So Brisbane CBD more or less disappeared under the Brisbane river. Lindsey's friend Myra posted photos on Facebook of the views of the river from her place, showing the fortunes of the riverside park bench which slowly vanished and then later reappeared again. Who knew there was a walking path by the park bench!!!! The ABC showed the former Prime Minster and now Foreign Minister helping people in his corner of the world move their belongings to higher ground. ("We live up the hill there. If we get flooded then we're all buggered," said he).
The rains moved their way, slowly, slowly across most of the rest of Australia, leaving only Western Australia, as far as I could tell, dry. And they had their (smaller, I think) problems with scrub fires.
And now Victoria is flooded. The Wimmera (poor, poor Horsham); Halls Gap; Beaufort; Skipton; Quambatook; other places all known to me. And I'm told Jeparit is under threat. Who would expect tiny, desert-side Jeparit to be flooded?
Ross and I lived in Jeparit for three years in the early 80s. When we left, Ross flatly refused to let me put paper covers over the signs on the three main road routes into the township saying "Abandon hope all ye who enter here". But I did leave, after three not entirely happy years, metaphorically and biblically wiping the dust from my feet and vowing never, ever to go back there again. Since then I have hardly thought about it. Just in the occasional, dusty dream and vaguely, from time to time, in amorphous and cloudy ways.
Until recently, when Ian G happened to find himself in Jeparit and in a moment of idleness went hunting for the manse. Couldn't find it. Reported this to me. I went hunting on Google Maps' street view and found what I thought was almost certainly the manse, pretty much where we had left it in the January of 1985. Off I trundled for a stroll around Jeparit - on street view, not via a quick tardis trip to the township. Nothing much seemed to have changed. Even the Post Office is still in place, which is more than can be said for rural Post Offices hereabouts. I began to form a small plan for a quick visit to the area. After all, January 1985 is a long, long time ago. No one would be likely to recognise me (I could wear a wheat bag over my head to make sure :-D ). And The Builder hasn't ever been there. As far as I am aware he hasn't been to the Wimmera at all. We could make a quick trip up in February, stay in Nhill overnight, have a potter around, suss things out, pick up Halls Gap on the way back. All seemed fairly safe.
I think the Wimmera floods might be my fault :-S I have a feeling that the Weather Dogs heard my vague plans and decided to save me from myself. After all, places that have been comprehensively flooded are unlikely to welcome wheat bag wearing tourists a mere matter of weeks later. Sorry :-(
(As a side thought - I do remember waking up one morning in around 1984, after the drought of the early 80s had broken, and thinking that the river was looking particularly pretty that morning. A slight double take later, I remembered that you couldn't actually see the river from our kitchen, and I went out to investigate, and found that the swollen river had moved out over the river flats and formed a very pretty and definitely temporary lake. But it didn't come into the town and made for a rather nice contrast to the previous year when we had had ferocious fires in South Australia which had blown smoke, ashes and huge mountains of dust across the township and enveloped us in an apocalyptic darkness for several days. The soil from our vegetable garden more or less blew to my parents' place on the edge of Melbourne, about 200 miles away).
But enough of this historical retrospection. We probably won't go to Jeparit in February. Maybe next time.
In the meantime, back in the Yook, our wintry weather has abruptly returned to what had passed for normal over the decade or so prior to the past three winters. The temperature has gone up and got noticeably milder. The clouds have gathered. We have reverted to the mild, grey, gloomy damp winter weather that we had when I first arrived. I might almost prefer the snowy, freezing blue skies and sunshine, except that this is much, much easier to move around in. And the chooks very much prefer it. They don't care about the rain. But they really, really do care about the snow and ice. They hate it with a hatred to thwart all previous hatreds!!!
At least we are not flooded. Well, not yet
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