Elsie Lange
It’s been more than a month since floods tore through and gutted Neville and Joanne West’s home in Darraweit Guim.
Last month, Star Weekly spoke with Neville just days after the disaster. He would have to throw away 35 years worth of belongings, of memories the house contained.
Navigating his insurance policy, finding a place to stay and figuring out what their next steps would be as they waited to find out the fate of their home has taken enormous strength, especially while Neville continues to undergo liver cancer treatment.
“[The engineers’ report] can take up to six weeks for the insurance company to get, so it’ll be after Christmas before we know whether they are going to rebuild it or just sign a cheque and say, what you do with it is your problem,” Neville said.
“It’s very frustrating in one sense, but I can imagine all the people in Shepparton and Echuca are in the same boat as I am.”
Joanne, a nurse, said she would probably be getting counselling after the whole ordeal, dealing with her husband’s diagnosis on top of a flood-ruined home.
She said she and Neville had been spending their own money while they waited for their insurance to pay out their contents insurance – it had been hard, but finding out they’d be financially covered was “a sigh of relief”.
“I don’t know [what I want], I’m scared to live there again, and I don’t think the love would be there, we both put a lot of love and effort into the house, and I’d be scared that it would just be futile,” Joanne said.
After camping in their caravan on the hill behind their home and then spending four weeks in $500 a night short-stay accommodation, last week they found a rental where they could stay longer term.
Neville said their insurance covered 52 weeks of accommodation, or until they’d spent $50,000.
“They are insistent on that part of it. If you run out of money, bad luck, if you run out of weeks, bad luck,” he said. “But it’s small fish compared to your house going under water.”
He said if the insurance decides in coming months to fix their house, rather than paying them out for it, they’d be “lucky to get in before next Christmas”.
But in the meantime, the couple said Macedon Ranges council, Joanne’s union and the community “had been brilliant”.
Council community director Maria Weiss said the Darraweit Guim community had shown extraordinary resilience.
* In a previous story, Star Weekly mistakenly reported Neville West was undergoing lung cancer treatment, as opposed to liver cancer treatment.
