“The river came up to right where we’re sitting, and the waters were more than two feet deep,” Peter Goodwin tells me in the driveway of his ranch-style house perched on the banks of the Balonne River in St. George, a village of 3,500 in eastern Australia. It is a drizzly Sunday afternoon in April, three months after a devastating flood that drenched a landmass the size of France and Germany combined and isolated the town after the rain-swollen river rose to a record 45 feet.
Agricultural areas like St. George were hardest hit by the relentless rains and overflowing rivers that swamped roads, cut off power lines, washed away vineyards and fruit orchards, drowned thousands of head of cattle and other livestock, and covered homes and everything inside them in thick layers of sediment and mud. Shell-shocked residents are still digging out from under the debris.
“That’s the hard part of the flood—the aftermath,” says Goodwin, 60, a crusty, compactly built man with piercing blue eyes and calloused hands who works as an operations manager for the local municipality and has been staying with his grown daughter while he makes his home habitable again. “You get a lot of help during the flood, but then everyone settles back into their routine. There are a lot of houses down there that are still empty,” he adds, gesturing toward the riverbank. “And they will be for a long time to come.”
Everywhere I travel down under, the stoic Aussies are industriously patching together their shattered country, which has been walloped by one weather-related disaster after another. On an overcast Monday morning, I’m 200 miles east of St. George, cruising toward Brisbane, a sophisticated coastal city of more than 2 million, when I hit traffic that’s backed up for miles on the two-lane blacktop that crosses Cunningham’s Gap. Construction crews are still repairing the flood-related destruction on this highway and other roads throughout much of eastern Australia. A line of passenger cars, along with the brawny pickups favored in rural areas and the aptly named “road trains”—the double-trailer 16-wheelers that ferry cotton, apples, grapes, peaches, pears, and other produce to the coastal cities—inch down the steep grade, stuck in the kind of slow-motion gridlock that would normally send tempers flaring and horns blaring. After almost an hour in that slowdown, steam is coming out of my ears, but the other drivers seem to accept the jammed roads with a remarkable equanimity, looking upon them as simply another step in the process of recovery.
Australia has always been a country of climate extremes, but lately the swings of wet and dry have been shockingly intense. Weeks of torrential rains at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 (summertime down under) created tsunami-like waters that covered most of the province of Queensland. Then in mid-January, a cloudburst from a freak storm caused the Brisbane River to overflow its banks. A surging wall of water gushed through the pocket parks and tree-lined streets of downtown Brisbane, saturating trendy boutiques, stately government buildings, and gleaming glass skyscrapers.
