Brisbane Breached: The Story of a Drought Defaulted Floodplain
Rain of terror; menace of drought. What happens when a drought-prone city is built on a flood plain? … Topp’s 2024 publication explores the history of major riverine flooding in Brisbane, focusing on the devastating floods of 2011 and the more recent ‘rain bomb’ of 2022. Bravely, Brisbane Breached is as broad in its remit as the wide-ranging matters that plague flood management today, reflecting diverse topics that span flood mitigation and water security to politics, policy, and urban planning. Topp’s knowledgeable handle on many of these matters makes for a compellingly varied read…
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Brisbane Breached: The Story of a Drought Defaulted Floodplain
DAVID TOPP | 2024
Rain of terror; menace of drought. What happens when a drought-prone city is built on a flood plain?
This is the paradoxical narrative that David Topp embarks on in Brisbane Breached: The Story of a Drought Defaulted Floodplain. In a sequel to his previous book,Tennyson Breach (2012), Topp’s 2024 publication explores the history of major riverine flooding in Brisbane, focusing on the devastating floods of 2011 and the more recent ‘rain bomb’ of 2022.
Bravely, Brisbane Breached is as broad in its remit as the wide-ranging matters that plague flood management today, reflecting diverse topics that span flood mitigation and water security to politics, policy, and urban planning. Topp’s knowledgeable handle on many of these matters makes for a compellingly varied read, primarily appealing to audiences with legal and policy-related backgrounds or lived experience of flood events within Australia.
Brisbane Breached is composed as more of a study than a story, but this does not discount from the book’s emotional narrative. An opening overview of the city’s propensity for severe flooding and prolonged droughts provides a solid foundation for comprehending the events of February 2022. While damage to infrastructure – homes, bridges, shopping centres, and the like – is vividly recounted, Topp reminds us that the aftermath of disaster courses far deeper than the physical. The impact of floods has, enduringly, proven to be psychological and intergenerational, permeating the collective conscience of the South-East Queensland community to such an effect that despair is ‘unable to be hosed away like mud off walls after flood peaks subside’ (p. 191). Some events do not simply recede into memory like the tides.
Amidst a broader societal focus on flood management, a lesser-told narrative is that Brisbane is also inherently drought prone. Flooding, although exceptionally devastating and extraordinarily newsworthy, is in fact the anomaly. Brisbane Breached leans into this reality by portraying a well-constructed analysis of the various politicians, their ‘dammed lies’ [sic] and ensuing policies, which have, rather unsuccessfully, attempted to reckon with these dual forces. Yet, as Topp emphasises, flood events cannot be resolved with a mere technocratic solution. The management of Wivenhoe Dam is frequently discussed throughout the book as a point of debate; a synecdoche of sorts for one of the book’s primary themes of binaries and opposition.
Topp’s profession as a barrister is increasingly evident through his commentary on the litigation that occurred over the 2011 floods and the resulting management (or, perhaps more accurately, mismanagement) of the Wivenhoe Dam in 2022. These discussions tactfully segue into the penultimate chapter ‘Planning, Planning Policies and Circularities’, which highlights the circular logic that gives momentum to the political values accompanying the city’s merry-go-round of droughts and floods. As an urban planner with an interest in post-disaster management, these provocations were especially intriguing to me.
Here, Topp skilfully critiques the ‘building back better’ epithet that dominates flood resilience discourse, reflecting on the various retrofitting and buy-back schemes that developed in the wake of the 2022 floods. Before any practical solution is reached, Brisbane Breached argues that we must adopt a change of mindset away from supply, and instead harness an approach characterised by radical proactivity, good governance, and genuine collaboration. In the lead up to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games, Queensland’s response to water security and housing communities in flood-prone areas will no doubt become more consequential in the public eye.
It may be true that accounts of disaster do not sit comfortably with the prevailing narrative that our nation wishes to tell of prosperity and progress; so too, the disillusioned perspective of these disasters as merely ‘natural’, unreckonable forces of nature. But, as Brisbane Breached contends, willed amnesia is not an option. While broken attempts to respond appropriately to flood events can quickly erode community trust in government, more damaging is the downplay or blatant ignorance of their impact.
‘Rain, rain go away and don’t come back to Plainland ever again’ sung Topp’s grandmother in 1910, aged six, in her modest hometown of Plainland, midway between Brisbane and Toowoomba. She had lived through four major flooding events in her lifetime. Today, it is estimated that every eight-year-old in Northern Queensland has lived through two ‘once-in-a-century’ floods already.[1] As we face the brunt of the climate crisis, it is clear the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events will only continue to increase – not just in Queensland, but across the nation.
Brisbane Breached: The Story of a Drought Defaulted Floodplain is a well-articulated study of the historical chronicles of Brisbane, spanning a broad array of topics while pertaining relevance to a more intimate audience group of practitioners. The book presents an impressive collection of historical recounts weaved with personal narrative, constructed in such a way to educate, provoke conversation, and inspire action. Difficult as they will be, Topp urges that these conversations—whether within government, with our neighbours, or simply a fellow reader—need to begin now.
Brisbane Breached: The Story of a Drought Defaulted Floodplain is published by Connor Court Publishing.
Guest Reviewer: Eloise Reddy, Summer Fellow 2024-25, State Library of NSW
[1] Jackson, B 2025, ‘’Expect more’: Second ‘once-in-a-century’ flood in six years worsened by climate change’, news.com.au, 6 February, https://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/expect-more-second-onceinacentury-flood-in-six-years-worsened-by-climate-change/news-story/cdf727dc3bc95905fa329eeeda5a16ca, accessed 15 February 2025.