Floods force new paths through old landscapes

I’d been watching the water move across my patch for days, trickling through the grass, creeping down the green beds of billabongs and seeping into the giant sand pits dug out decades ago for use as road ballast and brick making.

It started as a silent occupation, but now there was a murmur like a distant city or the hiss of a giant snake shifting over tree roots and logs.

Then there was the electric crackle of frogs. They were everywhere.

I rounded a corner and the murmur became a low pounding.

I topped a rise and looked down and there it was — a stream of fast water the colour of frothy milk and tea flowing from a higher pond into a low pool as the river rushed to find its true level.

Water always finds its true level.

I’ve lived around this patch of the Lower Goulburn National Park in Shepparton’s north for more than 30 years, but it’s the first time I’ve been able to actually watch how it floods.

The floods of 2011 and 2022 happened too quickly for me and old Finski to get out there and track the course of the water.

But this time, I saw it arrive day by day, accompanied by squadrons of ducks and soccer stadiums of chanting frogs.

I must admit I became a bit obsessed. I was out there every morning checking the new levels and disappearing tracks.

It turned into a new unfamiliar landscape, until one morning, my path was cut by a new water course flowing into another, lower sandpit.

Suddenly everything changed and I either had to find new paths or change my routine and stop walking altogether.

I climbed over fallen trees and branches and waded through boggy patches to find myself in entirely new unexplored territories.

I got wet feet a few times.

Things became so unfamiliar that one morning I actually got lost in my own bush backyard.

What I thought was my home path turned out to be a new route through a foreign landscape in the opposite direction.

That’s when I decided to forge a completely new walking route away from the encroaching waters.

It was strange at first, but now I enjoy my new surroundings, and I’m forging new paths every day.

Then I remembered I had been here before.

In 1980s London after the collapse of my first marriage, I found myself trying to forge new pathways through a swamp of old ghosts.

Every street I went down, every corner I turned and every pub or restaurant I went into, I was met by a rising tide of memories and faces like flotsam.

I realised this was her town and suddenly I was a stranger in my own backyard.

So I booked a ticket to Australia where an old schoolfriend was busy forging a path through his own flooded forest.

Landscape always changes after a flood.

The familiar becomes strange and blocked with debris.

The trick is to forge new paths without getting your feet wet, and remember that water always finds its true level.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.