Escaping Water: Living Against Floods in Townsville, North Queensland, from Settlement to 2019

Abstract

Scholarly attention to flood in northern Queensland has generally focused on the region’s potential to irrigate Australia’s drier regions or stimulate its northern development. These concerns emphasise infrastructure and rural issues and neglect the experiences of the northern cities. Established in 1864–65 on the Ross River plain, Townsville is located within Queensland’s drought-prone, dry tropics. Despite the damage which accompanies them, the city has come to rely upon extreme rain events brought by cyclones and monsoons for its urban water supply. Repetitive but unpredictable cycles of below-average rain followed by extreme wet weather have informed locally unique ways of processing, memorialising and rebuilding from these disasters.

This chapter explores Townsville’s history of flooding and flood responses. It compares the civic responses to major flooding disasters in Townsville since 1860 and argues that the city’s ambivalent position as a “suburban frontier” plays out in media coverage and local responses to its disasters. For the media, images of crocodiles wading through flooded streets, and interviews with straight-talking locals, portray Townsville as a frontier settlement. For residents of the city, water management schemes and disaster responses are expected to sustain a standard of living familiar to the suburbs of Australia’s major cities. Yet, acceptance of the monsoonal deluges and big-wet sits awkwardly with a lack of acknowledgement of the long dry season and the destruction brought by extreme weather events. The residents of Townsville, and their reactions to flooding, offer interesting lessons in both accepting and ignoring the local environment while constructing an urban settlement.