Add all those factors together and you’ve probably got a situation where flood proofing the Bruce will be a perennial vote catcher for candidates seeking election and a never-ending will’o’ the wisp as far as residents are concerned.
Sure, it could be done, but it’ll cost a packet and I suspect no State or Federal government is going to be inclined to make the outlay.
Underpinning Hughesy’s remarks about flood proofing the Bruce is, I suspect, a vestige of the Old Northern Mentality, and some of that discussion might also be seen as fitting into A Separate North, where I set out to consider the idea of separateness that hasn’t quite left us, but certainly isn’t as strong today as it was fifty years ago.
On the other hand, fifty years ago the expectation was that next wet season we’d be cut off again. You hoped The Wet wouldn’t be accompanied by a cyclone. If it was, you hoped the thing would hit somewhere else along the coast.
It was in other words, a time when the locals acknowledged the impact of the weather on the lifestyle and planned accordingly. Fifty years later we know about the weather, can see it coming and bitch and moan about its impact on our insurance premiums.
That acknowledgement of the influence of weather on lifestyle was reflected in the architecture. Take a step into a convenient time machine and point yourself to the wilds of suburban Aitkenvale in 1963 and you’d probably be remarking on a couple of features of the built environment.
The first would be how little of it there actually was.
While the street where my family spent the first three years of my spell in High School had more blocks with houses than without, there wasn’t much in it, and blocks covered with guinea grass were a part of everyday life.
Travel along that suburban street and study the houses, and the first thing you’d have noticed would have been the fact that all these houses were raised on stumps rather than plonked straight on top of a concrete slab. Most were high set, with a concrete slab underneath, but if they weren’t there was still space under the floorboards where water could run off.
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