Flooding in Australia

If you've been watching the news you'll know a lot of the eastern states of Australia - Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria - have spent the last week being deluged with massive amounts of rain.

After a decade or more of drought, it was finally good to see the land being restored by revitalising rain. I've been living in my area for almost 20 years and this is the best I've seen it in that time.

But now a slow moving pressure system has deluged my area with over 7 inches of rain in less that 4 days creating almost record height flooding. And I suspect, looking at the long range forecast, there is more to come.

Bumper wheat, cotton and canola crops are now rotting and perishing in sodden paddocks, if they haven't been washed away. Roads are being lifted and eroded by flood water. People are being evacuated from towns and villages. Local councils will soon need to apply for disaster funding to repair the damage. Heartbreaking stories are airing on the local news.

Mother Nature continues to amaze, inspire and devastate me at what she's capable of. It reminds me of the Dorothea McKellar poem My Country.

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.


An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Our local SES volunteers monitoring the creek height