Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Ten days into his journey walking the Brisbane River, author Simon Cleary and his brother arrived at a remote cabin on a hill near Caboonbah, north of Lake Wivenhoe. They intended to spend one night there.
They awoke to the pounding of rain on the corrugated iron roof. “It was the wettest May on record,” Cleary says of that month in 2022. “The banks of the river were impossible to traverse.
The creeks were also impassable.” They ended up stuck in the cabin for four days – “not knowing whether or not the rain would stop, not knowing whether we would be able to find a route ultimately around Lake Wivenhoe”. Soon, both the nearby highways were cut by floodwaters.
To make matters worse, his brother was struck down with COVID-like symptoms. This was the moment when Cleary had to ask himself: had he made a huge mistake? Author Simon Cleary on the Upper Brisbane River, 2022. It took him just under a month to walk its length.
Credit: Simon Cleary Cleary’s self-imposed mission to walk the length of the Brisbane River (Maiwar) from its western source at Mount Stanley to the river’s mouth in Moreton Bay is recounted in his book Everything Is Water (UQP). A barrister by trade who has published three novels, Cleary was inspired to hike the river by curiosity about the Brown Snake that winds through our city. It was also a sentimental journey.
“I grew up on the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range in Toow.
