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Alter live years ol on-and-oll drought, eastern Australia is
now
adding
up
the cost ol recorcJ-breaking floods. In the
last months ol 1970, continualllooding plagued the Murray
River system in the southern New South Wales Riverina
orea-
a region nearly devastatecJ by the 1967-68 drought .
But this llood and drought were only a prelude to the havoc
wreakecJ by the deluge ol January ancJ February 1971.
Our
Australian Editorial Stall reports
on
the disaster that
sorne
estimate will
cost
Australia as much
as
$7 00
miliion .
Sydney
I
F
THERE'S one thing Australian
farmers and ranchcrs don't secm to
get any more- it's gentle rain in
due season. For Australians it's too
often either flood or drought. In the
October-November, 1970 PLAIN
TRUTH we published an artide explain–
ing how Australia was in the throes of
drought.
Tben suddenly - in the months
after - Eastern Australia was battered
by its worst flood in forty years. Thou–
sands of Australians in the three-state
area of Queensland, New South Wales
and Victoria were hit. Before the flood
was over, more than 4,000 square miles
had been progressively inundated. In
sorne places .Booding !asted for fourteen
days.
As rain-swollen rivers made their way
from town to town - at times hitting
severa! regions simultaneously - a
familiar pattern of events repeated itself.
Anatomy of a Flood
Prime farming and grazing lands,
with their immense sheep and cattle
properties and cotton, corn, fodder, seed
oil, and wheat farms were covered by
six-inch- to four-foot-deep water.
In Victoria, five inches of rain fell
one Friday night and swelled the
already overburdened MacAiister,
A
von
and Thompson Rivers until they burst
their banks and flooded thousands of
acres of quality farming land. Commu–
nities and whole towns were cut off by
the flash floods, and pollution threat–
ened to produce epidemic diseases in the
isolated areas.
-
John Foirlo•
&
Sons Lid.
Dr. David S. Wishart, Director of
Agriculture in Victoria, told PLAIN
TRUTH reportees that in Gippsland,
much of the thirty thousand acres sub–
merged in water reappeared with a cov–
ering of from 6 inches to 3 feet of sand.
T he Human Toll
Perhaps the individual stories of
hardship are the most agonizing.
Frank Dampney of Narrabri shut
himself in bis bedroom to escape the
pitiful bleating of his 2,500 sheep as
they floundered in rising floodwaters.
He had herded them onto higher and
higher ground until at last they stood at
bay before the advancing waters -
with nowhere higher to flee. After
twenty years of farming, he was wiped
out in the two hours it took his flock to
drown. Restocking now is impossible.
A
46-year-old farmhand, bis wife
and nine children were forced out of
their Narrabri house by the four-foot
floodwaters that swept through and
destroyed almost everything they owned.
It
was the family's third bout with
natural disaster. In Western Australia
they had survived both a cyclone and an
earthquake. Still the husband pitched in
to help his fellow victims, keeping his
spirits undampened. He quipped to
Sydney Moming Herald
reportees,
"1