GOING UNDER

Twelve months ago, the tiny community at Telegraph Point on the mid-north coast of NSW was swamped by a once-in-a century flood. The long, hard work of rebuilding and recovery continues but, for many, life will never be the same.

- SUSAN CHENERY 

There was no warning. No prelude and no precedent. No one was prepared. It came so quickly and with such force. There was heavy rain and then a great wall of water that smashed everything in its path.

The Wilson River, north-west of Port Macquarie, broke its banks at 9am on March 19, 2021. At first it was slow but insistent. Bruce Moffat, a former rescue paramedic who now runs a lawnmowing business, wasn’t too worried. He lives on low-lying land by the river on Hacks Ferry Road near Telegraph Point. “We’re used to floods,” he tells The Weekly. “They come up to the house and yeah, no dramas.” But by 10am it was time to get out – by boat – to his neighbour’s house.

Down the road, Angie Priest had to be towed out by tractor to get to her job as a registered nurse making home visits. Reluctant to get out of bed, her eldest daughter Mikaela, who was living in a caravan on the property with her boyfriend, Connor, decided to stay. “No one ever thought it was going to get as bad as it did,” Mikaela recalls.

By lunchtime, Bruce and his neighbours were sitting on tables, “watching everything float out of the house”. Up in the hills the rain kept pelting down, sending more water their way.

Downriver at the Telegraph Point Sport and Recreation Club, manager Pam McArdle went out to her car in knee-deep water. When she turned around to come back, it was up to her waist. “I realised the flood was coming from the river and moving fast. Within an hour, everything was under – the club, people’s houses.”

A king tide was churning up the river from the coast. Crashing waves hit the new highway where there weren’t enough culverts. The water turned around and returned as backwash, rising and rising with a kind of fury.