Doreen was expecting her first baby as the waters of the Goulburn River rose.

“It took all the bridges, the Sandy Hollow Bridge and the Yarrawa Bridge, and we were isolated,” she said.

Doreen said her father was pretty calm and collected because he’d had four years in the war in the Middle East.

“We didn’t know what was going on, we had no phone, no communication and they dropped us food in tin cans from an aeroplane,” she said.

“We were milking about 60 or 70 cows all day every day with a generator because we had no electricity.

“We tried to separate the milk, but then we had to throw it out because it wouldn’t keep.

“It rained for days and days and the cow’s hooves grew and curled up from the foot rot and the horses got bogged,” she recalls to the Chronicle.

“Even though it was raining, it was steaming hot and we were all in shorts and we ate when we ate and slept when we slept.

“At night it sounded like thunder as the banks fell away and crashed into the river.

“The flood took all our Lucerne.”

Eventually, a fire fox was built over the Goulburn River near Doreen’s parents’ dairy farm, on Richmond Grove Road, and she recalls being one of the first to cross the river after the floodwaters subsided.

Before 1955 was finished, though, Doreen said her family left the farm.

“My father sold out and my husband and I moved into Sydney Street in Muswellbrook and we’ve been here ever since,” she said.

“In the 1971 floods the water came up to our fence but, because our block is a bit steep, it didn’t come into the house.”