Lady Luck has muso David singing new tune

 By Tim Howard

 There haven’t been a lot of happy stories to come out of the floods that ravaged the Northern Rivers in the past year, but Lismore musician David Birch has one.

It does come with a qualifier. David lost most of his belongings when the February 28 floods hit Lismore and his move to Grafton has separated him from the friends he made in the region over 20+ years of living and performing.

But on the whole he feels like he has been extraordinarily lucky.

Seven months on from that dreadful Monday he finds himself living in a three-room flat in Grafton, with barely any possessions, no car and his existence turned upside down, but thinking life is looking up.

“I can’t explain how I got here,” he said. “At some stage I filled out a lot of forms and this opportunity came up to relocate to Grafton. So I took it.”

David said like the way the floodwater rose in his rented room in a Lismore pub, things happened fast.

“It came up so fast,” he said of his experience in the flood. “It was so quick you could watch it rise minute by minute.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do, then suddenly there was this guy in a tinny outside telling us to get in.”

His rescuer took him to the gymnasium at Southern Cross University, where he was allocated a couple of metres floorspace along with about 300 other people.

David was forced to leave most of his clothes, his bedding and his extensive music collection to the floodwater, but he did grab his most treasured possession.

“I couldn’t take much, but I made sure I had my guitar,” he said.

“As long as I have my guitar, I’ll be all right. I can always get out on the street and busk and get enough money to buy myself a feed.”

For a musician who once fronted The Nightcap Band and put out a CD of his songs, Byron Journey, in the 1990s, busking on the streets was a distant memory.

“I can remember busking on the streets outside Woolworths in Kings Cross, but that was a long time ago,” he said.

Even longer ago, David and his family moved to Australia from Somerset, the home of cider.

“I was 14. We were living in a little village near Bristol, called Uphill,” he said. “My life’s been uphill all the way, you could say.”

David said he still feels traumatised by the floods, but it doesn’t compare to what some people experienced.

“It affected people in different ways,” he said. “I met a woman who had lost her home and was staying at university gym with her five-year-old son.

“The little boy refused to get into the shower. Something about the sound of falling water made him think it would flood again and he would freak out.

“That’s trauma. That’s the sort of things people are dealing with in Lismore now.”

David said what he loved about coming to Grafton was how “normal” people were.

“To be fair I’m probably still traumatised myself,” he said. “But it’s so nice when you go out for a walk – and because I don’t have a car I that happens a lot – you say hello and people smile and say hello.

“If you get into a conversation you talk about anything, not going over and over what happened in the flood and how bad everything is.

“And don’t get me wrong, everything is bad, absolutely terrible. But if you’re lucky enough to be out of it, the relief is fantastic.”

David said he was appalled at the number of people still left homeless after the floods.

“When you’ve got somewhere permanent to stay it’s such a relief. I can only feel for all those people who are still homeless.

“The response has been way too slow. When you think there are still people living in tents and their cars after the fires a few years ago, it makes you angry.”

David said when he got out the recovery was underway, but that was also stressful.

“The army was there, with bulldozers and backhoes clearing out the streets,” he said.

“Everyone’s belongings were just piled up in the streets to be carted away to the rubbish dump.

“There were fridges and industrial gas canisters floating around in the water. It was a torrid time.”

But David said now his walks, which ironically often take him to the banks of the Clarence River in Grafton, where we met at the weekend, were calming.

“Look at this scene,” he said. “It’s so peaceful. Grafton has such wide streets, I call them avenues.

“It just feels so far removed from where I’ve just come from.

“I have somewhere where my sister can come and visit me when she comes in a little while.”