I’m joining Becky in her July Square Photo Challenge over at The Life of B. The rules of the challenge are simple: most photos must be square and fit the theme word tree. Look for #treesquare. Come with me on a Central Queensland road trip starring trees and the beautiful landscapes of my home state.
Clermont
On 29th December 1916 disaster struck the little town of Clermont. The previous day a tropical cyclone off the coast had delivered torrential rain over the central Queensland region and early that morning a wall of water rushed along Sandy and Wolfgang Creeks, destroying the town and killing 65 people.
A flood memorial on the corner of Drummond and Capricorn Streets commemorates the tragedy.
A marker on the Flood Tree shows the height of the water at the peak of the flood and the memorial plaques tell the story.
Later on that fateful day in 1916 a piano was found downstream on Sandy Creek, stuck high in a tree where the raging water had left it. Across the road from the flood memorial a replica piano, wedged in the branches of a gum tree, is another reminder of the day Clermont was changed forever.
The Eternal Traveller 
Mother Nature is always in control. We, humans, just sometimes forget.
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I’m thinking the people in Clermont would never have anticipated a flood of that size would ever occur. It’s so far inland and usually dry.
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Australia does do extreme weather very well! I remember a tropical cyclone – Tracy – that hit Darwin in 1974, also in December, might even have been Christmas Day. My cousin and family lived there at that time, but luckily were not injured.
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Yes, Tracy was the mother of all cyclones. It was early Christmas morning when she struck and the whole town was flattened. Total disaster. Tracy was a category 5 cyclone. When we lived in Darwin, Gretel struck. She was only category 1 and that was scary enough. I can’t imagine how awful and frightening a more intense cyclone must be.
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Scary. We get strong gales here, but nothing like that.
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And that’s a good thing.
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Never underestimate the power of water. I like the replica piano in the tree – it really gives a sense of the realities of what happened.
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Yes, it makes it all seem so real. The memorial is beautifully done.
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I think Australia seems to do memorials really well.
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A sad story.
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Very sad. Whole families lost in this event.
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😟
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What a sad story, Carol. That’s a huge loss of lives, but especially in a small town.
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Yes, it’s hard to imagine the huge effect it must have had.
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We just had a flash flood in Flagstaff, about an hour from here, higher in the mountains. I don’t know the loss of lives, but I doubt that it could ever come close to that.
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I hope everyone there is safe and well.
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Yes, we are, not all in Flagstaff, though. I saw a man and his two children being rescued from a jeep where they were sitting on the roof as the water rushed around them up to the windshield. https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/rescue-of-dad-2-young-girls-amid-monsoon-flooding-arizona/982608
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very scary!
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Truly!
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Very sad, but they have remembered beautifully – nature terrifies me sometimes and I have this suspicion that nature is going to be terrifying us more frequently in the years to come
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It’s a very simple memorial but says all it needs to.
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