got to start again. It's heartbreaking,' she said.

Lifeline is a charity that helps telephone callers who are going through a hard time. Times are hard at the moment and Queensland's Lifeline coordinator Richard Johnson is fielding lots of calls.

'When people are affected by disaster, they usually go into disbelief at first into what exactly the effects are, but when they're confronted with the reality they can respond in various ways,' he said.

For some, reality can be as cruel as Australia's fires and rains.

Colleen Murphy, who owns a waterlogged cafe in Rockhampton, is well aware that her current predicament might not change.

'This is all I ever wanted to do, have a shop of my own,' Murphy said. 'This flooding could mean bankruptcy for me.'

The Balonne-Condamine River runs through St George, a town of 3,500 people some 500 kilometres from Brisbane. The river is expected to peak next week and deliver worse floods than those that hit the town just last March.

The best-known St George resident is Barnaby Joyce, a member of the federal Parliament.

'The people who could be affected are the ones who were hit hard by the last flood,' Joyce said. 'When it happens the first time, it's a disaster - but it's a disaster you think will happen once in your lifetime.'

But, as Moessinger attests, disasters do happen more than once in a lifetime. He can recall water over the floorboards of his Rockhampton home in the floods of 1954, 1988 and 1991.

'I've heard people say every 17 years, but it's really just when they come, they come.'

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