Flood trauma remains strong among residents at Bunbartha

Ms Sheed said the flood experience of residents around Bunbartha had been different to many other areas.

“In Shepparton, in Mooroopna, it’s receded and so people start to take those steps of moving on, but here, it’s an incredibly daunting thing to not be back in your home, to not go in and rescue things, to not be able to make your way in,” she said.

“It’s tragic from so many points of view. There’s nothing surprising about how people were behaving or feeling here today.”

City of Greater Shepparton Mayor Shane Sali said the flood threat remained active, limiting how authorities could react in the short-term.

“We’re still actively involved in a flood emergency and that’s why it’s hard to transition to any strategic conversations,” he said.

Local resident Jim Grinter estimated his family had lost 100 per cent of its canola and wheat crops in the flood.

He said it was difficult to see the meeting achieving much.

“It’s a difficult thing to run these meetings and I appreciate that everybody’s got a different axe to grind,” he said.

“There’s a lot of frustration and understandably anybody who’s had their house flooded, there is nothing worse, I would have thought, than having your house flooded — we just managed to save ours.”

David Chalmers is a farm manager in the immediate area on a 1200-hectare property and put into perspective the emergency he and his wife faced as waters began rising.

“The water was coming over the flood bank behind us and I said (to my wife), ‘You’d better get in here, we’ll go to the shed to a mobile sprayer, which is very high, and it doesn’t matter how high the water gets we’ll be safe in here’ and within two hours there was three foot of water right through the machinery shed,” he said.

Mr Chalmers doubted the meeting would achieve much positive change.

“I don’t think it will do any damn good about the loch,” he said.