Floods swamp Australia's south-east corner

Feb 3, 2012, 5:47 GMT

Sydney - The cotton farming town of Moree in Australia's south-east was cut off Friday in the region's worst flooding in more than 30 years.

Overflowing rivers have isolated 10,000 people and prompted a military deployment to drop food aid and pluck people from the roofs of houses and cars.

'As you fly over the centre of the town, there are streets that look like canals that have more relevance to Venice than north-western New South Wales,' the state's premier, Barry O'Farrell, said after flying over Moree and its environs. 'It's an extraordinary landscape.'

Moree is 640 kilometres north-west of Sydney.

The floods came a year after Queensland, the state to the north, was inundated. Dozens died, thousands of homes were swamped and production worth hundreds of millions of dollars was lost at coal mines and farms.

The Bureau of Meteorology said rivers at Moree missed the level seen in a great flood of 1955 but might eclipse those in 1976.

Peter Birch, who farms cotton north of Moree, told the national broadcaster ABC that the floods were affecting the wildlife as well as people.

'We woke up this morning with wallabies, kangaroos, an echidna and a koala sitting in the trees, so I think everything is headed to every little bit of high ground they can,' he said. 'About every 10 minutes, you see a kangaroo swimming down the river.'