On a camping trip in the Flinders Ranges back in the 1980s, grey nomad Fay B was sitting in a dry creek bed when a huge torrent of water appeared out of nowhere …
I was sitting with my friend Margaret on camp chairs in a riverbed in Brachina Gorge in the Flinder’s Ranges. The riverbed was currently dry and we had placed our chairs on the rocks between the rock pools there.
The sky was streaked with pink and grey from the sunset and a multitude of birds were flapping and squawking in the trees along the banks of the river. Our husbands, Jeff and Jim, had prepared a superb barbecue and we were enjoying a delicious meal of steak, sausages and salad.
Our campsite above us had been set up on a flat treed area away from the river bank because we had been warned about the potential in the Flinders Ranges for flash-flooding, even if there was no rain in our immediate area.
Margaret and I had our chairs facing downstream and Jeff and Jim had set theirs up opposite us and facing upstream.
Suddenly, Jeff let out a yelp, stood up and called out, “Run!!.” He grabbed his chair and began to run, jumping from rock to rock across the river bed. I turned to look upstream to see what he was running from. In the distance, the not very distant distance, a brown wall of water was racing toward us.
Following Jeff’s lead, we grabbed our chairs and began to run towards the bank. We had scarcely clambered up the side of the river bank before the wall of water raced past us, carrying everything along before it.
A car passed by with the driver still in it, then a caravan. We were all completely in a state of shock, scarcely believing what we were seeing. Our children, who ranged in age from 10 to 4, to our utter relief were asleep in bed at the time. Had they been playing among the rock pools as they had been earlier, they would have certainly been swept away.
It occurred to me that tomorrow, my daughter Judy would say to me, “Why didn’t you wake me up and show me?” So I woke her up and frog marched her out of the tent down to the edge of the now full flowing river and told her what had happened. She turned and walked back to her bed and promptly went back to sleep. Next morning as we talked about our previous night’s experience,
Judy said, “Why didn’t you wake me up and show me? You know I would have wanted to see it.”
“I did show, you Judy, but you mustn’t have woken up properly, I did show you!”
I knew just how she felt, because my mother woke me up when the earthquake happened in Adelaide in 1953, but next day I remembered nothing, yet all my friends at school had a multitude of stories to tell about their ‘earthquake experiences’.
We found out later, that two people had been drowned in the river during the flash flood. How very frightening and how sad for their families.
