Live or Die: 12 Desperate Hours in Floods

Newspaper April 5, 2025

Australian, The/Weekend Australian, The/Australian Magazine, The (Australia)

JAMIE WALKER, MACKENZIE SCOTT, Additional reporting: Elodie Jakes

Adavale Veterans Retreat Photos c/-Ted Robinson

To begin with, it made such a beautiful noise: rain, sweet rain, drumming on the roof of Ted and Pip Robinson’s home in Adavale.

The Vietnam veteran and his wife went to bed early, as people do in this far-flung corner of the Channel Country in southwest Queensland.

It had been tipping down for days but they weren’t worried: every drop seemed like manna from heaven after a parched and punishing summer. Blackwater Creek, wrapping around their place, was running again, part of the spider’s web of ephemeral rivers and waterways that crisscross the vast western plains leading into the Simpson Desert. The couple knew what happened when they erupted – how drought turned to flood overnight – yet nothing could prepare them or their friends and neighbours, in communities and stations stretching all the way to Longreach, for the 12 desperate hours to come. The time was 3.30am on Thursday, March 27, day one of the outback’s flood of the century.

Ted Robinson, 75, was disconcerted by a sound he couldn’t place at first: water lapping at the floor of the demountable hut they call home.

They hadn’t experienced the likes of it since moving from the Sunshine Coast to Adavale, a hamlet of 27 hardy souls on the mostly sealed road out of Quilpie, to set up a respite centre for returned soldiers 1000km west of Brisbane. He told Pip: “We’d better get up.” Soon enough, the torrent was up to their knees. By dawn, they were fighting for their lives in a sea of churning, coffee-coloured water. Robinson duct-taped a ladder to furniture in the flooded hut – part of a compound of sleeping quarters and amenities – and they scrambled onto the roof to wait to be rescued. A diminutive muster helicopter buzzed in, “like the cavalry,” to pick up Pip, 68.

Another arrived to fly him out. Thank god. Then it crashed and he’s injured while escaping the downed machine. Honestly, you couldn’t make this up.

“All these alarms started going off and we weren’t getting very high,” Robinson remembered. “The pilot said, ‘oh sh-t’ … it was a pretty fair thing to say.” Only now, as the flood ebbs, having inundated an area twice the size of Victoria, killing at least 150,000 head of cattle, sheep, horses and other stock as well as a multitude of wildlife, are people able to draw breath and share stories of courage and forbearance in the face of this epic disaster.

The cost will be counted in a damage bill of billions and higher meat prices nationwide, but also in the trauma experienced by some of our most stoic Australians. Hard-bitten cattlemen are dreading the clean-up. Mass graves will be dug to accommodate reeking piles of decayed carcasses blackening the landscape.

There’s anger at the absence of warnings about the scale of the rain event, partly due to a blind spot in the Bureau of Meteorology’s weather radar system.

Thousands of kilometres of fencing and hundreds of properties have been devastated, erasing a lifetime of sweat and backbreaking toil for the hardest-hit graziers and business operators in the stricken towns.

“People are potentially going to go three years without income,” warned Quilpie mayor Ben Hall.

“That’s three years before they generate a dollar, not making a living. They may be able to keep their head above water for a ­period, but realistically what are they going to survive off when their entire livelihood has been wiped out?” Yet despite the pain of his still-raw injuries, the shock of a near-death experience and having his and Pip’s life’s work with the vets engulfed, Robinson counts himself lucky. Lucky to still have his wife by his side. And lucky, oh so lucky, to be alive. He’s not alone.

4am The cries for help were echoing across the Channel Country.

A terrified young teacher in Adavale had sent an SOS alert from her phone, which was picked up by one of the Robinsons’ neighbours, who in turn called the couple to check on them.

The mobile reception was out, so Robinson used his satellite phone to dial triple-0, and was patched through to a disaster co-ordination centre. The operator asked about the flood flow. How fast is it? “Try me on FaceTime, mate, and I’ll show you,” he said.

The rains, initially so welcome, had arrived on Monday, March 24, propelled by a monsoonal trough system. The downpours would be turbocharged when Cyclone Dianne crossed the West Australian coast six days later, sending another burst of weather eastwards. The great inland rivers immortalised in the prose of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson – the Barcoo, Cooper, Diamantina and Thomson, draining to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre – are surging, punching through records set in the benchmark floods of 1974.

At the Lake campsite and caravan park near Quilpie, owner-operator Louise Hoch was shaken awake by her frightened 11-year-old, James.

“What’s that noise, Mum?” the boy asked.

The Bulloo River had broken its banks and the water was “roaring, just roaring”, Hoch recalled. “It was that high it was ripping through the tops of trees.” They were lucky, all right. The family’s home sits on a ridge, out of harm’s way. But most of the powered van and camping sites below were swallowed up, as well as the two nearby properties where Hoch and her husband, Dan, raise Kalahari goats and cattle. “We had something like 2m of water over the parts of the ­property that went under,” she said. “There was just so much water coming down from the north. The force of the current was terrifying.” She shuddered at the memory of the plaintive bellowing of cattle being washed away. “You could hear them calling out … absolutely heartbreaking,” she said quietly.

6am The whirring of rotors was music to the Robinsons’ ears: the cavalry was here. The couple was standing thigh-deep in water, piling belongings on top of a fridge, saving what they could. Should they make a break for higher ground?

It didn’t look like a good idea. The flood reached for as far as the eye can see. But the bush telegraph was still on line and the word had gone out to every ­available helicopter operator within flying range. Get what you can in the air: people are in peril, deadly peril.

