Mid Richmond beef producer Roger Olive understands better than most the challenges of restoring pasture after flood.
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Things look clean and green now but it appeared different in early March, after four metres of water transformed fertile paddocks to a vista that appeared to the lifelong resident as if he was "looking out over the Pacific Ocean".
It took a long time for the tide to go out, and not return. Grey skies kept the place brown and boggy right through autumn, but the sun did dry things out for weeks at a time in early spring and Mr Olive took advantage of those moment to slash paddocks as soon as he was able.
There are new fences thanks to grant funding and a shiny tractor and replacement bull bought back on insurance and a portion of his beef herd is almost ready to come home to East Coraki, from another farm west of the Richmond Range.
"What else can you do?" he says, putting on a brave face.
However, the sad reality in the days following that epic saturation remain a bitter pill to swallow for the life-long cattle producer, with 180 head of Angus cross cows and their sappy black calves all drowned. He was fortunate in that 30 heifers were found, after they swam with the flow around a great bend in the swollen river before navigating to high ground.
The wave of debris-choked water that delivered the first flood came up to the knees of the 83 year old grazier so quickly that it's only premonition was a rustling noise like whitewater and very quickly the job of opening gates for cattle changed focus to personal survival.
"Until that moment there was only rainwater lying in the paddocks," he said.
"Cattle were feeding and they were alright and then it came: Brown and muddy, real flood water. It arrived in a rush and was a real shocker."
Cattle huddled on the dirt mounds, raised to withstand a record inundation but the 2022 level was 20 per cent more again so they floated and there was nothing anyone could do to save them.
"If we had kept going someone would have drowned and the dogs would have been lost. As it was I didn't lose any of my dogs," Mr Olive said.
The tight knit community of East Coraki was caught fast, like the rest of the low-lying district, after the March flood obliterated all reference to historic records.
A neighbouring homestead left dry during the epic 1954 event was flooded to the ceiling this time around.
Water from multiple catchments ponded at the place of meeting waters, which is the Bundjalung phrase behind the name Gurigay, or Coraki.
The week of systems that began in late February first saturated vast back swamps and low country to the south of the place where the Wilsons meets the Richmond so the sponge was soaked even before torrents pelted the slopes of the Mount Warning caldera. Dunoon, perched on a steep ridge above Lismore recorded an astounding 700mm in 24 hours.
Read more: Clarence River property on the market.
The flood arrived at Coraki to push into a great lens of tanin-coloured water, that filled a landscape of native tea tree and myrtle. The highest waters drained in different ways, and across the usual set of currents.
Residents used tractors to ferry people and pets to the strongest fortress around, a two storey home on steel poles that eventually housed 27 neighbours in the upstairs level. All waited patiently for the water to go away, but it wouldn't.
"It kept rising all the rest of the day and all night," Mr Olive recalled.
He woke once from a fitful slumber in a chair to hear noise and commotion as one other refugees fished his dog from the back of a ute, just before it went under, and on the way back slipped and fell to return soaked right through.
Mr Olive's boots and new rain coat were washed away while he slept, even though he put them up out of water's way before he shut his weary eyes. In the morning the SES evacuated them as a mob.
"We were loaded into the boats like old cows going to the meatworks," he said. "We were in a full boat and on the way out we had to pass a dozen people on a roof. I hope I never have to witness that again."
At Coraki, they refugees gathered in the Uniting Church for a hot meal and Mr Olive slept on a pew so narrow that his hand tended to slip down and wake him up.
"So I unzipped my fly and put it in there," he said. "You can only laugh. No point crying."
A visit back to the home farm when the storm clouds parted revealed a new strange reality, with rafts of water hyacinth stranded on roof ridge caps like toupees and inside all amuck but outside in the mud was his old hat.
Mr Olive was the first to move back in and seven months later he's the only resident around. Like the other eight neighbours nearby, house insurance claims have been slow to materialise.
"They're still hanging on the hydrologist's report," Mr Olive said. "But at the end of the day it's not about losing the cattle," he said. "At least not one of us drowned and no one got hurt. That flood could have been a real human tragedy."
