Over the course of this blog’s eventful life, I’ve mentioned the triumvirate of crises that greeted our arrival in Australia: drought, wildfires and of course pestilence. Now it gives me a certain kind of pleasure to welcome a fourth apocalyptic horseperson as it makes its debut in the posse: floods.
Yup, it’s been raining again. It’s been pouring since Friday, pretty much without surcease: heavy, soaking, continuous precipitation, punctuated by short drizzly periods and stiff winds. Following on the coattails of epochal episodes of drought and fire, this is of course a good thing – but at some point as we approach the end of day 3, you do begin to wonder how much is enough.
You could look at this in a purely analytical way, say by checking on the levels of NSW’s dams. This sensible and sober approach reveals that (as of yesterday), although a few dams and reservoirs are full or even overflowing, 14 of the 19 mentioned are less than half full, with Split Rock dam trailing the pack at a parched 4.7%.
Well may Wikipedia classify poor Split Rock as “a minor ungated concrete-faced rock fill embankment dam” with a volume of just 1,048 cubic metres – I’m betting those who depend on Split Rock for their livelihoods (and I’m thinking fish, frogs, birds and bugs here) would much prefer to see it full. I’m pretty sure they’re feeling a bit concrete-faced themselves at the state of their water supply right now.
So on that basis, let it rain and rain, right? Well, one doesn’t always want to be the fly in the ointment, the princess with the pea, the looker of the gift horse in the mouth, but given a choice, I think we’d take every drop of this wetness if it was perhaps distributed over a little more time – just to give it an opportunity to soak in and minimise the amount lost to runoff.
Still, in the spirit of COVID-19 which requires us to take adversity on the chin and seek whatever silver lining we can, we’ve taken this opportunity to shack up indoors with a glowing fire and Netflix to keep us warm; breadmaking experimentation continues apace and The Boy has just about completed another semester of study from within his dark and pungent cave.
Yesterday, though, it became necessary for occupants of the cottage to perhaps seek a little time in an alternative location. Just a change of scene – you know, perhaps somewhere a little less confining for an hour or so, just to clear the air.
So two of us took off in the car to have a look at the Shoalhaven River. It’s quite a dominant feature of the region and central to its gold-producing heritage. We’ve crossed it a hundred times zooming to and from Canberra, but there’s never been the time to stop and have a good look. Usually it’s a chain of rocky pools, but I was confident the 24-plus hours’ rain would have linked those pools into something more contiguous and the river would be in full flow.
In what turned out to be a brief lull in the downpour, we parked up and plodded down the muddy shore to a large sandbank, kissed by an ominously smooth-flowing broad brown expanse of water. Nearby the high bridge carried desultory traffic to and fro; there was a steady rushing noise further down where the flood was encountering some inconvenient rocks; but other than that, all was quiet. Not a bird, sheep or cow disturbed the stillness.
We snapped a few pics and kicked over a few stones to see if there were any gold nuggets lying about, brought down by the water, and then there was very little else to do. I did contemplate the risk of a huge wall of water sweeping down the valley and carrying us off, pathetically trying to swim, which, while unlikely, is the kind of freak occurrence that kills people because they think it’s unlikely. So we left.
We should have waited – the rain continued unabated all night, occasionally punctuated by lusty gusts of wind, and we awoke to a soggy prospect this morning. Social media is full of reports of floods – including Flood Creek, which is flooding much more copiously than it flooded yesterday. It makes you wonder how it got its name.
Our compendious and expressive language has several old saws that cover this situation – ‘feast or famine’, ‘feast or flood’, ‘it never rains but it pours’ and so on. Shakespeare had a good one (as usual): “when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
It’s pretty likely that the late-breaking news that the local school will be shut tomorrow won’t be seen as any kind of sorrow to the kids granted an unscheduled long weekend. For them it’s more like “come on with the rain, there’s a smile on my face.” Now there’s a silver lining right there.
