Price of NQ floods
AUSTRALIAN agriculture has suffered a devastating blow, with the magnitude of what occurred to only be fully realised in the weeks and months to come.
An inland tsunami has hit northern Queensland, with the epicentre being Julia Creek, Cloncurry and Richmond.
Horrific scenes have flooded social media, with war-zone-like images of the dead and dying littered across vast paddocks; bodies heaped into corners of fence lines after floodwaters smashed into these helpless bovines, swept by raging torrents as the angry water raced to empty into the Gulf.
For a country that is as flat and immense as northern Queensland, with little high ground for these cattle to be able to reach, the force and depth of water had little precedent in recent history.
Townsville was also badly flood affected, with many houses having lately been built flat on the ground on flood plains and reclaimed swamps.
Water will always find its own level and man-made dwellings are no deterrent to the flow of water as it takes its path to the sea.
Scenes of belongings dumped in the streets, brown with mud, have filled the TV screens of the urban populations further to the south, as it rightly should have, but seemingly little is being reported on the suffering and magnitude of the disaster for the northern cattle herds.
Tiny 30-second grabs don’t capture the carnage of an estimated 500,000 animals and approximately one billion dollars lost to the economy of Queensland and ultimately to Australia.
Not only is there the economic loss, but also the loss of many of the hopes and dreams of people who have withstood numerous years of drought, fighting to keep their core breeding herds intact, positioning themselves to come through the drought using vast sums of money, much of which had been borrowed.
Generational graziers, risking all to give their children a chance to be on the land and continue living the life that helps produce food for their nation.
These hardened warriors have been fighting the demon drought with every ounce of their being, only to have their beautiful cows, weaners and calves along with bulls, horses and flocks, drowned in a rainfall event.
Coupled with the northern catastrophe is the still present drought of central and southern Queensland, where the rural towns and producers have been in a stranglehold of famine for more than seven years.
The bush will always rise to the occasion. Australia-wide, rural and regional people are asking how they can help on a practical level.
Bush people are pro-active and they need assistance in the form of money to rebuild their herds, keep the kids in boarding school, fix the water infrastructure and reconstruct yards.
Please, if you have a heart for this nation, support your primary producers and the rural towns that make up the fabric of our vast continent, and help Australia to remain one of the economic and social wonders of the world.