A chair hangs from a tree. Across the road, a water tank is wrapped around a power pole.
Inside the historic Lions Den Hotel, shirts left behind by tourists for decades are caked in thick, brown mud and a stench unique to floods permeates the air.
Rossville, south of Cooktown, is a disaster zone, like so many small townships and communities along the Far North Queensland coast reeling in the wake of the worst flooding they have ever experienced.
The Lions Den is one of those iconic pubs found in isolated areas, with lots of memorabilia around the bar and where every tourist wants a photo. It's been around for 148 years but now its future is uncertain.
Craig "Prickles" Thorn is the pub's unofficial groundskeeper. This week, as floodwaters, almost submerged the old building and the whole town, Prickles was one of 16 locals who found themselves perched precariously on the pub's roof and a nearby donga, desperately hoping for rescue.
Prickles says Ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper was a non-event in their part of the world, but the bucketing rain that followed caused all the trouble.
Locals woke up one morning and the water was up to their necks in just 15 minutes.
Most of the people climbed onto the roof of a donga. Prickles was on the roof of the main pub with his dog.
"There was a sea of water around us. It was still roaring," Prickles said.
"The power of that water was incredible."
Heroic rescues
The water was rising quickly and they didn't have much time left.
Enter Magoo. The Queensland Premier says he is owed a beer. The Prime Minster has lauded his heroics.
For days, he was a mystery man, a pilot flying a tiny Robinson R22 mustering helicopter, who miraculously rescued 16 people from the roof of the Lions Den in the pouring rain.
Bret Little, aka Magoo, is one of the many heroes and characters of the past week in the state's far north, as the remnants of Ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper dumped an extraordinary 2 metres of rain on the coastline from Innisfail to the Cape.
It's Queensland at its best and worst. Cyclones. Ordinary people doing heroic deeds. Miraculous rescues. Cairns airport underwater and planes submerged. And it wouldn't be the country's far north if there wasn't a crocodile there somewhere.
A 2.5-metre crocodile was caught in Ingham, 115km north of Townsville, in floodwaters in the centre of town.
Tragically, one life has been lost, that of an 85-year-old man missing from Degarra, 110km north of Port Douglas.
Remote community hit hard
Rossville musician Gavin Dear is another man the premier has said is owed a beer.
Hearing people were stranded, with two mates, he headed to the area of the Lions Den in a tinny. Someone was shouting "help, help" from the trees.
The tinny trio rescued two men clinging to trees as the water swirled below. One of them was shaking uncontrollably after being almost squashed when a shipping container hurtled past him.
Mr Dear says it was "amazing, miraculous, biblical".
At Degarra, eight more people were rescued by another boatie, who braved the conditions to save lives.
By Thursday, almost 300 people had been evacuated from the remote community of Wujal Wujal, 170km north of Cairns, with the help of the military.
Wujal Wujal elders had never, in their lives, seen anything like the wall of water that engulfed their homes and towns in such a short space of time.
At 6pm on the Sunday, Coraleen Shipton went for a drive to check out the river levels. The water was rising quickly and by midnight the phones were running hot, homes were going under and people scrambled onto the roof of the town's health clinic.
Ms Shipton said the community had endured floods before but nothing like this.
"It never stopped raining. It kept raining and raining," she said from Cooktown, where the community has now been evacuated.
Kathleen Walker believes without the ADF coming to rescue them, they would have all drowned.
She has lost everything — her home, photos and the turkey and ham she was preparing for Christmas Day. Her mother and grandparents were bought up in Wujal Wujal and it's her home.
"We are strong people, we will get through this together," she said.
Mayor misses child's birth
Wujal Wujal's Mayor, Bradley Creek, is just grateful everyone in his community got out alive. Community is a word he uses often as he reflects on the past week.
It's been traumatic but he says he needs to stay strong for the community and for his people.
"Everybody looked after everybody and came out at the other end," Mr Creek says. He applauds the young people from his community who risked their lives to help their elders.
He has mixed emotions. While he was in Cooktown with his people, his wife gave birth to a daughter in Cairns. He wasn't there for the birth.
"I can't get happy, I can't help being sad", Mr Creek says of the joy of new life tinged by his community losing everything.
The prime minster and Queensland premier headed to the region to assure stricken residents they were not forgotten just days before Christmas, vowing governments were listening.
Why so little warning?
Now, as the massive clean-up in towns up the coast from Cairns ramps up and people there start counting the damage, questions are being asked about why the huge deluge, in the wake of Ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper crossing the coast, was not better forecast.
The BOM says the lead time for the prolonged rainfall forecast was short.
So how did it come to this? A century's worth of flood records broken by an unrelenting rain event.
The genesis was Ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper, which formed on December 2, 2023 near the Solomon Islands and made landfall in Wujal Wujal on December 13 as a category two.
It was the first cyclone named in the 2023-2024 season. It was rare to have a cyclone in December, especially in an El Niño. Jasper crossed the coast with relatively minor damage and destruction and locals breathed a sigh of relief. The worst had not eventuated.
But it was a short-lived relief. For two days it rained non-stop, and then the flooding started.
Now the Lions Den publican, Judy Fry — one of the 16 plucked from the roof by Magoo — is back, trying to clean up.
She wants to have one of the bars open by mid-January but admits it could take a year to get the place back on the road.
It's an iconic establishment with quite a history — back in the day it was a miner's pub; the workers would write on the wall how much they had spent and how much credit they had and sign it.
Ms Fry is like so many, all along the coastline, spending Christmas cleaning up, but grateful for their lives.
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2023-12-23 20:38:52Z
CBMiamh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIzLTEyLTI0L2Zhci1ub3J0aC1xdWVlbnNsYW5kLWZsb29kLXRvd25zLXN1cnZpdmUtY29tbXVuaXR5LXNwaXJpdC8xMDMyNjA1MDLSAShodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTAzMjYwNTAy
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