The Big Clean

This weekend I joined in with the thousands of other Brisbanites who took to the streets of our city armed with brooms, mops, buckets and gloves to help out those hit worst by the floods. It was just stunning to see how many people had given up their weekends to help out complete strangers.

About 6 members of my family started off in one house that had been inundated up to just under the ceiling. We were gurneying out the mud and sludge that had settled in the house and cleaning off the silt that had settled on all of their salvagable furniture. We were there for about 5 hours and by the time we had left there were about 30 volunteers in this house, cleaning everything they could get their hands on. Not one person in this house had known the owners prior to the floods and most people still didn't even know what they looked like. There were just locating dirty things and turning them into clean things. It was wonderful to see and I have never been so proud to call myself an Australian.

By the end of the day our little team had mucked out three houses in the western suburbs of Brisbane.  We were stunningly filthy. Sewerage-tainted mud was caked onto our shoes, legs, arms, face, hair. My feet were the most impressive.


Those runners were white at the beginning of the day



Tide marks

I'm glad I was able to help out and I'm glad so many others are doing the same. Now I've just got to explain to my back that what we did was a good thing and hope it understands and stops punishing me soon.