Dave Rastovich - Patagonia

In rural New South Wales, Dave Rastovich, Patagonia Surfing Ambassador, tends to his land in an untroubled and slow-paced approach. Unlike the categorized landscape around him, Dave’s farm reflects the synergistic design of the ecosystems that plants naturally flourish in.

Talking to Dave on his experience of the floods that devastated Northern New South Wales this year, his outlook spans a wide range of themes – from mental health to industrialisation – but, like with his farm, he shows a simple yet considered understanding of each element and their connections.

The Boat:

I’ve been in this region for 20 odd years, I’ve lived through a few flood moments, so, it’s not actually too shocking to have a flooding experience most years. But what happened this year with the floods, and the scale of all the water that was falling … we’re talking Sunshine Coast all the way down to Bellingen totally inundated with water.

What we’d noticed at the outset was that the region west and south of Byron Bay – which is flat country – was pretty much 30-50km of inland ocean basically. So, once the magnitude of the flood was obvious, and that there was no let-up with the weather, those of us who could reach any of the river systems with our boats jumped into doing that. Just getting in the water and going and just looking for people.

I have this boat that was made by my neighbour. His name’s George Greeno, he’s one of the most respected elders in the surfing community, in the boat building community and the fishing community, he’s just a genius of a man. I have one of his boats that he built in his backyard in the 90s. It’s like a rapid response boat, it can handle any kind of water that the ocean throws at it.

I grabbed my neighbour who was a hot-air balloon driver in the region here. He knows all of the backroads, he knows all of the hills, all of the country because he’s always drifting around in his balloon and landing in paddocks here, there and everywhere.

He and I grabbed another friend. She has a horse-riding business in the region and is super tapped into the community of people with horses on properties.

She’d gotten word that there were stranded horses and other animals in these rural communities. These places where the people had been evacuated two days before, but their animals were still stuck somewhere, really struggling.

We loaded up my boat with vet supplies, feed, other food for cats, dogs, chooks, you name it, just everything we could fill the boat with. This is just a little boat, it fits four people. It’s kind of like a little rescue boat that you’d imagine surf life savers have.

We went to Ballina, to jump in the river, but the police were stopping anyone from doing that, I knew of a sleepy corner of the area though where we could slide the boat into the river and just get going.

We struck off up the river going through radical turbulent water. We were going past Coraki, about 70km.

There was only one house along that 70km stretch that was near the river that didn’t flood, and it was like Noah’s Ark. There were a dozen horses, there were half a dozen cattle, there was a kangaroo and her joey, there was a fox up in a tree, there were chooks everywhere, it was just this wild scene.

Everything around the house was pure mud and raging water, but hanging on the deck and around this house were all these animals that had gotten to the only semi-dry spot.

We started getting animals, bringing them all the way back with us and sending them off to vets and stuff for a good four or five days.

On the third or fourth day lots of other people who were up near the Gold Coast came down and assisted. Lots of surfers and heaps of donations from people from Goldy came down and started running that same stretch of the river and doing that work with us. That was my direct experience of the thing.

The Towns:

Nothing trumps local knowledge in so many ways.

I had my friend who was with me from across the road. He’d volunteered for marine rescue in the area, but he’d quit after that because they were just sitting on boats and personnel. Fully trained, capable people, they were sitting there.

In some cases, those people, and those boats, fully ready to go, were sitting for 6 hours.

Not allowed to go out and start helping people, because of the bureaucratic streams that people had to navigate to try and get a yes or no directive.

I wasn’t too let down by it, you could just see it was this systemic thing. The people who are in all those positions are great people who want to do good, and it’s not a problem in human nature, it’s just a problem in the system.

But in the centre of that whole time, it was so obvious that it was just everyone who was from here looking out for each other. Communications were down so you just had to go to places to check on people.

That was really what brought this community together.

It created such an awesome social cohesion to an area that, because of the whole covid thing over the last couple of years, had so much division.

A week before those floods happened, the feeling in this area was that people were just backing themselves into the corners, and anyone who differed from that was a fool. People on the streets in these little communities were being super unkind to each other.

