Once, the inappropriate car driven by my husband and myself became lodged in the mire of a blacksoil road between Charters Towers and Aramac. It could not be dislodged.

People smarter than ourselves did not use that long and unreliable road.

We watched, from memory, two sunsets from the front seat of our car, surrounded by mud and nothing else. When a man in a ute finally slid towards us, eyeing with some amusement the evidence of nuts, cherry brandy and empty water containers, we greeted him like God.

When the help he sent back some hours later arrived, legend has it I bit the sandwich clean out of our saviour’s hand. Best corned meat and pickles I had ever tasted, abruptly ending the brown rice diet I had been observing.

We are not people who are prepared for things.

My husband, while he is a bushie, is a she’ll-be-right bushie. I grew up in Brisbane.

So, when my daughter woke up sick a week-and-a-half ago, I did not make the trip into town to stock up on food and other supplies in case we got a flood.

Then we got a flood.

Today, I am waking up in our home, about eight or so kilometres from Gunnedah, to another day of isolation in our own kingdom.

We are the lucky ones. Yesterday, we received a helicopter drop of food kindly organised for people such as ourselves who never envisaged having to live off what you thought was a well-stocked pantry. Our cold room, our pantry, our fridge – I always thought they were groaning with food but somehow this sojourn has come to us right at the end of a big shopping cycle.

The beer has run out. The milk and bread had disappeared before the food drop – and I had even tried my hand at baking.

Yes, people do live many months in the outback in isolation without trouble. We are not those people.

All the while we have been seeing the amazing images of millions and millions of litres of water continually pouring down the Namoi River and rising into friends’ homes and businesses, then dispersing, then coming up again, even worse than before.

The water lapped at the foot of our house pad, turning the large back paddock we watched become dust during the drought into a torrent of water.

The rare glimpses of our neighbours have caused great excitement and even our daughter, who is going through a phase of shunning school and all social interaction, is almost ready to see the world again.

While we have been isolated, we saw a documentary about the Fyre Festival debacle, watching entitled young people go native after only a day without charged iphones, en suites and hairdryer diffuser attachments.

I once wrote a news story about a couple who got left behind on a North Queensland island. When they were found about two days later, they were wearing coconuts.

What you think will be Love Island, is actually more like Lord of the Flies.

The cats position themselves at threatening angles to anyone eating any meat. There was a nasty altercation over a cinnamon scroll. Family members have been observed scuttling furtively away holding something out of the fridge. My husband had a one-man party with the last of the rum.

It’s not pretty.

In the past two years, we have seen drought, mouse plague, pandemic and now flood on our patch of paradise. Somehow, our biggest learnings have been about ourselves.

– Marie Low is a freelance journalist located in an ark in Gunnedah, New South Wales.