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Figure 24. Jeff Shellberg talks with Philip Yam, Louie Native, and Viv Sinnamon about erosion
and water flow along the Eight Mile Creek at Oriners.
Philip Yam commented that Dixie Station was the only place that could provide people at
Oriners with a warning about floods coming down. However Viv Sinnamon recalled that Brian
Hughes was able to use the Palmer River as a proxy for conditions at Mosquito Lagoon:
When we were here during the wet [camped at Mosquito Lagoon in the 1990s], Brian
[Hughes] dropped us in the helicopter. He was out at Drumduff, he was working out at
Drumduff. He said „I‟ll just keep an eye on the Palmer, and if it starts looking a bit radical
I‟m coming to pick you up‟. We got through the full trip, and the day he came to pick us up,
it was just as well he did, because the rivers were coming down, and we watched it, it was
like the tide. I and Paddy [Yam] were the last ones, it was 3 [chopper] ferries to get
everyone back to Kowanyama, and in the end we were tucked into a little corner of the
ridge, and we were cutting down trees and knocking antbed over and everything else,
trying to make a spot for the helicopter. By the time Brian came in for that last load, he had
to come in through the trees and land on this little tiny spot. We were stuffed if he hadn‟t
come, because there was no way we were going to cut these big ironwood trees down. But
he slipped in, picked up our baggage, all our stuff, took it out onto a little piece of road that
was dry, dropped that there, and then come back and picked us up because it was just too
dangerous to take off in a heavy helicopter. And when he took off on the road, he had to
take off like an aircraft. We were watching that water and we could see it visibly rising.
Because we landed in a dip and if you saw that camp at Mosquito we had, [it was] like a
little dish. It was a real little helicopter pad, but it filled with water. But you could actually
see the water rising, it was fast.
Viv Sinnamon
When the water does arrive at Oriners, the whole area floods, creating forests in flood. Philip
Yam and Louie Native gave their response below when being shown the images:
Philip Yam: Yeah, that‟s what it looks like in the wet, see all that water there.
Louie Native: You can just see a sheet, eh, a big sheet of water.
Philip Yam: One year they came, when they picked us all up in that one big blue chopper,
well I was the last one on the last trip, That whole area, we wasn‟t even flying that high, we
were just above the treetops. That whole country was underwater. Everywhere, there was
water everywhere.
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
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