of reporting on what's
not happening at Frog Song Farm and to inform those who may be interested that we've had another setback. I'm tired of trying to put a cheerful spin on not so cheerful happenings and so in this post I'm not going to.
Friday at around lunchtime Ray received a call from Woody, a mate of ours who runs a few sheep on our place. Normally when he calls it's to tell us that he has some lamb for us for our freezer but I realised pretty quickly that he wasn't calling about that, and that along with thousands of other Australians we too were "flood affected."He started off by telling Ray (I could hear the conversation too) that we'd lost some fences, they'd been flattened by the force of the water and that his sheep were stranded on higher ground, cut off by the water that was still on the property. Apparently at that time the water hadn't subsided. When Ray asked Woody about the pen Woody very succinctly and in typical country style replied, "It's fucked, mate." And it is. By the time we got up there at around 4pm the water had subsided and we were faced with some very heart wrenching sights.
The log that you see up against the pen gate was originally about 8 or so metres away. I can hardly imagine the force of the water that swept through there - that log is bloody heavy! The shed survived, but the water tanks that we were using for wood storage, along with the water tank that was going to be used for water storage were all swept away and are now lingering by the creek, and our huge esky is nowhere to be found. Debris is littered all around the place, plant pots and Erin's old bike from the tip, and the old butchers cabinet that weighs a bloody ton has been picked up, dumped and smashed metres away from where it was.
We couldn't get into the pen via the gate because the log was blocking the way but no matter, we just walked over the fence that last week stood 2 metres high. The fence is leaning on the fruit trees but they appear to be alright as the poles are dug 1 metre into the ground and seem to be taking the weight of the fence successfully. I hope they don't buckle more because then we'll lose the trees too. Ray tells me that it's unlikely to happen.
The one boundary fence that we share with a neighbour was also washed away. It's the same fence that needed replacing after it was burned out in the fire that went through a few years ago. I'm hoping that things don't come in threes because I'm just not ready for a bloody tornado to come and rip the damn thing out of the ground once it's replaced again.
As we were leaving we saw our neighbour Anne who said that she's never seen anything like this happen in the 26 years that she's lived in Armstrong and that in 2 days she emptied over 200ml out of her rain gauge. In past years we'd have been lucky to get that much rain in 6 months.
Despite this event being called a "once in a lifetime/once in 100 year/once in 200 year" occurrence, we've witnessed flash flooding twice in the past 5 years and have heard stories of the previous owner also losing stock to flooding. What this means for us is a total re-think on where to go from here. We cannot replace the materials to rebuild so the next step is to salvage what we can from the original pen and re-design the whole farm plan.
