“I’ve lived here in Parade St, Lismore since 1952. I arrived into the world on Christmas Eve and grew up in Lismore. I went to East Lismore Primary and Lismore High School. In 1970 I started work with Northern Rivers Electricity and I stayed with them for 25 years. Lee and I went travelling for 10 years in a caravan and returned to Lismore to look after my parents for a while.
In 2007 I bought my sisters share of the house and Lee and I have done it up ever since and made it into a lovely home. You can’t beat East Lismore. We have our shopping centre, the golf club, walk to town in 20 minutes or ride our bikes in 6. We have friendly neighbours around the hill. It’s an area I know well.
My father was involved in the Civil Defence Unit during the 1954 flood. They got hold of a timber rowing boat and they rowed around helping people. After that Dad became more involved with the Civil Defence and his mate was the Regional Controller. They got hold of a 2 way radio which was pretty exciting. It was a huge lump of a thing and they always said ‘over and out’ and all that stuff (laughs). It was like Biggles. It was only 7 years after WW2, they’d all just come home.
Dad was a document freak and kept every record he ever found so he kept newspaper cuttings, particularly flood stuff, which I still have now. The Northern Star story from 1948 on the world worst flood here and how the locals helped everybody. It’s deja vu because we are still doing it the same. Gradually the SES moved out of town. Dad kept collecting his papers and we’d sit here and go through the flood stories. Lee went to Goonellabah so it didn’t worry her much but I was down here. We’d ride surfboards and boogie boards from where BBQ’s galore is right down to where the traffic lights were at the Dawson and Uralba St intersection. It was just fabulous as a kid. Every year you’d get at least 2 days off school, if you were lucky and if we got another flood you’d get 3. The flooding has always been here.
When I worked for the NRE I started in Grafton, Casino and then Lismore and we were always fighting with floods. We were constantly bogged because in those days everything was wet just like it is now and we only had 2WD trucks which sunk to their axels. Gradually it dried up and it dried up for about 30 years I reckon, with the odd flood in between. We got to know the area well because we were travelling around putting power lines up and talking to the farmers in every area. That was great because we gained all the local knowledge. How to get from one place to another without going through flood waters.
During those floods everyone would ring us here in East Lismore, and ask if our house was ok. We would always be ok as we were above the high tide of the biggest flood. Over the years after watching the SES and the experts telling us what to do I have been working on a bit of a plan. My idea came about purely because the 2017 flood was a teller. The water in the Wilson River ran backwards right out toward Woodlawn because the Leycester Creek was pushing it. This one in February, 900mls fell on the hills and came down both rivers at once meeting in Lismore so we ended up with a 2 metre swell on top of the incoming tide. I do think the tide isn’t considered. The tide goes up to Boat-harbour and it goes out past Leycester Creek bridge and it’s a big influence on this area.
I think to save Lismore we need to have people living in South Lismore and we need people living anywhere between town and the Base Hospital. They have to be able to stay there and live the way they have done for the last 200 years and the only answer to that is to move Leycester Creek completely, block it off out at the quarry hill a bit further up from where the glowing cross and the Humpty Bridge is on Wilson St, run a complete river down the other side of the airport, under Loftville Bridge and out at Sandy Point. That will solve half of our problem. We will still have flooding but not like we just had. It’s not impossible, it’s not like it has to be engineered by some space cadet. It can be done by a heap of blokes with excavators and big dump trucks to move the dirt around. We could raise South Lismore blocks and put them high and dry above any flood. That would solve Lismore’s immediate urgent flood crisis and be less costly than what they are talking about. People in South Lismore loved where they live. I know people who have moved back there and wouldn’t want to go anywhere else, and also many who want to. There’d be enough fill to build up North Lismore too.
They need to get the water downstream faster before the tide pushes it back up. You could cut off Colemans Point where the greyhound track is and that area is less than 100 yards. They could do the same thing where the rugby ground is too which would involve a bridge. If you get on the out-running tide from Boat Harbour on a kayak, it’s great! That’s half the reason the ships could come up here and take the cedar away in the early days.
