MRCCC REPORT 

NOT QUITE “WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE…”

With a flood peak of 10.2 metres at Moy Pocket, the recent Mary River flooding around Kenilworth wasn’t even at “minor level”. The water level sat at around two metres over Pickering Bridge for several hours before starting to drop. They always say that each flood is different and what characterised this one was that the heaviest falls weren’t upstream of Kenilworth, as is so often the case, but much further downstream in the Tiaro and Miva area, as ex-Tropical Cyclone Seth hovered over both, delivering impressive rainfalls.

While the Gympie Times was reporting a prize bull being swept downstream, most of the Mary’s aquatic creatures find a quiet spot and wait it out. Although we often speak of “swift moving floodwaters”, observation of a river in flood shows fast places and slow ones, and sometimes even ones where the flow goes backwards. Scientists call the quieter spots “refugia” and they are a haven for fish and turtles at times like these. Remember a few floods back the lungfish that sought one such spot in the flooded carpark of a Mary Street hotel, only to find itself a media celebrity as the waters receded.

Smaller creatures like snails, grasshoppers, spiders and even frogs, toads and snakes often clamber aboard logs as they travel downstream. Floods at this time do represent a challenge for Mary River turtles in terms of their breeding. Characteristically they lay their eggs after storms and rain in November and with roughly a two-month wait before hatching, the eggs are susceptible to being inundated during that time. Some lay not all that far above the waterline, others further above it, as if the species as a whole is weighing up the odds, balancing the risk of a flood with the benefits of hatching nearer the water. It’s times like these, though, where you realise what is really the river’s territory, rather than the mark it makes on the landscape for the rest of the year.

With a sizeable catchment in a high rainfall area, nothing is more inevitable than flooding, and with a river being really a series of the lowest points in the landscape, there is no other option for water Pickering Bridge, Moy Pocket around the peak of the January 2022 flooding. to run off, nowhere else for it to go. Historically floodplains have benefitted from the deposition of silt making them fertile and attractive for agriculture but at times like these you have to question the wisdom of locating our towns and cities on them.

Kindly submitted by Ian Mackay, Chairman MRCCC.