……. 2021/22 summer was WET! on the last day of summer, March 2022, the deluge ended a rain event simply known as the ‘Rain Bomb” … a WMD that destroyed Lismore, much of the Northern Rivers of NSW. My studio collapsed into a landslide that destroyed my site. 3 months later, I have my internet running again and can report some of the destruction that occurred.

Diary Note:

It is a week ago now. The rain had been hammering through the days well months before. 10 sunny days of no rain all through summer. So much water was running off my mountain. I called it early in the day. “Gonna make Debby (a cyclone in 2017) look like a picnic” Then about 3 in the arvo I said “big record breaker”

But I had no idea.

As the evening dimmed the angels tears were so hard there was almost no space between the drops.

Through the night the roof was at about 160db, deafening!!!

Later in the night with no slowing down the cats were all very close to me in my humble, leaky, bush shack. I told them “as long as we make it through the night without a tree falling through the roof, we will be OK”

Living in the sub-tropics one sees some rain, but this surpassed anything by way heaps. Trees were falling around me, unidentified bangs and crashes all around. No shortage of fire wood after this!

In the morning the rain had eased a bit, could not stop thinking about the people down the valley in Lismore. It will be huge. 

It was!!!

On getting up, and with all the crashing through the night I went down to check out how the pottery faired. Walked outside and the multiple tree line behind the pottery was gone. Clear sky.

What the?

Walked into the pottery shed, almost no floor, just a sinking series of muddy holes. It took time to take it all in. Furniture all toppled over. Everything along the back wall, 3 wheels, ball mill, pug mill, ton of clay, bins, tools was all strewn into the big hole that used to be my orchid. The back wall hanging off the rafters like a sorry dirty curtain. I was in shock for the rest of the day as the event sank in. Not knowing what would sink next as the muddy steep banks of the slip ate its way up the hill to the road. Trees continued to fall for days.

So I sit here, now, expecting heavy rain.

The internet seems to be back on a bit. No coms through the week except text messages and even then, patchy. 

The main roads to Kyogle and Lismore were blocked by landslides.

Neither town had fuel or supplies anyway. 

So it has been a hard week, sleeping on a table in a shipping container that I got in 2019 to protect my work from bush fires…

.

……. to be continued.