In the 2017 flood I was saying to people down the bottom end of James St, the tide won’t change for another 6 hours and they said, we’ll wait and see. The next thing they were getting rescued in a boat at 7pm that night. The tides are a huge influence. In this last flood the tide changed at 1:20 and instantly the water stopped rising. It’s about 11 hours behind Ballina. If they were serious they’d go down near Coraki where the Wilson River turns to go into Coraki, across the flats to the barrage at Broadwater and you could get the Wilson River gone. If it’s gone then the Kyogle River is kept to itself. The Dutch do it. There would be bridges involved but I still think it would be a lot cheaper in the long run. Without people living in downtown Lismore, the CBD is finished. Most of these areas around here will be.
Down at Coraki where the Wilson River does a big loop, where it meets the Richmond River, at the bend it’s 700mtrs across and it’s such an easy place to dig a trench. Coraki could survive as well. All is possible. They built a 12ft blow up dam, the Fabri dam just south of Woodburn on the Evans River and it stopped the salt water polluting the river further up. They could deflate it when the river was in flood and it worked. The Fabri dam wore out and the experts moved in made a permanent concrete wall and now nothing flows down. They talk about what we can do at Woodburn and that is one thing.
I put a submission into the flood investigating commission and I got a thank-you for my submission. I gave it to our local member and I gave one to our Mayor. I didn’t get any response from either of them which disappointed me about one of them and didn’t surprise me about the other but I don’t think that I’ve managed to get it to the right person with vision for this area. I think Janelle would go for it and also Adam Guise might. We need people who have been directly affected as they both flooded. Janelle walked out of her house up to her neck (which isn’t very deep)… hahaha, don’t put that in. No, whenever I see Janelle she is always very friendly and she does so much for Lismore.
The river was dredged for most of my early life by Boral who had a huge sand barge on the river. They regularly unloaded the barge down near the Wyrallah bridge and they sold the best coarse river sand there is. Lismore lake was a great idea. They seem to stop the little lake because it was free and it was competing with the baths in town. They stopped the skiing on the lake. They had thousands of people come to town and they had enormous ski contests over there. The fella built the motel over there because of the people who came for the skiing. Something happened and he sold it. The next owner didn’t want the noise. Gary Shipway ran a ski school over there for 20 years.
My mate at Ballina lives down toward Kingsford Smith Park and he didn’t have any water. The bloke up the other end of town had next to nothing because he’s near the river mouth which isn’t blocked anymore. They used to have a dredge working the Ballina bar forever. I remember about a year after they stopped dredging it the Australian Navy brought in one of their boats and they ran aground. They always used to be able to get in there but not anymore. There’s strange things that have gone on in a very backward way. Up at Maroochydore they have a permanent pipeline and this barge floats around pumping the sand onto the beaches. You could fill up South Ballina beach and raise the land. If we want to live here we have to interfere a bit. The Dutch did and they did it well and we really could plant lot’s more trees.
Another idea is out on Wyrallah Rd the water comes down around the hill and pushes back up to East Lismore. The area bounded by Skyline Rd and Wyrallah Rd has always been a no-mans land so you scoop that out and turn it into a Lismore lake and use that dirt to build up Wyrallah Rd and make a huge dam wall to keep the river out of East Lismore. It would increase the values of all those properties. I’d also run the wall around the back of the tip and the sewerage farm so that every time we get a big flood we don’t end up with the sewerage flushed all the way through East Lismore. Then they say you have to throw everything out because it’s polluted and toxic. You’d definitely need a pump out there but you don’t want Lismore City Council operating it.(laughs)
Geneva out at Kyogle was a paddock and the bloke who owned it built Lake Geneva out there. He sold those blocks for $100,000 in 1975. Such a great idea.
Lee and I are going to run away from home for a while and when we come back to Lismore we are going to stay with our son and get even for all those years. We are going to use his phone and not pay anything, leave clothes in his washing machine, we will raid the fridge and leave towels on the floor and always leave all the lights on (laughs).
Lismore has the best location. It’s handy to Brisbane, airports, the worlds best beaches all within an hour. We were just down town in Woolies and it was so quiet. It’s because our community from North and South Lismore aren’t here. The lady working there said..’I haven’t seen any of our old customers, they’ve either left the area or shopping at Goonellabah.’ The stores are looking beautiful again but people can’t live in their homes. It’s bloody sad.”