Editor’s note: “The 2025 Queensland floods refer to significant flooding that impacted the northeast Australian state of Queensland in late January, early February, into March and April 2025. The disaster resulted in at least two fatalities from flooding, 31 fatalities from a disease outbreak and prompted mass evacuation orders in Queensland’s coastal regions.”
According to flood gauges, the enormous body of water has surpassed the 1974 event, widely considered the largest flood in Queensland history. But it was still sitting within the floodplain, Sheldon says, just “reaching the edges” of where people thought it would go.
This was a natural phenomenon, Sheldon says, even though the devastation experienced by towns and communities was awful.
“The beauty of these river systems is that they are some of the last unregulated rivers in the world. What we’re witnessing is just rivers being rivers. There are no big dams on these systems. There’s no massive irrigation industry. So this is just what big rivers do.”
“But amid the challenges and the loss, Rowlands said the normally dusty flood plains around his home town were already lush and green and “pretty magic”.
And when the waters do recede, he expects these landscapes, normally among the harshest in the world, to explode with life.”
The unforgiving red earth of the Australian outback has undergone a jaw-dropping transformation — and locals are calling it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to witness Mother Nature at her finest.
After months of devastating floods triggered by the double punch of Cyclones Alfred and Dianne, the vast, sun-scorched heart of Queensland has now burst into colour and life.
Where there was once dust and drought there is now grass, greenery and flowers stretching as far as the eye can see.
By Kristine Sabillo / Mongabay
Intense flooding submerged usually dry areas of Queensland state in eastern Australia during the last week of March, forcing many people to evacuate and leave their livestock behind.
David Crisafulli, the Queensland premier, called the floods “unprecedented” as several places in western Queensland recorded the worst floods in the last 50 years, CNN reported. Some of the affected areas are normally very dry, including the Munga-Thirri-Simpson Desert, a vast arid region known for its sand dunes.
The rains started on March 23 as an inland low pressure area pulled monsoon rain from the tropical north of Australia into the arid landscape of southern Queensland, The Guardian reported. Cyclone Dianne, which reached Queensland from the west a few days later, further intensified the rains.
With rainfall reaching 600 millimeters (24 inches) over the last week of March, almost double the yearly average of some towns, record-breaking flood levels were reported in central Queensland’s Stonehenge, Jundah and Windorah areas. ABC news called it “the biggest flood in living memory for many people across outback Queensland,” exceeding the infamous 1974 flooding in the region.
In many towns, people were rescued using helicopters.
“We flew over a lot of water. We were just amazed how much water is around our place where we have never seen water before,” resident Ann-Maree Lloyd, evacuated by air from their home in the town of Yaraka, told ABC.
The agriculture industry is also facing significant losses. Crisafulli said more than 140,000 livestock, including cattle, sheep, goats and horses, were reported missing or dead, The Guardian reported on April 2. “This number will continue to rise,” he added. Images online show animals stuck in floods or mud.
Crisafulli said recovery may take years. For the agricultural industry, it means rebuilding some 4,700 kilometers (2,900 miles) of private roads and 3,500 km (2,200 mi) of fencing.
“Not only economically, but psychosocially — we’re already getting reports of landholders that are struggling mentally with the prospect of what they know is to come,” Tony Rayner, mayor of the affected Longreach region, told The Guardian.
Environmental geography professor Steve Turton wrote in The Conversation that some meteorologists have dubbed the recent rains a pseudo-monsoon, “because the normal Australian monsoon doesn’t reach this far south — the torrential rains of the monsoonal wet season tend to fall closer to the northern coasts.”
He added most of the rainwater dumped in the dry areas will now flow slowly through channels on the ground until it fills up Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, usually a massive, salty, dry depression in the northern region of South Australia state, covering an area of more than 9,000 km2 (3,500 mi2).
“When Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre fills, it creates an extraordinary spectacle,” Turton wrote. Millions of brine shrimp hatch from eggs in the waters, which draw fish carried in the floodwaters, which in turn attract many waterbirds, he added.
Photo by Tobias Keller on Unsplash
This is nothing new. Every few years or so, North Queensland gets some heavy rain and every time, it is called a new extreme event never seen before. This is not an unusual amount of rain. It is an example of a cultural phenomenon, collective amnesia.
People who live there may in some cases really believe they have not seen this before, and in some cases they may be exagerating to get financial aid as victims of an unanticipated disaster. But whichever reason might apply in any particular case, this is a normal rainy season even in that part of the world. It would be well to be skeptical of news reports.
Most of the deserts of Australia are manmade by thousands of years of aboriginies setting fires. That wiped out the megafauna and allowed a few desert resistant species of plant like the eucalyptus to take over and become the dominant forms in Australia today.
If the climate did ever return to normal, meaning as it was before the aboriginies ruined it, that would be the very best thing that could possibly happen. But inevitably, watch this ”unusual” rain be called a ”disaster” and be blamed on ”greenhouse gases” from burning coal and oil.