Julie Johnson, who ran the community recovery centre, and local Chris Short at Grantham's memorial monument yesterday, in front of the railway bridge. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen
ON this day last year, the first anniversary of the disastrous floods in the Lockyer Valley in which 22 people were swept to their deaths by a gushing torrent, the nation came to mourn with the locals.
In the small town of Grantham, which was worst hit by the floods, Governor-General Quentin Bryce, then Queensland premier Anna Bligh and opposition leader Campbell Newman, state Governor Penny Wensley, Lockyer Mayor Steve Jones, plus all the military leaders who had helped to clean up the town, were on a specially constructed stage with carpets and tents below.
But it is an indication of the change in attitude among those whose properties were flooded and some of whom lost neighbours or family members, that this year Grantham will remember alone. There will be no official ceremony, but locals will gather late this afternoon at the memorial in the town's park for a short service, followed by a community meal. It will be just them -- no politicians, no dignitaries, no outsiders. And that's the way they want it.
"I can understand that last year there was a need for a ceremony, but this year it's all about us as a community," says Julie Johnson, who ran the community recovery centre at Grantham until mid-2012. She keeps track of as many people as possible who were there on that fateful day two years ago.
"This is just us -- no media, no politicians, no outsiders," says Johnson. "Some of us feel that we've been burned a bit -- you know, the stuff about greedy Grantham, people not moving on, all of that. The reality is that while there are some people who I don't think will ever move on, most of us are now getting on with our lives.
"But something like that never leaves you."
Exactly two years ago, the ground in the Lockyer Valley and up on the Darling Downs was saturated after several weeks of heavy rain, so when an even heavier storm swept through, depositing up to 200mm of rain in an hour, there was nowhere for the water to go but down.
Toowoomba, on top of the range, became an unlikely flood scene -- it's the equivalent of Katoomba or the Dandenong Ranges flooding. Three people were killed by the floodwaters there. Toowoomba is a substantial city and news of the flood there got out to the wider world quickly, but it wasn't really until the next day that the full extent of the drama in the valley below became clear.
There were 22 fatalities altogether, and the largest concentration was at Grantham, which is in the middle of a flood plain but, like many small towns in Australia, is built at the junction of two creeks.
There had been floods in the past, but that generally meant the water in the creeks burst its banks and spilled on to the main road.
What happened two years ago was completely different as a wall of water -- not pristine white but like a colossal brown milkshake, bubbly brown and carrying debris -- came down the valley.
After two years, the most conspicuous sign of the new Grantham is the housing estate up on the hill, which now has about 30 houses -- mostly brand new but including some old ones that have been relocated and restumped. Most are freshly occupied.
Grantham has a relatively stable population, with no great reason to move there -- but once you are there, no great reason to move away.
It has very few young families; since the flood, they've been the ones who've left. It's either retired people or those with long-term jobs who have stayed.
Rob Gordon, a clinical psychologist who is a consultant for the Red Cross and specialises in trauma counselling, travelled to the Lockyer Valley, including Grantham, after the event and has visited the area several times since. He has also been involved in the recovery after other major disasters, including the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria four years ago. He says that often in the first year after a traumatic event such as the Grantham floods, most people concentrate on re-establishing their daily routines; plus they also have to deal with various bureaucracies as they work to rebuild their lives. "But often in the second year . . . you can build what they're calling in Black Saturday (areas) 'the new normality'. The first year is when you're busy coping with all the drama of rebuilding, but the second year is when you get back to thinking about how to get on with your life," he says.
However, Gordon says another pattern is that when people become more settled into a new routine, there is often a revival of the trauma, only felt differently.
"If they move into a new house, and that's what a lot of people at Grantham have done, then they can start to feel a sense of calmness, but it also often brings back the trauma, as this is so different from it. But really, it's very hard to get a handle on how a community recovers. Each individual varies in their feelings and views."
Roy Abraham, 62, an odd-jobs man, started this day two years ago the way he started any day at Grantham, looking out of the window to see what the weather was like. It seemed they were in for yet another wet spell.
"But I finished the day on the roof of the pub, floodwaters all around us, saying goodbye to the other blokes up there because we were all certain we were going to die. We all said a little prayer. My wife was on the roof of our house. I didn't see her for eight days. All this water kept rising and we knew that other people had been carried away in the waters. You don't get over that quickly," he says.
