It rained for four days. The gauge at the shed collected 212 millimetres, which is more than we recorded for the whole of the previous three months put together. On the third night the river came up over the lower track and we lay awake listening to it, which is a sound you do not forget once you have heard it on your own place.
By Saturday it had dropped back to the channel, and we walked the frontage to see what had happened.
What it took
The bend below the homestead lost about two and a half metres of bank along a 40-metre stretch. That is roughly a hundred cubic metres of soil, gone downstream to someone else. We had marked that section as the worst on the property in our first year, and it had been slowly getting worse ever since. This was not slow.
The old river gum at the downstream end of the bend is now hanging on with half its roots in the air. We have given it a year. We would be surprised if it takes the next one.
Two of the self-seeded wattles we were so pleased about in December went with the bank. The other dozen or so held. Their roots were in the ground, not on it.
The lower dam on the river flat went completely under. When the water dropped it had a new inflow channel cut straight through the wall on the upstream side. That dam was always the wrong shape. The river has just brought the earthworks forward.
What it left
Here is the part nobody warns you about. The flat below the bend, the same compacted, fireweed-choked flat that came back worst from the rest, is now covered in a layer of silt between 5 and 15 centimetres deep. Fine, dark, and full of whatever the upper catchment lost.
We pushed a spade into it on the Sunday, and for the first time since we have owned this place, the spade went all the way in on the flat.
That silt is on top of the compaction, not instead of it. But it is a growing medium we did not have a week ago, and the cover crop we had planned for autumn just got a much better bed.
The river also left us three sizeable logs, wedged into the bank on the inside of the bend. We were going to buy logs for exactly that job.
What it changed
We had a planting plan for the riparian zone that started at the top of the property and worked down. Neat rows, a nursery order already placed for April, a working bee pencilled in.
The plan now starts at the bend.
That 40-metre stretch needs roots in it before the next big rain, and the next big rain on this coast could be in a month or in a year. So the April planting moves to the bend: casuarinas and lomandra on the toe of the bank, swamp oaks and river gums above them, planted dense and close. We will lay the three logs the river gave us along the base of the eroded face to slow the water down while the roots get going. We will not pretend that will hold in a flood like this one. It might hold in a smaller one, and it will buy the trees time.
The dam wall is a job for an excavator in a dry month. When it gets rebuilt it will be deeper, narrower, and further from the river.
The thing we keep coming back to
Two hundred and twelve millimetres in four days is not an unusual event on this coast. It will happen again. The bank that went was a bank with no roots, and there are other stretches of this river with no roots that simply did not get tested this time.
Planting 30,000 trees over the coming years is a big number, and it sounds like an ambition. After this week it feels more like a deadline. The river is not waiting for us to get organised.
We will post the planting day when it happens. If you are within reach of Stroud and own a pair of gloves, you are welcome.
