Joanne Moody fell asleep to the sound of steady rain on a tin roof.
When she got out of bed, Moody’s legs – “very unexpectedly” – sank knee-deep in water.
On that night of 25 February, the nearby creek burst its banks and water rose through her corrugated-iron cabin in the woods of Beerwah, near the Glass House Mountains, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.
The events that followed would result in Moody becoming one of the thousands of Queenslanders displaced by widespread flooding – a disaster that’s thrown them at the mercy of a housing market already in the grips of crisis.
It is a crisis that urgently demanded a government response on the magnitude of the one Covid triggered, says the St Vincent de Paul state chief, Kevin Mercer.
Mercer says the charity was seeing several hundred people seek assistance every week – a number he said was growing on a daily basis.
He says his organisation is working on an estimate that 20,000 homes are affected by flooding, over an area that sprawled from Gympie south to the Gold Coast and into New South Wales.
“When you look at it in the context of housing, that’s 20,000 that need housing on top of the 50,000 people we already had on the housing waiting list before the floods.” Mercer says.
“So these things are just compounding into a housing crisis that we already had.”
Mercer says drastic action is needed to give tens of thousands of Queenslanders hope. But more on hope later.
Because last month, as the flood waters swirled around her, Moody was not afforded the luxury of thinking about the long term.
She shoved some valuables on high shelves, grabbed her phone and waded – barefoot through waist-deep water in only the T-shirt and shorts in which she had slept. Even her wallet was left behind.
When she opened the front door, the water gushed in to even higher levels.
Soon, SES volunteers arrived on a boat to rescue Moody and the family who owned the Beerwah property on which she rented.
A whirlwind of events followed. The owner of her property paid for an Airbnb, the proprietor of which donated clothing.
After two nights, the property owner drove Moody 30 minutes up the Bruce Highway to Nambour.
“She left and I was there with a bag of clothes, not quite knowing where to go,” Moody says. “So I rang the homeless line.”
They directed her to a flood evacuation centre, where a charity worker drove her 20 minutes back down the Bruce to another centre at a university in Sippy Downs.
Another night passed and she was driven south again, almost back to Beerwah, to stay at a Landsborough motel, courtesy of Vinnies.
Nothing of much financial value remains at the cabin.
Some possessions could be salvaged. Quilts her mother made, her dad’s old watch – mementoes of parents now passed. The Seagull cherry oak guitar she has lugged around with her for years. Cook books, which helped inspire a career change to cheffing after more than a decade working in child protection. A laptop.
Other belongings are wrecked. Her car. The washing machine and fridge. The laptop charger. Her record collection, including special-edition Pearl Jam and Jeff Buckley albums. Journals and notes from her 47 years of life.
“It was only observational stuff, there wasn’t anything of great, Nobel prize-winning literature,” Moody says. “In a way it was refreshing, to wipe the slate clean.”
Moody is similarly philosophical about the institutional response to the flood.
She received a text with a general flood warning, but the rain fell inconsistently in the days prior. So when Moody went to bed that night, she was totally unprepared for the life-threatening situation to which she would wake.
The speed at which the SES responded was “pretty impressive”. The neighbours, “God love ’em”, provided a hot shower and a cuppa.
“In that emergency stage of a flood, people respond to what people need immediately: food, water, clothing,” she says.
“Clothes are definitely not a problem in a flood, let me tell ya.”
But despite everything she has already been through, the greatest uncertainties for Moody lie ahead. She is in motel room, paid for less than a fortnight.
“I’m not too sure what will happen after that,” she says. “I’m looking for properties but nothing has come up yet.”
Others displaced by the floods are relying on family or friends for emergency accommodation.
The Queensland Reconstruction Authority says it finished this week assessing 16,500 homes and commercial buildings, of which nearly half were flood-affected.
The number of people affected, however, is likely to be higher than the number of homes.
Ellen Loeffel, 25, and her doberman, Xena, are now living downstairs in a friend’s Queenslander in Brisbane’s inner-northern suburb of Albion.
She too speaks about the rapidity with which her life changed. For her it was on the last Sunday of February.
“I was keeping an eye on the water in the back yard,” Loeffel says. “I went outside to check – and suddenly the water was in the house.”
Loeffel had enough time to carry the TV upstairs and get out with a bag of clothes and her dog. She has been crashing with a friend since.
She plans on moving back in, but the owners need to wait for an insurance assessment before renovations can start.
While she lost most of her possessions, she’s OK. She owns a place in Ipswich and rents in Brisbane to be closer to her work as a personal trainer.
Mercer says the crisis demanded a suite of short-term responses.
Holiday rentals should house flood evacuees. Commonwealth rent assistance needed to be indexed to property prices. Welfare support should match the soaring cost of food and fuel. The National Rental Affordability Scheme needed to be retained, not scrapped.
But, ultimately, the crisis demanded a long-term commitment to build “serious numbers of social and affordable housing stock”, Mercer says.
“We are talking tens of billions of dollars. We really need a broader vision, not just a reactive response, because a lot of people are feeling quite hopeless. They need a vision and they need hope.”