He knew eight people who lost their lives. His house was relatively undamaged, but his sheds and birdcages were wiped out.
He admits that some nights he doesn't sleep well "and there's the odd nightmare -- I'll probably have them for the rest of my life". But as a no-nonsense, old Australian type, he's pushed on with his life, trying to get back to the sort of life he had before the flood.
One of the oddest parts of the disaster, he recalls, was when he had to go to the council to identify his birds, which had been in the aviaries before they got washed away. "I knew the birds were mine because of the bands on their legs."
His neighbour Kel Wood, a welder whose skills were in great demand in the post-flood period, recalls meeting ABC journalist Paul Lockyer three days after the flood. "He said to me, 'You reckon this is bad? Brace yourself for the bureaucrats.' He was right.
"We had all sorts of people who had no life skills telling you what to do. I had people walking through my yard telling me I couldn't rebuild because they had to check for asbestos. My house was built in 1996. Of course it was OK.
"Then I had to sign indemnity forms, and we had people coming around asking us to fill in more forms for the premier's fund. Some days we had several forms to fill in and sign. I tend to keep my head down and work away, and didn't want a part of any of this at all."
To emphasise that everyone's different, he claims to have no nightmares or ongoing traumas. "None of the event left a mark on me at all. I guess I've always been pretty resilient in that way. But really, we've had big floods in the past in Australia, and everyone's got through them.
"We had floods like this 50 years ago, 100 years ago -- what happened then is that everyone just mucked in and fixed it all up. Why couldn't we do that now?"
What everyone in Grantham recognises is that the disaster has changed relationships in the town. In the first year there was considerable resentment that some people had got more than others in the rebuilding.
One local who didn't want to be named -- "I have to live in this town" -- says, "There were a few people who were lining up for every charity going who weren't too badly off, and there were a lot more worse off, and that's changed my opinion of them."
But Julie Johnson says that on the whole people are feeling more positive about each other. "There were a few instances where neighbours didn't talk to each other, but after they went through the floods, they decided they weren't too bad after all," she says.
Johnson lived in Brisbane for most of her life. She and her husband bought a small farm in Grantham and started going there on weekends, before moving there more permanently a few years ago. She had no background as a health or social worker, yet was cast into the role after the floods, when she ran the community centre.
The centre was closed down last year for practical reasons -- the main being that welfare organisations still active in the town had by that stage formed their own networks -- but also because it was associated too much with the negatives.
"People associated it with the floods, and if you wanted help that's where you went," says Johnson. "But what we're trying to do now is encourage people to take more responsibility themselves and start looking to the future."
Lockyer Mayor Steve Jones, who is not at all offended by not being asked to officiate at formal ceremonies and strongly supports the notion of low-key, small remembrance services, says most of the community is proud of what has been achieved in the rebuilding and wished to commemorate the occasion together.
"But all through the region -- and this is especially true of Grantham -- in the past 12 months, people have moved from a dependency situation to one where they have some control over what they're doing. It's a move back to individuals.
"Having the community centres, all those community meetings -- fantastic in the short term, but you've got to move to a different stage. The big thing for many . . . was moving into their own house in a safe part of town."
Chris Short, who ran a service station in town, says most people are looking to the future.
"With that wave came a new soil," he says.
Time is a great healer, but no one hedges around the fact that there are still a lot of angry townspeople. Johnson says some will never quite get over what was an incredibly traumatic event.
Gordon, who has counselled a lot of them either face-to-face or over the phone, says the anger will remain with some for years.
Not surprisingly, the people who lost family are generally the angriest. "For a lot of these people there's enormous grief, and that grief often expresses itself as anger. When people move into that state of anger, they blame someone for the situation, usually the government.
"The only way that governments can get better at disasters is if we have one every two years, so they can practise more. But there are always a lot of complaints about things not working right."
Grantham still carries its physical scars. There are an abnormally large number of partially built houses, gaps where houses used to be, and some houses with tarpaulins still on them. Yellow tape on houses indicates they are still being checked for asbestos. But the situation is getting better.
But for many in the community, the level of psychological scarring is similar: it is considerably less than last year, but still there, and being felt differently. And unlike the physical scars, they will never really go away.
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