Arts
28 December, 2025
FLOODING BACK Stories shared and inspired
ROADS can be repaired in time, halls cleaned and quickly back in use, herds and flocks depleted by flood waters replaced.
The physical toll of Loddon’s October 2022 floods left a trail of damaged shire infrastructure and a bill of $25 million.
Farmers lost stock worth many dollars more. According to A Different Flood, launch last week, Loddon accounted for 70 per cent of livestock lost in the Loddon Mallee region as the Loddon River swelled and swirled across the shire, through 32 homes, several businesses, caravan and camping areas, halls and recreation reserves.
But it is the stories of Loddon people who waded through waters rescuing stock, some facing their second major flood in a decade and were part of the response, relief and recovery efforts in local communities that are given recognition in A Different Flood.
Written by Lucy Mayes from interviews with a 16 Loddon residents and recording how Loddon Shire responded - the book project was through Loddon Shire Council’s flood recovery program funded by the Federal and Victorian Government - it is the sub-title that will connect readers in a way every single person who lived through that fortnight of sudden impact in Newbridge or to the slow wait up north around Pyramid Hill and Boort as crops that would have been weeks away from harvesting altered the water course. Yet towns were still cut as water rested on roads and the wait for the flood to recede was like “watching paint dry” as one northern resident told me at that day.
In A Different Flood, Bridgewater Fire Brigade captain Tim Ferguson tells how locals who had been alerted to what was coming started door knocking around town and how the early drama of ordering sandbags through the incident control centre was circumvented with a quick call to the shire council.
“People were calling me to see how they could help, getting around town sandbagging - even people who you don’t really see around town much.”
“We had a really great response for the recovery as well.
“We had two fire trucks in town with about five people on each.
“We worked our way through the town, going from house to house and all the businesses, hosing all the mud out before they started to stink or dry off.
“I think one of the trucks spent nearly the whole day at the motel. It was a big couple of days.”
There are also stories of how to prepare and manage the anxious moments that come with the knowledge flood waters are headed your way.
Canary Island’s Jo Bear writes in the book: “It can get really stressful so it really helps to plan for the street, be prepared for the worst and know that you’ve done everything you can, and then there’s nothing more you can do.”
Jo said the heavy crops had created their own natural levy banks.
“I think you’ve just got to accept that it’s going to get flooded every now and again. You just need to be prepared to say ‘we’re going to lose this crop but we know next year year there’s going to be moisture there. It’s going to be a really good crop. Let’s just let go of this one,” she told author Lucy Mayes.
Two and three years on from the floods, Jo put out a call for better leadership in managing natural disaster issues.
“We need some clear leadership ... not just community leadership but also from authorities such as (North Central) catchment management authority. It’s about co-ordinating all the leadership really, because you’ve got somebody who’s got technical knowledge, you’ve got others who have got access to the best information and then you’ve got the historical knowledge. If you can come together and get all the voices at the table - preferably beforehand - that would be helpful.”
Knowing the history can also be taxing, as Newbridge’s Ron Trimble explains in the book.
The man who led the Newbridge Recreation Reserve rebuild after 2011 and was to the fore in 2022, says: “We got through complete destruction and a full rebuild in 2011. It almost all happened again in 2016. And in 2022, we saw all the same patterns over again.
“I find it very emotional when you can see what can be done to avoid these things from happening, and you’ve lived through and recovered from the devastation and damage three times,” Ron says.
“You can’t change the past. You can only learn from the past and change the future,” said Ron who in the weeks after the floods was critical of warning advice for Newbridge as 145 gigalitres of water was released every day at Laanecoorie Reservoir.
He praised the community leadership of Newbridge’s reserve committee and football club in returning the football ground, tennis and netball courts and camping area to use in the months after that wet October.
“It’s the community leaders who make all the difference. They know the lay of the land, they’ve been there before and they’ve seen it before - they’ve got commonsense and they understand their communities. The community was just rock solid.”
These stories can will sit alongside those contemporary accounts captured in the pages of the Loddon Herald in October 2022 - in print and through award-winning breaking news reports that broke new ground in emergency communication for rural communities needing timely information. When read together, future historians will have an an unparalleled insight into the second “once in a century” flood in essentially a decade to roll across the Loddon.
Perspectives in A Different Flood expand on the context and experiences recorded by our newspaper in the days after October 14 when online updates at least once a day filled a void until many official lines of communication were fully activated a week and more later.
They strengthen the story that has been Loddon communities more so than ever in recent years - floods in 2011, 2022 and the summer of 2023-2024.
Stories of strength and resilience you only find in country communities where everyone looks out for each other.
The very essence of rural life that is cherished and celebrated.