Remembering the Night of Noah: Flood Memory and Townsville's Floods of 1998 and 2019

Abstract

In January 1998, Townsville experienced a flood event that came to be known as the Night of Noah. Local media coverage painted the event as exceptional, despite the city’s reliance on monsoons and cyclones for its water supply. When a subsequent extreme wet-weather event and flooding occurred in January 2019, the Night of Noah was quickly recalled, but media coverage also depicted the more recent event as exceptional. Experiences of the 2019 flood suggest that, following Noah, a sustainable flood memory was not developed, but the development and promotion of a local flood memory will be necessary to guide Townsville’s future planning and development.