China Gibson, The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper

The 2022 flood will be the new 100-year flood level in the Edward at Moulamein. The old record was 6.094m. I think we got to 6.235m. The Edward did have that bit of a hiccup last week when it started to rise again for no apparent reason.

Luckily, there was a reason. Our railway line had blown out and was putting pressure on the houses out on the Swan Hill Road. Blocking the blowout did raise the water in town 27mm by 2am in the morning, but it lowered the water out on the Swan Hill Road. When you start to open banks, block banks or leave banks that stop water flow, it always affects someone else. That is the way floods are. The old saying has always been, “Fires unite, floods divide.” Pretty close to the truth.

There were a few keeping an eye on this rise as blocking that blowout made a lot more water go through Moulamein than anyone expected. More nervous times for those with not much freeboard. All was okay and it started to drop again. 24 hours and it was back to where it was before the blowout was blocked. Then, it started to drop lower.

According to the ABC, we are open again. We are below major flood level and some roads do not have water over them anymore. We can now plan Christmas as families can now visit. It will be a while before all the roads have not got water running over them, but most will be dry by next week. Rough, but dry. Take your time. If the sign says slow down, it means it. We should put up a few signs. Good road, enjoy. Would save a lot of signs. Just a thought. You can still tell some of your family members that we are isolated if you want to keep them away.

I should have listened

Before all this flood stuff got real, I noticed that some of our frogs had laid their eggs in some wheel tracks that had water in them. I remember thinking that we would not get many of our southern bell frogs out of that laying as it will dry up. They knew. They are probably on their third generation by now as it just kept raining and ended up a swamp that we are trying to grow rice in. I also noticed an ants’ nest when another paddock did start to go under. As the photo shows, they were also prepared.

We have a swinging pole at our house dam. My wife commented that she did not know that ducks perched. There always seemed to be a couple of ducks sitting up there on the cross arm. I just said that if you see them building a nest up there, panic. The ducks did not build their nest up there but next time, I will be taking more notice of nature.

Now, we have locusts

I had a mate ring up the other evening. He reckons we were doomed as he had grasshoppers out in his paddocks. I was out on the bike at the time, had not seen any, but just after I hung up, whack – managed to get one in behind the glasses. Just cleared my eyes when a bloody baldy coot took off. Then, to top it all off, the bloody turbo chooks have turned up and started to breed. Up until now, I have never seen a baby turbo chook. I just thought they split like cells and one becomes two, then two becomes four and so on until we are overrun by them. At least the rice is too far advanced to be affected by the turbo chooks this year. Next year is the worry if they do not move on. The baldy coots can still do a lot of damage before the rice is harvested.

Frogs plentiful

The frog corrals in most backyards are deafening. It will get noisier as every thousand acres under water will produce zillions more frogs. This happened back in the 70s. Three wet years in a row, the frog population boomed. This is great for the frog population and it is great for anything that eats frogs. Birds of all kinds eat frogs. Great, more birds. Fish eat frogs. Great, more fish. Even frogs eat frogs. Great, more southern bell frogs as they like to eat smaller frogs. Lizards probably even eat frogs, as well as cats and foxes. They are part of the food chain.

Great, I hear you say, except for the cats and foxes. But, back in the 70s, snakes also loved to eat frogs. Frogs come in every size, so snakes can eat them from the time they are born. Here is the bad news for those that hate snakes. We had a snake plague back then. Or it seemed like it when you were a kid.

Killing snakes was fun back then and if we went out to the Niemur blocks that we used to own, tiger snakes were our sport. Of course, we would not do it now as it is frowned upon. My brother’s farm was named back then. It is called ‘Tiquito’ – a cross between tiger snakes and mosquitoes. Something else to look forward to. I think the starting price for a snake bite on a working dog is three grand or more. Be careful out there.

A white Christmas

The way the weather is going, a white Christmas would not be out of the question. I often wonder where that fella called Tim Flannery ever got to as I battle our flood waters with a jumper on in December. “It is going to get hotter,” he said. “The rivers are going to dry up,” he said. Where are you, Tim Flannery? Can you give all that money you got paid for preaching your crap ‘our drying climate’ to the flood relief please? Or are you too busy skiing up in our mountains at the ski resorts that you said we should close down because it was never going to snow again? And my kids wonder why I am so cynical about global warming, sorry, climate change. Global warming did not work.

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 15 December 2022.