If ever there were a demonstration that whites have not yet adapted to the vicissitudes of Oz it has to be this insistence on building towns & cities on flood plains, fertile land & semi drained swamps then wailing & whining when Nature visits.
A perfect example is the central NSW town, Nyngan, on the confluence of two major inland rivers, at the bottom of the mostly denuded western slopes. The name, in the language of the original inhabitants, meant "BIG water" but - surprise, surprise - it floods.
Houses can be built on stilts, levees can be raised and building standards tweaked to the Nth degree but Nature Rules, KO.
Imagine what life could/would/will be like if/when it finally dawns on the majority that this great island continent is a separate creation, not the Home Counties slathered with sunblock.
The iconic poem of Dot McKellar was written to allay severe homesickness in damp & dreary Blighty - <I>viz</I> the original first verse whereas most people can only quote the 2nd - hence the delusion that "...we've golden soils..". This couldn't be less true over 98.0% of the landmass which is mostly ancient pulverised seabed with small additions of nutrient from passing wildlife. Great for macropods & eucalypts but, for some strange reason, not suited to the pounding & crushing of hard hoofed, half ton herd animals.

Shoot me down if you will (and you will) but I have said it once before and I will say it again; observe and learn from nature. Build Dome Homes on stilts. Nowhere in Mother Nature's beautiful designs do we see angles or flats; we see only articulated, compound geometry, well able to withstand natural, all but really violent forces. We are not going to change masculine, chest-thumping thinking however, which is to spend zillions of dollars building massive earthworks to stem the flow.

State and Local governments have been paying themselves millions of our dollars, and deciding where, when and how we should build our homes.

The results of their efforts have been disastrous in many cases.

Perhaps a class action might motivate them?

The old adage 'either lead, follow or get out of the way' applies to them I'd suggest.

Take a look at Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans which suffered much worse destruction due to clearing of 100 miles of the wetlands. In 2011 Brisbane CBD was inundated and police hq could not function. Cairns is built on a swamp. A storm surge in Trinity Bay would wipe out Cairns Hospital and Police, Fire and Ambulance services. It is only a matter of time before class actions are mounted against local government which has allowed development on flood plains in the last decade. .We must work with nature.

After the Great Flood of 1893, and again after 1974 engineering and scientific discussion re Brisbane flooding looked at the water hydraulics - what was coming in and what was going out.

It considered on both occassions that the vast amount of silt in the Brisbane River and the adjoining water courses needed to be dredged in a major manner, in 1974 a very quick survey off the now long gone RAN Training establishment of HMAS Moreton on the Brisbane showed there a soft silt structure of 44 feet opposite. One mile west it was 48 feet, while one mile east it was 76 feet.

This centuries old build up of silt has not disappeared and will have undoubtedly been enhanced in the past 37 years.

Removal of the many millions of tonnes of silt to enhance the depth of the Brisbane River would undoubtedly allow the build up of water through storm surge and excessive rain fall free access to the sea. Whilst there would of course still be flooding, its effects would be dramatically reduced.

Of course the lack of informed debate and logical discussion would allow the doom and gloom brigade to inform us that such action would release toxins, C02 levels would rise, and it would affect Aboriginal sacred sites et etc et ect.

Such dredging of the lower reaches of the River Thames in the early 1990's in conjunction with the building of the Thames Barrier, helped in the reduction of the potential flooding of London in a dramatic manner, and also improved the quality of water within the upper reaches. Yours, Mackinlay
PS.
The Queenslander's could have a benefit the could use the silt to fill the big holes in the ground from mining!!!

When an ant nest or a bee hive are damaged the occupants instinctively and immediately go about rebuilding, without looking to the cause. It seems that we humans share the same instincts.

With a little more intelligence, we have the capacity to look to the cause and so rebuild with intelligence.

It takes another jump in intelligence to work out whether our instinctive response is adequate to the scale of the threat. We have no choice but to try to cope with increasing levels of extreme weather as best we can, but to persuade ourselves that we can "disaster proof" ourselves against 4 degrees or more of global warming is a gross delusion.

Yet is seems to be a delusion that we are instinctively programmed to ignore, at our peril.

Excellent article Sarah.

Please could someone help me with a question.

Didn't the original European settlers of Brisbane flood-free their houses by building them on stilts? If so, WTF have present day occupants decided to ignore this principle? Or, did the QLD state government accept the folding stuff from developers to permit the construction of jerry-built homes? Or, perhaps I've been misinformed?

When talking about flood-proofing future constructions it might be contra-advantageous to peoples' interests to push for the building of a levee. A levee would almost certainly come out of the public purse. Rather, make it the responsibility of each household to pay for its own flood-proofing. No one has insisted on them living there. So why should the public pay?

Felix MacNeill I have struggled with that too. A partial solution might be found using building regulations. e.g. in areas subject to inundation (as opposed to raging flood) an elevated house engineered specifically to cope may well provide an acceptable solution. The land may still be developed, but a caveat is added to the title relating to the nature of any building. A similar approach might be available in fire prone areas.

What was going on that resulted in so many comments removed by the moderator? Is this a record? What a shame on this, of all the sites, in all the Intertubes, such acrimony should intrude.

Its clear that these extreme weather events are linked to climate change. The adaptation cost for Australia will be enormous - not onlymore intense and frquent cyclones, floods and bushfires, but also coastal erosion, drought, urban water supplies, biosecurity risks and greater incidence of tropical diseases.

Who should foot the bill? The perpetrators of global warming, in the first instance. Given that the principal driver of anthropogenic warming is the mining and burning of fossil carbon deposits (oil, natural gas, coal and coal-seam gas), it is the energy resource companies that should put up the lion's share. Those who facilitate fossil fuel extraction - the banks and other investment houses - should also cough up. Those who burn fossil fuel (electricity generators, minerals processors, transport operators and others) should also pay their fair share
The Australian Government, which condones Australia being the world's largest coal exporter, must also take responsibility.
Under present rules, the carbon tax is levied on companies that burn carbon, not on the minors. I suggest the carbon tax be extended to include the miners. Alternatively the Mineral Resources Rent Tax should be extended to include coal and gas producers.
It is worth noting that two thirds of all coal mined in Australia is exported, most to countries including China that have no responsibilities under Kyoto to tax fossil fuels. Australia produces coal tax-free, exports it China, where it is used (amongst other things) to manufacture goods imported back into Australia. So Australian consumers often pay nothing for the fossil fuel embodied in what we use. Perhaps GST could be extended to include a consideration of the embodied fossil carbon in the goods we buy.
Make no mistake - the costs of climate adaptation will be huge. If we do not plan to raise the necessary revenue, it will be just another example of the old capitalist saw - privatise the gains and socialise the losses.