Australian Floods

Regarding the most recent NSW floods, the following comment was posted at JoNova;

beowulf
March 23, 2021 at 12:01 pm · Reply

My family has lived and farmed around the Hunter River since about 1850, so there is 170 years of oral history passed down through the generations. I grew up on stories of the 1893, 1949 and 1955 floods, the latter two being recent history just before my birth. I also grew up with the never-forgotten sweet stench of rotting vegetation in my nostrils after the numerous floods of my childhood on the Paterson River (a Hunter tributary). The Hunter River has the biggest catchment of any NSW coastal river and includes some very high rainfall terrain in places.
Maitland CBD sits on the riverbank where the bullock wagon track once ran and a series of grog shanties sprang up to service that trade from the (then largest) river port of Morpeth to all places north and west right up as far as Toowoomba in QLD. Until the advent of the railways in the 1880s Maitland and Morpeth were THE pre-eminent NSW towns outside of Sydney. Newcastle had yet to blossom. The river has changed its course many times since settlement, but back then the paddle-steamers used to come right up behind the Maitland shops to unload into bond stores, so Maitland was on the river for good reason. 
The Hunter’s history is nothing but floods and droughts. One of my grandfather’s earliest memories was of standing knee-deep in flood water as a 7 year old pulling beetroot to salvage what they could of their crop before it all went underwater and rotted. The locals took it in their stride. When the river was rising they would put their beds up on bricks and go to sleep, likewise with their other furniture. The 1955 flood was on a scale the locals had not seen.
In 1955 an entire street of houses below Maitland Hospital was washed away with their residents clinging onto the roofs. A line of big poplars stretched across the floodway downstream and some of the “lucky” residents were able to clamber into the trees as their houses were smashed to pieces on the bridge below. They were hanging out of the trees for a couple of days before they could be rescued as the current was too fierce and the only helicopter sent in for rescues had crashed during an earlier attempt elsewhere, killing all. 
As KK stated, the Newcastle surf clubs sent surf boats up to help with rescues, although Maitland had a number of heavy flood-boats always on hand too. The Army sent in trucks and Ducks (DUKW). The trucks did good service; the ducks not so much. Some of the Duck drivers insisted on plowing up and down the main street, creating bow waves that punched in the shop front windows on undamaged buildings. Out of town their activities were much more useful. 
After even the 1955 flood nothing remotely salvageable was thrown out. Mattresses were hosed off and stood out to dry for several weeks; clothes and bedding were used complete with mud stains; walls were scrubbed down until the fibres in the old plaster showed through; families pitched in to help each other. Several of my mum’s uncles and cousins had their homes and farms inundated.
My father was the northern NSW trouble-shooter for the Massey-Ferguson tractor company. He spent months after the flood stripping down tractors, where MF provided all labour for free via its dealers in the Hunter. The farmers were only charged for oil. Starter motors and generators were washed out then dried in the ovens of a local bakery after each batch of bread was done and the ovens cool enough. Flies were in absolute plague proportions. Life went on without any gnashing of teeth or blaming the CO2 weather gods. 
After the excitement was over many houses were moved up onto higher ground, with real estate prices for ground on the hills rocketing within the year. The block where my parents had planned to build went from £100 to £300 while they were pre-occupied with the flood aftermath.
KK is not quite right about the siting of the town in that the larger part of East Maitland as it then was, also went under. Only the newer hillside suburbs were unaffected. The hills were covered in homes mainly after 1955. Development throughout the floodplain was banned, but now we have three generations of blow-ins with no local knowledge plus young graduate engineers who think that floods are a thing of the past and it is quite OK to develop the flood plain once more. They base their confidence on the levee system strengthened in the 70s. The town centre has nearly gone under twice since then, but they know best. In time there will be a disaster that makes 1955 look tame.
Incidentally, the early settlers were told by the Aborigines that they (the natives) had seen huge mega-floods in the past, one where kangaroos were trapped and washed off the hill on which Maitland hospital now sits — which would make the water probably 70 feet deep on the floodplain. By comparison 1955 was about 20 feet deep in the worst places. Geofluvial survey work has been done on Wollombi Brook (Cockfighter Creek) — a major Hunter tributary — which proves the occurrence of mega-floods in the past few hundred years prior to white settlement, so 70 feet of water may not be far fetched.