LIVING WATER: visits [streams of reconnection]
visit 4 - Adam and the water hole
I reckon we’d been living here about a year before I put a foot in the water and then I was like, why didn’t I do this before? I just drove back and forth and don’t notice it and then, as you know well, it became such a close part of our Winter Solstice ceremony. Not just that bravado of going in the cold water, but the idea of this is what we do, we wash away the old year ready for the new. … Sometimes I go we’re so lucky we’ve got somewhere to swim, yes there are times when its muddy and you don’t go in, or its too fast flowing … but it’s like: I can walk the bin out and go for a quick swim, I can check the mail, go for a quick swim, and that bit’s really lovely. And part of me feels like I should do that, it kind of feels like I went a whole year without ever setting foot in that water and it wasn’t until people visited on a really hot day and put their kids in the creek that I kind of went – Of course, we’ve got a swimming hole! We’ve got a swimming hole that should be used, why am I not using this? Why am I not getting cold, going for a swim? And just that feeling of being in water, how different it makes you feel having just been in the water for 5 minutes and then getting out and I go on with my day. Yeah. Something very special about that.
And I think the fact that we swim in it puts more detail into that relationship with it too, because you know how much rain it takes to make the water cloudy. Often it will rain, and the water is still crystal clear, and then you’ll get big dumps of rain that washes lots of soil and stirs things up, and you watch, and you wait, and you see it start to settle before you start swimming in it again. And I really like that. And now we do use it a lot more, and come down and play and swim in it, particularly with [our granddaughter] Asta. Before she got confident swimming, she would look at me and she’d nearly always go,” can we go down to the creek?” And I’d go “sure”. And the canoe would be down there, and she’d say: “And I will be the pirate queen and you will be …” and there’d be all these elaborate games as I’d be paddling up and down. Now she’s confident to just jump in and swim around which is great. And she loves playing in the mud, she made a little sculpture of my head, it was bald funnily enough, with sticks and stones for facial features “Poppy look, it’s you!” It’s nice to watch that change in her relationship with it. More recently we’ve had birds in the creek that we’ve not had before. Baby swamp hens and pied cormorants. There’s been one going up and down the creek, that’s a bit strange. They do go inland, but I didn’t know they come this far inland to such a small creek.
I remember, on the Friday the forecast was pretty high, and I moved things up to where I thought was above the flood level, I tied the canoe to that shed and the kayak to that casuarina, And then Saturday it upgraded, I think by that point we were already cut off. It was like, they’re gonna go, that will be under water. But when we canoed across the next day they were still there, it was really lucky, just a paddle had washed out, and we got it back, and that was so lovely ... It’s such a mixed feeling, we kind of go “this is what it is” ... but that flood, just looking at how much water there was … this is so much worse than 2017 … please let people be ok … it was just heartbreaking knowing that you can’t actually do anything … We’re stuck where we are. We’re ok, we’re fine, the power had gone which doesn’t normally go out, but that’s fine we’ve got loads of camping stuff, we’re good at being adaptable. But knowing how bad things might look in town and not being able to do anything about it ... Our kids couldn’t get in contact this time cause the phones had gone out, and that really panicked them as well. They were going “Mum and Dad are never not contactable” The only way we could get service was to get raincoats on, and the track was like a creek running down it. But we had to get right to the top and climb over the fence to the plateau to send our messages, and even then it was really patchy. And you sit there and go, this magnitude is so much more … you feel so helpless. It’s hard to imagine it when you’re out on a day like this, it’s the nature of it, it changes.
Knowing the way Karen’s brain works, I really loved that one of the initial responses was: butchers’ paper, 3 columns: What have we got? What are the deficits? What do we need? Initially we used to think, what’s the longest we’ve been flooded in? 3 days? Maybe we should look at a couple of weeks. That realisation was quite liberating, to plan as if no- one’s coming, as if there’s not a solution for this other than the one that you make. I think the activist space does make you feel slightly more hopeful, the community got rid of the fracking risk in Bentley, and the fact that it did, we felt a little tiny, glimmer of hope. So maybe the CSIRO report will want to plant 20 million trees as part of its multi-faceted solution. Maybe we’ll live in a region that’s just got corridors of forest so the community go, look how much more beautiful the Northern Rivers is. We’re looking at all these different ways of living with this water and what it brings, we can’t manage without it and we struggle sometimes with it. I feel like our relationship to this water has changed my opinion about protestors. Being here and listening to our own children and to other activists, you go, there are plenty of good people like that who care. I’m really grateful. You’ve been impacted by this so much that you are going to risk such an unpleasant experience because you believe this is important. If human beings are one thing, I feel like living in a town that floods, has reinforced that feeling I had, that hard times brings out the best in people.