Unspeakable

Northern Rivers, 28 February 2022

On the morning of 28 February 2022, much of the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales – the place both authors of this book call home – woke to a landscape that no longer resembled itself. Overnight, entire towns and valleys had been swallowed by water and soil. Streets disappeared under currents that rose to heights few had imagined possible. Hillsides collapsed as a result of thousands of landslides and slips, reshaping the contours of the region in ways that remain visible today. Houses were observed floating away in the strong current. Cows were seen on house rooftops, carried there by surging waters. Small planes were found upside down. What had stood firm for decades gave way in a matter of hours.

The disruption was total. Roads were cut across the region, including the highway that carries most of the food, medicine, and supplies into the Northern Rivers. Supermarket shelves emptied within a day and stayed that way, in some places, for months. Power failed. Telecommunications were cut. Potable water ran short. Emergency services were immediately overwhelmed. Depots belonging to the State Emergency Services – the agency responsible for leading flood response – as well as fire and police stations were underwater. Hospitals and medical centres were inaccessible. Schools and workplaces closed, some indefinitely. Banks could barely operate; cash machines were dead. Some communities were cut off for days, others for weeks. For many, the outside world simply vanished.

The psychological shock of all this was immediate and profound – compounded by a second major flood only weeks later. Some residents lost their homes and/or livelihoods in the space of a single night; others lost neighbours, friends, or the landscapes that defined their sense of place. Yet even those untouched physically carried the imprint of the event – a collective jolt that rippled across the region. No one was spared the grief or disorientation that followed. The scale of loss, and the speed of it, unsettled our sense of safety and permanence in ways that continue to linger.

And yet, in the absence of functioning institutions, something extraordinary happened. In dozens of isolated pockets across the Northern Rivers, communities mobilised spontaneously. People who had never spoken to each other before, climbed into tinnies and kayaks, launched private boats, flew helicopters to evacuate people or drop goods, used tractors and machinery to reopen rural roads, improvised rope bridges, and went street by street to pull people from rooftops and out of attics. Rescue efforts unfolded from verandas, school ovals, community halls, car parks, makeshift helipads – anywhere dry ground could be found.

As the floodwater slowly receded, the response only grew. Donations poured in from across the region and beyond. Spontaneous community hubs formed, with people organising food distribution, cleaning crews, welfare checks, emergency accommodation, animal rescues, medication runs, and the clearing of unimaginable volumes of debris and mud. These hubs meshed with neighbourhood centres, community halls, and local councils, creating a decentralised yet remarkably coordinated response that carried many communities through the early months.

The trauma was deep and remains so. But the community response – its speed, its organisation, its sheer determination – was nothing less than astonishing.

Both authors of this book were involved in these efforts: as residents, as neighbours, as a firefighter, as people who led when needed and followed when someone else knew better. The experience was shattering, illuminating, and transformative. It revealed not only the fragility of the systems we rely on, but also the depth of collective care that remains possible, even amid devastation.

Our own response was shaped in part by prior experience. One of us, Jean Renouf, had previously worked internationally in disaster and conflict zones, and in 2019 founded Plan C (‘our plan is the community’), a not-for-profit dedicated to strengthening community resilience, precisely because we anticipated that large-scale, cascading disasters – climatic, social, economic – would arrive in our region before our institutions were ready. We were acutely aware of the climate science, systemic risk, institutional fragility, and the urgent need to strengthen community resilience.

And still: the shock of 2022 got deep into our bones.

Despite our awareness, training, and experience, nothing buffered us from the trauma that followed – the exhaustion, the burnout, the grief for what was lost and what might still be lost. We witnessed firsthand the trauma etched on the faces of friends and acquaintances whose homes were caked in toxic mud, or who attended a free counselling service soon after the tragedy. We saw the tears, the anguish, the bewilderment, and shock – feelings viscerally familiar to us. We felt what thousands of others felt: the disorientation of realising that the systems meant to protect us could be washed away overnight. The realisation that – ‘this is it’, this is climate disruption in full view – a scenario of disaster that will reoccur many times, in worse ways, for the rest of our lives.

But we also witnessed something else: a communal spirit emerging from the chaos, a clearer picture of what must be done, what is possible, and what communities can build when they no longer have the luxury of waiting.