floods in Darebin Parklands

For the last fourteen years or so we've been wishing for rain.

And this summer we have had plenty!

Our famous Australian poem says, in one stanza:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

Droughts seem to have taken a back seat in Victoria at the moment, in favor of the flooding rains.

A couple of days ago, Penny took as down to Darebin Parklands to see what has been happening and we saw the results of the recent flooding.



In one way, the rain is beautiful, and I think no-one regrets the water that has sunk into the ground and replenished our water table, reinvigorated our creeks and rivers and added to our water storage. Look how green the parklands are at the moment:



However, there's been a lot of damage in the park and it will take work to get things back to normal.

Here's some of the fencing that protects the new plantings.



But much of it has been uprooted.



And there's junk everywhere.







And big logs thrown around.





It wasn't too hard to work out which direction the water flowed.





There's to be a clean-up day on February 26th and another on Clean Up Australia Day on 6th March.