Meeanjin (Brisbane) is experiencing Australia’s worst floods in a decade. New Zealand expat Tom Doig reflects on what it’s like to live through the torrents.

“Make sure you don’t rent near the river.”

My mum said that to me late last year, after she had congratulated me on getting a job in Meeanjin. 

But of course, my partner Laura and I wanted to live near the Maiwar Brisbane River. It is a gorgeous looping river, an iconic river, a city-defining river. We wanted to live as near to the Maiwar’s sleepy brown waters as possible, really.

So we left Papaioea Palmerston North and seven weeks ago we moved into a gargantuan eight-building apartment complex in West End, named “Riverpoint”. Outside our second-floor apartment, there was a bike trail that ran alongside the Maiwar. At dawn and dusk, it would be packed with dog walkers, joggers and cyclists all clad in activewear, taking advantage of the slightly cooler air, soaking up the birdcall, the scent of eucalypts and the shimmery watery views.

Then on Thursday, February 24, it started raining. Serious tropical rain. No gusts of wind, no sense of being caught up in a wild storm: just vertical, straight-to-the-point rain, single-minded and extraordinarily heavy. At times it was as if there wasn’t any space between the raindrops. There were warnings – over 200mm fell in a day and people started using the term “rain bomb”. But I could still cycle to work at the University of Queensland, so I did.

On Friday, it kept raining. But I rode to work again, and that night, it only seemed a little bit silly to catch a taxi through the downpour to see a movie, and after that, to get drenched walking 10 minutes down the road to a ramen bar. It wasn’t cold, so being soaked to the bone was more a novelty than anything else.

Saturday morning it was still raining, heavier than ever. It was like some kind of magic bottomless cloud had parked itself directly over the city and was tipping itself out, without ever running out of water. (There was a high-pressure front known as a “blocking high” sitting over New Zealand, stopping the “atmospheric river” over the East coast of Australia from dispersing.)

Even so, we cycled through the deluge to the West End Market. Instead of 150 stalls, there were 150 puddles and just one solitary fruit and vege stand. But that’s all we needed. 

On the way back, the water was up over the high tide mark, over the concrete ledge, creeping onto the grassy verge, lapping at the ankles of the complex’s exercise equipment. It was impressive, although by no means alarming. I had seen flooding like this before, in New Zealand and Australia and Cambodia. I texted my brother, who had been living in Meeanjin near the river 11 years ago, the last time it catastrophically flooded.

“Oh memories …” he wrote back. 

That night, it continued to rain, heavily. Loudly. Consistently. More than 200mm, again. This was the third night in a row of living inside a real-life version of a ‘soothing tropical monsoon’ soundtrack, only it wasn’t soothing anymore. The next morning, we were woken up by a voice coming through our intercom. “Attention residents, the basement carpark is taking on water. If you have a car parked in there, think about moving it now.”

We unlocked our bikes and wheeled them through a lively stream of water. We put on our rain jackets, went outside – and gaped. The river was slowly swallowing the bike path, like a python. There were people everywhere, clutching umbrellas and iPhones, gaping.

Further offshore, the Maiwar wasn’t sleepy anymore. It was ripping along at 10 times its normal speed, carrying barrels, tree trunks, whole pontoons ripped off the moorings of millionaires’ upstream properties. 

As we took pictures of the tops of the exercise equipment, now almost entirely submerged, we got chatting to a 9 News cameraman. He told us he had seen a pontoon washed down the river, with a jetski and a yacht still attached to it.

Back home, the lobby was dark and the lifts weren’t working. Blackout.

We went to the supermarket to buy cans of beans and ice. They were already out of ice. I went to buy some bottled water, but the shelves had been stripped almost bare.

“Oh no,” another customer said through her face mask, “there’s only bougie water left!”

Later that afternoon, I went back down to the carpark; the water was up to my shins. All the cars had gone … except for someone’s silver Mazda. It was sitting there alone in the darkness, water lapping at its doors. I took some creepy footage on my phone: The Blair Witch Carpark. 

I’d never been in a non-stop four-day rain storm before. Since the power was out, we had to keep the doors open to keep the apartment cool, so the noise flooded in. The pounding of the raindrops became more and more oppressive.

I tried to read a book to get back to sleep. But the book I was halfway through, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, was a cli-fi novel about worsening climate breakdown. I lay in bed with my headtorch on, gulping valerian herbal sleeping pills and red wine straight from the bottle, and reading Robinson’s description of an “atmospheric river” hitting Los Angeles, causing city-wide flooding, until all of LA was underwater.

I looked out my front door and saw cars floating down the street on a brown wave about three feet high that covered everything … Everywhere I looked was a big sheet of brown water! … So much water! And brown as hot chocolate. And it was still raining cats and dogs too, so it was hard to see very far, and hard to believe what you could see ..

