In 1974, Nonno Anni and Nanna Francesca received a knock at the front door by two policemen warning them a big flood was coming and the power was about to be cut off…
This weekend is the 50-year anniversary of the devastating floods that hit Brisbane and Ipswich in 1974 so I thought I’d share with you just a few of the old photographs when my grandparents’ house and flats in Brunswick Street, New Farm were inundated. (An arrow shows their house. The water eventually got to the floorboards.) Top left – Nonno Anni alerts blokes in the tinny to Nanna Francesca taking a photo from the house. Below it, shows a police patrol. And I can’t help but smile seeing Nanna has her hair perfectly hair-sprayed as she hoses mud off furniture during the clean up afterwards.
It was difficult after they were gone when their house was again flooded in 2011 and we lost many of their belongings before we could get them out. But that is how it goes sometimes, the water can just unexpectedly rise too fast. Knowing the damage and terrible loss wrought on so many, we got off lightly really.
From, Joe’s Fruit Shop and Milk Bar…
Nonno Anni and Nanna Francesca both left dwellings of tile and biscuit-coloured stone – one in the mountains, the other by the sea – eventually to share their lives in a house of wood and iron not far from a river. I recall Nonno Anni telling me about the clean up after the 1974 flood. How a lot had to be thrown out or burnt, and weeks afterward they finally located an enduring stench as being a dead fish wedged in the back of a cupboard.
Being a toddler at the time, I have no memories of Brisbane’s ‘74 flood during which the water came higher, and my mother afterwards donated my baby clothes to flood victims. Yet, from childhood, I was fascinated to pore over photographs of the event – my father and Nonno Anni in the floodwater in the front yard, Nanna Francesca peering from the front doorway, refusing to come lower than the top step. In one photograph, Nonno Anni is in the water, waving to an overloaded tinny of longhaired, young people rowing along Brunswick Street. They cheerfully wave back to him.
Zoë Boccabella 