My induction into Brisbane's mud army

Yesterday I took the opportunity to finally appease my flood guilt. Most of Brisbane seemed to be back at work and only students, retirees, aspiring non-working creatives, teachers and the unemployed were left behind to volunteer. My good friend Mel Long hadn’t got quite enough of her fair share of the action up in Toowoomba, despite her parent’s roof falling in, so she drove down for the day to do her bit for Brisbane. We slathered on some sunscreen, grabbed our shovels, donned our coveted gumboots and set off in search of a street in need of some help from two muscly, super-fit women. OK, one muscly, super-fit woman…and me.

We eventually stumbled upon a massive cleanup effort in the streets around the University of Queensland in St Lucia, where the water had gone about a metre into the second level of the homes along Sir Fred Schonell Drive. Five days on and some of the streets had not yet drained of water. There were hundreds of volunteers all over the streets, being loosely instructed by scores of guys in Army gear (the real deal who had actually arrived there in tankers, unlike the numerous volunteers who had all rocked up in their camouflage kits like they were auditioning for Saving Private Ryan). We figured out the system pretty quickly - the trucks would roll in, we would grab stuff of the footpath and throw it in the back until it was full, and then move on to the next pile.

Ever the wallflower, Mel got into the spirit and climbed on board the truck a few times, shouting instructions even to the army guys below – I can see now why she makes an excellent Deputy Principal. I almost felt like shouting out “Yes Miss Long!” whenever she doled out instructions from atop her muddy heap. I stayed on the footpath to put my muscle into throwing items like fridges pieces of foam carpet underlay single handedly into the back of the truck. It really was like a war zone and just as dangerous – at one stage I even got hit in the side of the head by a muddy, water sodden mattress being thrown into the truck. Bit of concussion never hurt anyone, and the mud facial really did me the world of good.

I didn’t have too much time to stop and think about all this stuff we were dispensing of like common rubbish, all the artefacts of people’s lives. Some houses didn’t seem to have gotten anything out in time, including their cars, and I wondered what their story was, given we had so much warning that it was coming. Being in an area that houses so many students, I wondered if some of them had gone home for the holidays, not able to get back in time to retrieve even the smallest of items. But of all the things that were discarded in muddy piles on the pavement, rotting in the midday sun, it was the books that really got to me. When the flood waters were rising, I told Dad that if we had to move my furniture out of the garage, all I really cared about getting out was my books and my photo albums. To me at least, furniture is material and replaceable. Books, on the other hand, are not. They often take many years to collect and, to a book lover like me, are almost as sacred as Great Grandma’s fine china. It was heartbreaking to see the streets of St Lucia littered with thousands of sodden, muddy books. From thick medical text books and literary novels to books written in katakana or hiragana or one of the other multitude of Asian languages I have no hope of ever mastering.  

After several hours, I was getting sunburn on my sunburn, had consumed the contents of Wivenhoe Dam in water and had developed muddy cankles. I ate a sausage sizzle from the kind chaps of Westpac who had set up a station for volunteers and I thought – isn’t it funny that it takes a disaster like this to really bring out the best in people? (not mentioning those horrid looters of course). But even after the efforts of all those volunteers and young fit army guys (there really is something to be said for a sweaty, mud covered man in camouflage gear), there is still a very long road ahead to get those streets inhabitable. Driving home afterwards I was amazed to see the truckloads of rubbish being dumped into all of the suburban parks, their intermediary home while they await collection from another truck to take them to the tip. The magnitude of the cleanup effort really hit home. But if it wasn’t for all the volunteers….well, these streets would continue to look like war zones for years to come. As it was, as we headed back to the car, dragging our muddy boots, we commented that if you didn’t look too closely, didn’t notice the waterline on the buildings showing where the water came to or the absence of cars on the roads, didn’t see inside the houses, mistook the mud for just a bit of dirt, you might almost think everything was back to normal already. Thank god for this mob of unskilled, uncomplaining, determined, grotty volunteers – Brisbane’s mud army.  

So now that my flood guilt has been temporarily appeased and I have washed all of the caked mud out of my ear (I hope), surely I can get back to writing my book. I might just have to disconnect the internet and not leave my room until I fly out to the UK next Sunday. Or maybe someone needs to lock the door and slip vegemite cruskits under the door and a garden hose through the window. It might be the only way to finally stop this flood procrastination.