The Spring of 2010 was the wettest Spring in the hundred and eighty odd years since records have been kept in South East Queensland; that big river district which wedges to the sea from a sub-tropical corner of the Great Dividing Range. February 3 of 2011 would end the Lunar Year of the Tiger.
My wife and I had planned to go to Viet Nam to celebrate the new Lunar Year with our two young children, my wife's parents, her dad's clan and our friends in the city of Nha Trang. Nha Trang is Viet Nam's equivalent of Australia's Gold Coast where you might find every man and their dog on holidays. It would be the Year of the Cat in Viet Nam, the Year of the Rabbit in China.
After the wet Spring in South East Queensland came a wet Summer, so wet so as to wash away the memories of a decade of drought. I was at work in the library, sheltered from the teeming rain and keeping an eye on the weather through the Bureau Of Meteorology site on December 23, and I noticed that a fortnight's more rain was forecast. I decided to buy my wife a clothes dryer as a Christmas present; imagine how grateful she would be despite my reckless spending; even through till January!
The children seemed to be enjoying the Big Wet as they call the Monsoon seasons Up North in places like Cairns, Tully and Innisfail.
I had engaged Lord Byron one of my son's nine year old friends from down the street to work on the little creeks that ran under my house. I named one of the rivulets that he helped me resuscitate the Lord Byron Canal. Lord Byron's dad was away in Afghanistan working in the Australian Army but Lord Byron was the most keen of my son's friends to engage with me in the adventure of my house and garden.
Huge floods hit town after town and city after city round Queensland and finally after a terrible torrent burled down the Range from the Darling Downs through the silt rich Lockyer Valley the flood waters visited South East Queensland.
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