There was so much head noise around all that bullshit, that it was the perfect thing to wash it all away and just be human again and stay human with each other.

People were saying, it took two years to split up the community and it took one storm to bring us all back together.

They’re talking about fellow humans in a togetherness, in an ‘us’ kind of perspective that hadn’t happened for a couple years, and you can’t underestimate that subtle experience that’s happening.

That’s not going to make front page news in the Sydney Morning Herald, but it’s very, very powerful and really foundational stuff for a functioning community to have.

I think if the government and other agencies were super proactive and were on the front foot from the very beginning with these floods, you wouldn’t have had the same social experience of togetherness. That was one of the best things that came out of this thing, it was fuckin’ awesome.

When these big events happen there is loss and there’s a lot of hardship and there’s really hard moments, but there’s also some really incredible moments and the rehumanising of a lot of us who had felt dehumanised the last few years is pretty amazing.

The Land:

Another wake-up call was just the industrialised landscape we have in Australia. When we look at a landscape and we don’t see many humans, we think we have this beautiful green, healthy countryside, but what we’re really looking at is stripped and industrialised agricultural land.

So, when you see all that condensed into a river system…

You’re watching massive plastic wrapped bales wash down the river.

You’re seeing big drums of glyphosate, herbicides, fertilisers, pesticides washing down the river with massive rainbow coloured oil slicks around them leaking who knows what.

You’re seeing massive amounts of machinery toppled over on the banks of the river system there, you’re seeing thousand litre drums of pesticides floating down the river and out to sea.

Seeing all that, smelling the chemical and biological scent in the air over such big stretches, the three big rivers are really all just choked with industrial agriculture.

That was a real eye-opener for me.

And that you were just looking at some of the last remaining topsoils in the region just getting rinsed down the hills.

There’s so many of these extreme weather systems, but also, extreme incapacity of our land and coastal ocean systems to cope with these weather events.

If we had trees throughout this landscape – instead of grasslands with roaming, hoofed cattle, and monocultured stretches of land with sugarcane and macadamia trees – where that rain falls it would stay.

That’s how it works in every thriving ecology on the planet. It stays, it falls, and it soaks into that fluffy awesome soil and in through that root system.

Those roots and those trees hold things in place, and it replenishes, it fills the cups. But if you’re looking at that flat landscape that we’ve industrialised, and you can see the water just rolling down the hills and into the swollen streams, it really dawns on you that we have some big scale earth repair work to do, we have some big scale planting to do, and so much more.

The Repair:

These things do tip you into the mindset of looking at the bigger picture.

There are these overwhelming stories that circulate, especially if you’re checking your newsfeed every morning, looking at all those global stories condensed. That’s some pretty overwhelming shit. There’s always a gnarly story in the news, every day if you want it.

But what’s interesting to me is…

What are the solutions?

What is the practical activism?

What is the course of action to take, now that we have the diagnosis that the systems we’re a part of are crook?

And there’s shitloads of them, there’s so many!

In our region here, it’s simply planting out the landscape, it’s just planting up every stream, every creek, every edge of the waterways, as much land as we can. It’s getting out of monocultured agriculture, it’s getting out of industrialised agriculture.

I do permaculture growing of food here. In a tiny space, I can feed over five families, we use no chemicals, we use no power.

We have this amazing little spot that was depleted like everywhere else. It was logged and cattle farmed and, in a year and a half, we’ve brought it back from the brink to now a thriving incredible food system for us and our local neighbourhood.

Here we are giving food away, going surfing, doing our other things, raising a family, not struggling to get some sort of bottom line out of the land. That’s when you can’t help but start to think on a bigger scale and go wow, imagine if this landscape in this beautiful region that so many people look to and think is just paradise on earth, what if we really did help that come to fruition: we kept the water where it fell, and we caught the fish that were in our rivers, ate them without being filled with contaminants, observed them and appreciated a thriving landscape and seascape.

So, there are a lot of those courses of action to take, we already know shit’s hitting the fan, it’s just what is a course of action? What do we do next …

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