11am Nearby, Heidi and Stephen Cowley were trying to lift their two youngest children, Zoey, 6, and Kiya, 4, onto the roof of their Adavale home with the help of granddaughter, Sophia, 11.

Standing on a washing machine on the back veranda, Stephen Cowley, 56, gently hoisted Sophia over the steel lip, so she could help the younger girls up. A helicopter hovered nearby to carry them away. But little Zoey and Kiya wouldn’t go. Sophia climbed aboard the chopper and coaxed the other children to follow. Their mum was saying: “We know you’re scared, babies, but you have to get in.” Finally, they relented. Cowley and his 46-year-old wife heaved sighs of relief. “It was a heart-in-throat moment,” she said.

Now it’s their turn. The family has a menagerie of pets – two goats, four pigs, chickens that had to be left behind.

Heidi can hear the goats bleating in abject terror. “They scream like … babies, it’s gut-wrenching,” she remembered.

The only consolation was that she has been able to push the cat, Tiggy, into the single bag they were allowed. As their helicopter lifted off, she didn’t want to think about what would happen to the abandoned animals.

11.30am This waiting lark was getting a bit much for the Robinsons. They cracked a beer to pass the time. Blackwater Creek feeds into the Bulloo River, which in turn empties into a system of intermittent lakes and waterholes. The council rain gauge in town cut out at 1000mm – over a full metre of rain. “It just hammered down,” Robinson said.

Some muster choppers were so small they could only take a single passenger. By now, there were at least four of them overhead, darting down to pluck people from rooftops. Robinson insisted that Pip took the first one out.

The little aircraft landed softly on their boxlike donga and she climbed into the spare seat. “Steel roof, horizontal, those helicopters don’t weigh that much,” he said, recognising a remarkable feat of flying by the pilot.

The muster choppers were ferrying evacuees to Bull’s Gully, where they would wait for heavier-lift machines to transfer them in groups to Quilpie or Longreach.

But things went awry when Robinson’s ride lifted off. He didn’t know the pilot but admires how he handled the ‘oh-shit’ moment, as alarms blared through the cockpit.

“He couldn’t quite get the lift up,” Robinson said. “He got a little bit higher and then we went down,” landing heavily in the neighbour’s backyard, fortuitously in 1.5m of water.

The pilot “should get a medal”, he continued. “You think of a backyard with carports, fences, 44-gallon drums and everything in there … it is just a miracle.” He discovered, however, that Avgas and floods don’t go: leaking fuel from the chopper reacted with the water and he suffered chemical burns from the caustic mix. “I flew in and out of choppers for 12 months in Vietnam and didn’t have a problem,” the proud vet said. “Come to Adavale and the bloody thing crashes.” Thankfully, the pilot also walked away – though he didn’t get far. The poor fellow was wading through the flood, seeking help, when he was swept away. He was found hours later, clinging to a tree but otherwise unharmed.

A policeman in a dinghy reached Robinson 30 minutes after the crash, and he was taken to the council depot before being flown to Quilpie – this time without the drama. His torso, forearms and calves were inflamed and blistered. Pip found him at the local hospital, attended by two doctors and four nurses. She told him: “I’m going back to the hotel. They’ve got cold white wine there.” 3.30pm The end of a long and fraught day for Anne-Maree and Geoff Lloyd, a fourth-generation grazier from Judburgh Station, near Yaraka.

Their 153-year-old homestead had never before flooded, leaving them to struggle through hip-deep water to the rescue chopper that set down on the sand in their horse arena. More than 1m of muddy water had gone through the historic building. Anne-Maree, 62, was just relieved they got out. At least they’re insured, which many others aren’t, unable to afford the $20,000-plus premiums for home and contents cover.

“The rain just went on and on, like nothing we’ve experienced,” she said. “Our house is right on the river, but we’re on a sort of an island and we’ve never had a problem … I don’t know what we’ll find when we get back in. We know how to prepare for floods. For 30 years, we’ve put our vehicles on high ground. This time, they all went under as well. Geoff estimates the flood was 2m higher than anything we’ve seen before.” They will rebuild, but here is the question. Anne-Marie doesn’t think the homestead can be repaired, and she’s not sure she wants to given what transpired there. “Well, it’s probably time to retire the old girl,” she said. “I don’t know if this is the new norm for flooding, but I don’t think it’s a very wise thing to go back there and live there. So we might just make the move out of the river area to a bit of high ground somewhere. As yet, we don’t know what that will look like. I bought a caravan yesterday to give us some temporary accommodation while we sort out what we need to do. But the home at the moment is not the biggest priority – our stock and our fences are much more important right now.” Heidi Cowley said come what may, she and husband Stephen would return to Adavale and, if necessary, start over. “If we get back there and there is not even a house, we will sleep in tents,” she insisted.

Louise Hoch is struck by how excited she felt when the rain began. The last decent falls had been back in November, and didn’t they need the relief. But someone left the tap on, and here they were, mopping up the mess. They grazed 160 beasts and more than 6000 goats – half of which are feared lost. A caretaker who managed to get around the still-flooded paddocks has told them to brace for bad news: “There is a lot of dead stock out there.” As for the Robinsons, Pip is having a spell on the Sunshine Coast while her husband continues to recover from his injuries. “She’s finding it a bit rough at the moment,” he said, with his usual understatement. “We’re trying to get a bit of help for her … the whole thing’s been a bit confronting.”