The World’s Largest Garden Feature

The rain has been relentless and the north of the county is under water again. Nothing new there. But the most dramatic pictures come from the other side of the world, from Queensland, where entire suburbs have been drowned. These suburbs must have been built by supreme optimists because the lowlands of Queensland are forever being submerged.

Queensland’s most dramatic flooding took place in 1893 when the waters rose a full ten feet higher than they have this week. In fact the deluge was so great that a ship, the Paluma, which was berthed in the harbour, was lifted from her moorings and deposited in the botanical gardens, as this picture shows. It made quite an attractive ornamental feature amongst the palm trees for a while, but the dilemma of how to dispose of it was solved when a second deluge lifted it up and carried it out to sea. I think that’s a shame. If it had remained, the city fathers would have had a permanent reminder of the fact that Queensland is prone to flooding and they might have confined any future building to the higher ground.