Voice of Real Australia: Still fearless despite the floods

Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from ACM, which has journalists in every state and territory. Sign up here to get it by email, or here to forward it to a friend. Today's is written by Voice of Real Australia podcast host Tom Melville.

Caileigh Toupin's T-shirt reads "Fearless", and that's a pretty accurate description of her. She lost her house when the town of Mullumbimby in northern NSW was inundated with floodwaters back in February but doesn't really want to talk about it.

There are more important things on her mind: her neighbours, her community.

When I met her back in April while speaking to people for the Disaster Country podcasts, Caileigh hadn't worked her day job for six weeks - not since the floods.

The CWA building in Mullumbimby where I met her was a hive of activity - people streamed in and out, trendy twenty-somethings tapped on Macbooks dispatching supplies and teams of volunteers to remote valleys to provide relief to isolated communities.

It's a crazy mix of people and backgrounds - one of the leaders has a PhD from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in "Ambient Experience", another person helps organise a local festival, and Caileigh herself ran a concierge service in town. All of that has taken a back seat to flood recovery, though.

There isn't a hierarchy, just a group of people getting stuck in any way they can. Caileigh's official title here - if a loose organisation which sprung together almost overnight out of necessity can have "official titles" - is Environmental Department Coordinator and Isolated Communities Support.

In the days after the February floods, hundreds of people in the hinterland above Byron Bay were cut off by landslides. One place we visited had a whole kilometre of road knocked out by a landslide with no word on when it might be fixed.

Caileigh's job is to liaise with the people stuck behind the shifting earth and work out what they need, then help provide it. It's dangerous work - spending your days walking down muddy tracks in difficult to reach places with the landscape still moving above you. It must be stressful. But where else would she be?

She seems amped up, excited. She's doing remarkable things out here, and really helping people. A lot of the people in the cut off valleys are middle-aged and older - they'd struggle to get supplies if it weren't for people like her. The authorities tried to evacuate these people because it's too hard and too expensive to keep them safe in their hinterland redoubts. But they don't want to go, so Caileigh steps in, with her squadron of dedicated volunteers, to help where she can.

At some point, though, this mess will get cleaned up and things will go back to normal.

But Caileigh says her experiences up here have changed everything - she's loved it, it's been fulfilling and affirming and challenging - and she can't go back to the way things were.

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