The Beige Flood

Billy Connolly talks of his fear that the planet will be taken over by the "beige people", the bean counters and the petty politicians. Sometimes I think his fear is well founded and more often I think it is too late.

It is a theme that is touched on in this wonderfully observed and beautifully written account of the Toowoomba flood.

Beautiful one day, a terrible flood plain the next Heather Brown From: The Australian January 12, 2011
WHAT happened to this city of mine?
Never mind the inland tsunami, the bloody, muddy water or the smashed up shops, the pretty plastic cars piled up like a B-grade movie set or the dreadful grainy-graphic images of cars crashing down on trees and trees crashing down on men.
As soon as the water had cleared, the sun disappeared and a bleak heavy fog settled on the city for the night. And, for a moment, we found ourselves wandering through a shocked and silent landscape that seemed straight from another man's war.

How did this happen in a wealthy city, famous for its gardens, sitting sweetly on the edge of the Great Dividing Range, a place so safe and so far from floods?
There are no soupy coastal flood plains around here, no ruthless moods of the tides, no bitter curses of outback isolation. Toowoomba has 90,000 people, a strong economy, neat city pavements, fashionable shopfronts and even pink seduction roses in the streets.

I am forced to ask these questions, the same as every other person has asked who has contacted me since the phones started to ring at daylight yesterday morning. Because what happened in Toowoomba on an ordinary Monday afternoon in January simply doesn't make sense.
I came to live in Toowoomba 10 years ago, married a local vet and took up life running a thoroughbred farm 14km west of the city. Before that, however, I had been a senior journalist for this newspaper and covered various disasters and big events across Australia for many years.
More significantly, perhaps, I came from a cattle station near Julia Creek in far northwest Queensland and grew up on the broad, muscular shoulders of the Flinders River, the southernmost of all the great Gulf country rivers. So I knew a bit about floods.

We had been evacuated by the RAAF in 1974 after it rained for 40 days and 40 nights; we lost half of our cattle and sheep, and then came home to start all over again. My family had been in the north since the earliest days of the last century: we grew up close to the land, understood its rhythms and knew what it took to survive.
Tragically, it seems some of the most basic rules of survival - and certainly the most elementary rule of town planning - were forgotten in the case of Toowoomba, a city that is dissected by East Creek and West Creek, two deceptively innocent looking little creeks that seem to run as much water as a decent suburban gutter for most of the year.

Admittedly, Toowoomba - Australia's Garden City - has been battling drought for almost a decade. It was the city that achieved national notoriety by voting against recycled water, remember, so its residents might be forgiven for having forgotten what rain really looked like. Along the way, the creeks have been prettied and preened and slotted into your typical modern urban plan. And the breadth of their flow - and their seminal right to a small flood plain - has been gradually stolen away.
At the intersections of Victoria, Margaret and Russell streets - where the boiling muddy tsunami was its fiercest and most graphically filmed - the city council had embarked on an ambitious beautification plan to turn the creek into a pleasing urban feature, complete with boardwalks, gardens, illumination and seating. Everyone thought it was wonderful, except for cynics such as my husband and me. In fact, every time we drove past the feature we would say to no one in particular: This little creek is going to make them sorry one day. Tragically, we were right.

Early yesterday morning I went back to the bruised and battered Margaret Street to support any local business that still had the heart to open. My coffee shop was handing out free coffees to the battered owners of the local businesses who had lost so much. When I went to buy my newspaper, the newsagent told me he was devastated, not because of what had happened but because the engineer who had worked on the beautification project told him he couldn't make them listen when he pleaded for bigger pipes - "18-footers" he called them - to let the water through, because it simply didn't suit the aesthetics of the architects and landscapers.
So that's what happened to my city, folks, the same as happened to so much of flooded Queensland. We did stupid and really, really dumb things because we thought we could get away with them. We built the wrong sort of houses and the wrong sort of bridges. We built towns and suburbs on flood plains. And we ignored at our peril the forces of nature and the history of the great floods that have shaped this continent for thousands of years.

In our arrogance, we created towns and cities better suited to the whims of bean-counters and city-bound architects than the natural lie of the land. And for 20 years we cheerfully welcomed new settlers to Queensland with a "beautiful one day, perfect the next".
We didn't tell them what this place was really like when it rained. And we were wrong.

Heather Brown is a resident of Toowoomba and a former journalist with News Limited.