I took another slug of wine.

… ten million people left stranded on all the high points left sticking out, and no food to speak of … as we were paddling around in our kayaks, people were saying to each other, This whole fucking place is gone! Everything is going to have to be torn out! The entire city of Los Angeles is going to have to be replaced.

It added a new and unwelcome layer to my dread. First there was the crisis – which I was living through. It was stressful and scary, but manageable. I mean, it wasn’t manageable – the city wasn’t managing; people were dying – but it wasn’t Hurricane Katrina. But beyond that immediate threat, lurking around the corner of my mind, was the everpresent prospect of the greater coming crisis. Extreme weather chaos, disaster piled on disaster, mass extinction, complete climate collapse. That time in some some broken future when four days of unprecedented rainfall are immediately followed by four more days of unprecedented rainfall. When the whole of our street is submerged in thick brown floodwater, and the only way out is via kayak – and the river is full of splintered pontoons and petrol and sewage. 

The greater coming crisis – it was always there as a possibility, but usually it seemed like an abstraction. Now that possibility felt distinctly less abstract. I could feel that broken future coming for us.

In four days, 739mm of rain fell. Nearly 75% of Meeanjin’s annual average.

That Monday morning, we emerged blinking and dazed and squinted up at an improbably blue sky. Were things getting back to normal? Laura and I walked out onto Forbes Street – and there was a speedboat floating in the middle of the road, an “Easy Rider” decal on its side.

Checking on the basement, the water was way up the stairs, nearly to the top of the door frame. We got talking to a nice guy who happened to be a civil engineer.

“Don’t go into that water – it’s sewage overflow,” he told us (a day too late, I couldn’t help thinking). “If you’ve got any cuts, you might get hepatitis.”

Suddenly, my left foot felt itchy.

Later in the day I could hear kids below me playing in the sewer water, pushing balls around with sticks. I told them to stop, that it was sewer water; they smiled politely, like I was an uncool reliever teacher, and kept on playing

The next day, I went for a cycle around the city, the bits I could reach. I saw entire ground floors of office furniture being emptied onto the street: : waterlogged bookshelves, computer hard drives, chunks of uprooted astroturf, a forlorn wheelchair. 

I saw a black Hyundai sports car broken down and abandoned, number plates removed wrapped in police tape, sitting in the middle of a closed three-lane bridge like it was late, or early, for a Grand Prix.

I biked 320 vertical metres up Mount Coot-Tha, and from the summit lookout, I saw how Brisbane’s suburbs hugged the river at each and every meandering bend. How full the flood plains were with prestige apartment buildings and millionaire’s houses. They were vulnerable, of course they were.

The traditional owners of this land, the Turrbal and Jagera people, fished on the banks of the Maiwar for 60,000 years. “Meeanjin” means “place of the blue water lilies”. As Margaret Cook notes in A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods, the Turrbal and Jagera people built their camps 14 metres above watercourses, to prevent flood damage. Laura and I had gone to the Invasion Day (not Australia Day) rally on January 26, where one of the speakers told the crowd that their ancestors had warned the 19th-century colonists not to build too close to the river, because the Maiwar flooded all the time. They didn’t listen.

I got chatting to a middle-aged cyclist called Roland, who lived on a steep hill, didn’t get flooded, still had his power on.

“I was here in 2011, and it was worse than this,” he told me. “But in a couple of years, everyone will forget about it again. Developers will keep building luxury riverfront properties, and people will keep paying top dollar for them.”

There were catastrophic “once-a-century” floods in 1974, and again in 2011. These latest ones make it three once-a-century floods in 50 years. And with climate change, the floods are going to keep getting more frequent, more extreme, harder to predict or manage or understand. Zooming right out, most of the world’s cities are built on rivermouths or right on the edges of our now-rising oceans, less than a metre above sea level. Where, in the world, is a sensible place to live in the 2020s?

Laura and I spent the next morning in the basement carpark in our tramping boots, with face masks and inadequate gloves on, trudging through contaminated sludge, helping people empty out their storage cages and make piles of people’s ruined belongings for a tradie in a bobcat to scoop up and dump on the street outside.

The mud was a rich dark chocolatey brown. It smelt like earth and poo and illness, with faint bleach notes.

We picked up ruined photograph albums (“Our Lovely Baby”), ruined bolts of imported Japanese fabric, ruined washing machines, ruined camping gear – you name it, it was ruined. At one point I was hit in the leg by a runaway CD from someone’s ruined CD collection: Deep Forest, World Mix.

The guy tipping out his CDs apologised; he had lost over 300 albums.

I found a child’s Tonka truck, abandoned in the mud, looking not at all up to the task surrounding it.