Life on the land after the July 2022 flood is full of mud, challenges

I've been working in the mud for a couple of hours. I'm cold, I'm wet and this waterproof jacket can't keep the rain out.

I'm up to my knees in mud and floodwater, and at times these gumboots just aren't tall enough to keep it out.

I'm running out of clean clothes and I've almost given up on washing. It seems pointless when I'm covered in mud all the time.

It's hard to imagine that four years ago this place was a dust bowl in the midst of the worst drought in living memory. Now it's the wettest I have ever seen it - and two weeks on from the July flood the conditions remain extremely challenging.

More rain this week made things even worse. The ground is now wetter and even more slippery.

The cattle remain on higher ground and they're living in mud. All of their paddocks turned into an ocean and there's no feed left now. They are surviving on hay and taking refuge from the wet in an empty shed.

They don't like being moved from their pastures along the Hunter River at Hinton, in NSW's Hunter region. In fact, they often let me know that they don't need my help when they run the wrong way or complain about moving through a gate.

When I evacuated them they were oblivious to the fact their paddocks would be under about four metres of water within the next 24 hours.

Intense flash flooding on July 3, before the flood came, put half the farm underwater. Some of the cattle became surrounded by a lake, so I had to go in and get them. It was too wet for the ute and the tractor, so I was on foot.

Back on higher ground, I noticed a small black and white figure in the mud. I trekked over to investigate and realised a newborn calf had been abandoned by its mother.

The poor thing was cold and barely alive. The mum, and her baby, could have stayed warm on dry ground in the shed, but for some reason they didn't.

I took off my jackets and wrapped them around the calf to preserve its body temperature. I picked her up - she weighed about 40 kilograms - and I carried her through knee-deep mud, fighting the suction of the gumboots with every step. It was like quicksand.

About 50 metres later we arrived at the gravel road and I put her in the backseat of the car. I took her home to warm up under a horse rug with a hot water bottle.

I kept a close eye on her vital signs, and her body temperature. As it rose she became more alert. She opened her eyes and looked at me with gratitude. My heart melted.

I gave her a warm bottle of colostrum and she drank it all. Half an hour later she was standing up and walking around with a jacket on to keep her warm. I felt so relieved.

In two days time I did it all over again with another one. This time the mum was looking after her baby, but she had led it out into the mud and it was shivering.

IN OTHER NEWS:

This calf, another girl, came home and spent a night in the house. She recovered on a drip and eventually reunited with her mum in a yard on the driest part of the farm so she couldn't get stuck in the mud.

The floodwaters rose for a few days before it finally peaked. As it engulfed more of our highest paddock I set regular alarms each night to trek down to check the level.

The thought of having to evacuate the animals and the machinery was a bit overwhelming. Thankfully it didn't come to that.

When the Wollombi Brook is in major flood you know you're in trouble.

Some people around here call it the Cockfighter - that was its previous name - and they say when it's in major flood 'it's coming to get you'.

And get us it sure did. It was one of the biggest floods we have ever seen here - the biggest was the 1955.

It was a fast flood once it started overtopping the levee banks. Within a few hours it was swallowing the farm.

I've lived through floods my whole life. It's part of this gig on the land and when one is on the cards I know the drill.

This last one though, just four months since the March flood, has been hard to swallow.

Everything was already saturated and this month alone we have had more than 250 millimetres of rain - and it just keeps falling.

After previous floods I'd see some sunshine and within a couple of weeks the top soil would have started to dry out.

This time it was wet before the March flood, it dried out a bit afterwards, and now it's as wet as it ever was.

There is a long road ahead to recovery. All we can do is hope that predictions of another La Nina season in spring are wrong.

Some people have said to me that it's hard to find hope at a time like this, but all we can do is hope. Hope for sunshine, hope for a drier tomorrow, hope to see these drowned fields return to the sea of green we adore.

It's a journey, and we'll get there ... eventually.