ELLEN COULTER, REPORTER: Just over an hour’s drive from Hobart, a major clean-up is underway.
BRETT GLEESON, PROPERTY OWNER: There’s a lot of lot of fencing gone. Roads damaged, some levy banks all washed out, a lot of debris.
ELLEN COULTER: This is the first time Brett Gleeson has been able to survey his 2000 acre property since flooding started on the weekend.
When we visited the farm on Tuesday, Brett, his partner and daughter had been stranded in their home for three days.
BRETT GLEESON: The paddocks were 90 per cent, down the bottom of property was 90 per cent covered with water. So yeah, I’ve never seen that before in my time being here.
ELLEN COULTER: Now they’re free, he’s estimating up to $100,000 worth of damage to his property, roads and fences.
BRETT GLEESON: It is very disheartening. And you clean things up and you just, you’re on edge every time you get a lot of rain, and that’s the joys of living where we live.
ELLEN COULTER: Downstream, the swollen river Derwent has been causing havoc for other communities.
MICHELLE DRACOULIS, DERWENT VALLEY MAYOR: I’ve got older people coming up to me saying they haven’t seen anything like this in 40 or 50 years.
ELLEN COULTER: Successive cold fronts brought destructive winds to much of Tasmania over the weekend and early in the week, damaging properties, leaving thousands without power and resulting in hundreds of calls for assistance.
DAVID BOWMAN, UNIVERSITY OF TASMANIA: You’ve got to acknowledge the suffering and the fear, I think, that such a weather event strikes in the community.
ELLEN COULTER: Walkers were rescued from hazardous conditions on Hobart’s Kunanyi/Mt Wellington, which saw a wind gust above 170-kilometres per hour.
Those cold fronts hit much of Australia’s south-east, destructive winds also swept across Melbourne, and a woman died after a tree fell on a cabin in Moama on the Victoria-New South Wales border.
JONATHAN HOW, BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY: So on the whole, it has been quite an intense period of severe weather across the south east.
ELLEN COULTER: I’m standing here on the banks of the Derwent, which has been flooding after days and days of rain and high winds. You can see behind me we’ve even got entire trees floating past and it’s strange to think that this is going on in Tasmania while in other parts of the country they’re dealing with completely different extremes.
The nation’s hottest ever winter temperature was recorded when Yampi Sound in Western Australia reached 41.6 degrees last week.
On Friday, Birdsville surpassed Queensland’s hottest winter temperature on record – hitting 39.7 degrees.
The same thing happened in South Australia when Oodnadatta reached 39.4 degrees.
And Sydney Airport saw its warmest winter temperature – hitting 31.6 degrees.
JONATHAN HOW: For Australia, August 2024 was the warmest August on record. We’re looking at some of the numbers, it was three degrees above the long-term average. So three degrees in day-to-day temperature doesn’t seem like much, but when you talk about average across the whole month, it is extremely significant.
DAVID BOWMAN: We’re seeing this early start to the fire season in New South Wales. That’s like, gulp.
We’re really seeing the force and the strength of an angry climate.
ELLEN COULTER: Professor of fire science David Bowman says the past week of weather shows us not just how extreme weather events can be, but how quickly conditions can change.
Tasmania, now flooded, had been in drought.
DAVID BOWMAN: The fact that was this whiplash from an extreme drought to extreme flooding and extreme winds and extreme coastal erosion, and that’s happening so quickly. That’s the thing that I think really needs to be understood in the community.
From what we’ve seen in New South Wales, we can have these flash droughts, where you can very quickly switch all of that green, good stuff to really flammable, dry stuff.
JONATHAN HOW: The message from us would be to keep an eye on the forecasted warnings, especially when we start to see these severe weather events, the conditions can change very quickly.
ELLEN COULTER: That’s something Derwent Valley Mayor Michelle Dracoulis is conscious of.
MICHELLE DRACOULIS: With an event like this one, where we’ve got all this water, much of it was needed, I realise now that in the next month or two, we’re going to have some higher fire conditions because the grass will get taller.
DAVID BOWMAN: I would be certainly not fooled into thinking that because we’ve had some good rain, that bushfires have been cancelled for this summer. Doesn’t work like that.
ELLEN COULTER: Those still cleaning up after the most recent disaster are hoping they’ll have a reprieve before the next.
BRETT GLEESON: Just prioritise what needs to be fixed first and get on our way to getting it back to some sort of normality.
