My family is feeling a little bit sad at the moment. The house in Lismore we call “home” (my sister and brother-in-law’s home in South Lismore) —the physical anchor of so many of our memories—is officially due for demolition.
Ever since the catastrophic 2022 Lismore flood rewrote the rules of what was safe, the community has been in a state of profound transition. Through the Resilient Homes Program and the voluntary buyback scheme, hundreds of families have had to make the incredibly tough decision to hand over their keys to the NSW Reconstruction Authority. Many of these houses have been relocated to higher ground, many others will be demolished.
The finality of it takes me back to the days and weeks immediately following that 2022 flood. During that chaotic time, we spent a lot of time in the house, cleaning out the mud, throwing out the furniture.
Around that time I was also able to go into another house (the one where I was born and grew up) to take a look around. Standing amidst the aftermath, the memories of everything were still so incredibly vivid. I found myself talking with the people who owned it at the time, pointing out the invisible geography of my childhood: “That’s where my mum’s bed was. Her favourite chair sat right there. This is the exact spot where we used to sit and have dinner together every night.”
Back around 1970, that entire house was unbolted, put on the back of a truck, moved to a brand-new location, and raised high on stilts to escape the reach of the river. We laughed remembering another family home, once nestled right near the riverbank. It was shifted many years ago, leaving behind what is now just an empty paddock.
If you drive through Lismore today, especially through the neighbourhoods of South and North Lismore where our family spent generations growing up, the landscape looks vastly different. There are so many empty blocks now. It’s impossible not to feel a twinge of heartache seeing those vacant spaces, because humans are beautifully, stubbornly attached to the places they live. A house is never just timber and tin; it’s a repository for multiple lifetimes of memories.
Yet, amidst the sadness of the empty blocks, Lismore is entering a chapter of new times. It wasn’t just the homes that the 2022 waters claimed: community hubs were hit just as hard. Both my old primary school and high school were badly damaged, leaving a massive void in the daily life of the town.
But renewal is happening. Construction work on the brand-new primary school is going really well, and it won’t be long now until the doors finally open to a new generation of local kids. I vividly remember the last time the school had to be rebuilt in the wake of the devastating 1974 flood. In the same way that I had a few months in the rebuilt primary school before heading to high school, my niece will have the same experience.
Lismore has always been a town that knows how to adapt. In the past, adaptation meant putting a house on rollers, raising it six feet higher, or rebuilding on the same footprint. Today, adapting looks a little different. It means handing high-risk pieces of land back to the river to let the landscape breathe, ensuring that no future generation of our family—or anyone else’s—will ever have to face the terrifying uncertainty of a rising river from a bedroom window.
The physical structures might be cleared away, and the streets we knew might turn into open parks or natural floodways, but the soul of what made those houses “home” doesn’t belong to the Reconstruction Authority. It doesn’t get crushed by a bulldozer. It lives in the stories we tell, the history we share, and the resilient new spaces we are building together, safely out of harm’s way. Here’s to the next chapter, and to keeping the memories alive.