THE RECENT NEW SOUTH WALES FLOODS.

Colonist, Volume LII, Issue 12767, 8 February 1910, Page 1

THE RECENT NEW SOUTH WALES FLOODS.

The "Sydney Morning Herald" says one instance of successful struggle against tlie flood is especially noteworthy. At Dunmore, near West Maitland, a party of farmers and residents, under tlie president of tlieir shire couucil, worked from 6 a.m. en Sunday until 2 a.m. on Monday, fighting the flood along a half-mile of embankment they wero raising for the protection of their farms. They won by an inch. Tlie river slackened just in time, they had saved five hundred acres under crop. There were many gallant rescues that in the hurry and tangle of things have been passed over with a word or two as matters almost of course." And there has been a great. deal of quick ingenuity. The idea that an up-country Australian can turn his hand to almost anything has been well borne out. At Moreo a plumber built. two boats of galvanised iron, making them into a sort of catamaran, with oildrums for floats. S : x Moreo carpenters built a flat-bottomed punt, eighteen feet long, within three hours. One boat made a forty-mi : c' journey, from Gunnedah to Boggabri. Another from Gunnedah rescued a rabbiter and his wife and children, who had tied themselves to trees. In answer to an appeal from Dangar'Village, a suburb of Narrabri, separated i from it by a creek, a boat was_ run upon a lorry over a doubtful bridge, | ond had just crossed its shaky structure when a floating shed was driven by the current against it. and it carried bodily away. These "cases are but few of many. The State will soon recover from all this, will gain from the saturation of the summer-parched soil, and the abundance of water ahead; but thousands of individuals have lost much tbat they cannot get back. Where we can be-lp them, there we must. If it were ever a man's duty to give what he can afford, it is our duty now. Dreadnought and patriotic funds have splendid aims, but the public disaster fund has a higher claim thaji any of these.