Flood Relief

Hey you guys. So it’s been a fairly full on week, in case you hadn’t seen the news.

At about this time I was hoping to be posting a piece on the 21st Century: Art in the First Decade. But I guess mother nature had other ideas as the Gallery of Modern Art, along with over 30,000 other dwellings and businesses, were inundated by the mighty Brisbane River last week.

Fairly intense.

Luckily GoMA was not too badly impacted, with only the Children’s Art Centre actually inundated by the flood waters. They will remain closed for the immediate future, and you can get updates on their progress on Twitter.

It’s kind of scary and weird to have your city, the one you know, declared a natural disaster zone. Also scary is the sound of incessant helicopters and sirens on Wednesday and Thursday, and the sight of convoys of army trucks rolling through sleepy Kenmore on Saturday morning.

For me, anyway. But it is also a reminder of how lucky we are, even though something like this has happened, because we live in a country where this kind of thing is actually a spectacularly uncommon event.

Lying awake at 5am on Thursday morning glued to my iPhone (yes, I got one) reading updates on the river’s peak, seeing images of our floating walkways and people’s boats being washed away downstream, I cried for the destruction of the city that I know so well. But I reminded myself that at this very time, thousands of people, not tens, were dying in similar floods in Brazil and Sri Lanka. They’re probably not crying over their floating walkways and their Moggill Ferries, and they’re probably not glued to their iPhones.

It doesn’t make our loss any less real, it just puts it in perspective. There are still thousands of displaced people in our first world city, people who have lost everything they own, and in some cases people who have lost loved ones or lost their own lives. I am particularly heartbroken for the people of Grantham and Murphy’s Creek, who waited in their houses as flash floods rose without warning and swept their houses out from under them at enormous speeds.

I have some flood pictures for you courtesy of Misho Baranovic, and also some from myself. Please donate to the Queensland flood appeal to help thousands of families all over Queensland get their lives back on track after this terrible time.

Misho Baranovic

Misho Baranovic - this one is actually about 500m down the road from my place.

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And the rest are from me. If you start thinking they look pretty, go back and look at Misho’s for a reminder of the flood water’s impact. It might looks smooth and glossy on the surface but it carries an endless amount of sticky, stinky sludge.

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Feeling a little helpless and disempowered, the least I can do is show these to my international readers, and ask them to DONATE NOW if you can, or else reblog.

To get an idea of the widespread impact of the floods on SE Queensland, check out these before and after images.