The house that lived

Photographs by Pen Tayler and Lance and Julie Lunson


It is about 2am. In a quiet street in Latrobe, Lance and Julie Lunson wake to the sound of voices outside their home. There is a knock on the door. It is the SES – flood waters are on their way and they need to evacuate. Lance and Julie look at each other in astonishment. Then, out of a window, they see considerable water already in their backyard. It will obviously soon reach the level of the house. They quickly start moving things, in the house and in the shed, to higher shelves.

Later, over a much-needed cup of coffee, they watch the water enter their home. By 9am, with water “well and truly through the house”, they are told by the police they really do have to leave. Many hours later, the flood has subsided, and Lance returns to the house. He opens the front door, and watches as water pours out.

It was June 5, 2016. The previous evening, the residents of Latrobe had gone to bed with no idea of the catastrophe to come. It was raining heavily – record amounts fell on the Western Tiers that June weekend – but that alone wasn’t cause for alarm. Then the banks of the swollen Mersey River gave way.

. . .

The Lunsons still live in their lovely weatherboard cottage in Twiss Street, but the road back hasn’t been easy. Photographs of the flood from their front door show cars half submerged and a ute washed a block and a half up the street. As Lance Lunson said, “The water went up the street at 47km/hour. Hot water cylinders were floating, cars moved down the road, the kids’ swing from across the road was in Bells Parade. We tend to think a flood just comes up then goes down rather than it actually moving.”

Inside their shed “looked like a bomb had gone off ... it flipped the compressor over and upended a freezer full of food”. In the house, much of their furniture was sodden.

With the water up to 230mm over the floorboards at the height of the flood, the damage to the house was considerable. There were substantial amounts of mud and debris, which were left behind as the water receded, making the house uninhabitable. The nearby caravan park was flooded, as were many houses in the area.

Not all the houses in Twiss Street were flooded but the Lunsons’ house is more than 100 years old. Built on foundations made of nothing more than farm rocks, the floorboards were lower than some other nearby properties. As they stood in the kitchen, after the flood, looking at all the mess, they thought to themselves, “Where will we start?” And then, “Why would you start? Why would you bother?”

As they told me this, they laughed.

. . .

They weren’t laughing at the time. Despite those depressing thoughts, when builders told them to pull the house down and start again, they were determined not to. “We love it. How could you build a place like this again? It would have been much cheaper and easier to build another house but there’s over 100 years of history in this house.”

In addition, they had finished renovating the place just weeks before. “The worst part for us was that about three weeks before [the flood], I’d got down and oiled all the floors,” Julie Lunson said. “And we had just finished the little room we remodelled at the front. On the Sunday afternoon, we sat in the front room and I said to Lance, ‘Let’s chill out, I am sick of working.’ He said, ‘Me too.’ ”

About two the following morning, all hell broke loose.

. . .

Lance Lunson was born in Latrobe in 1945, and grew up at Sassafras, while Julie is from Devonport. They bought their home in Twiss Street in 2011. A Victorian weatherboard cottage with lath and plaster walls, timber floorboards, picture rails and original fireplaces, they fell in love with it.

They knew what was ahead of them if they decided to restore it after the flood. It would involve major structural changes: they needed to lift the whole house (including two double fireplaces with chimneys intact) 750mm. Undaunted, they set about, doing it mostly by themselves, helped by their son and an occasional builder. “We simply did what we had to do. We never panicked, we never worried. We just went okay, what do we have to do? And did it.”

At the time, Julie was in her late 60s and Lance in his early 70s, an age when most of us would leave it to someone younger, but Lance has an impressive range of practical skills. They are also both hard workers. Originally trained as a boilermaker/welder, Lance started his own business in the 1970s which involved factory boiler service work, mechanical repairs, welding and plant installation. In the early 2000s, Lance and Julie designed and built motor homes. In 2004 they won an award for the best touring motor home in Australia. Lance could have been a qualified engineer if he had had the time and inclination to go to university. Julie perhaps too – she has learnt many skills along the way.

It’s a maxim that disasters bring out the best and the worst in people and the Lunsons experienced both in their endeavour to repair their home. Their insurance company (they have a different one now) created significant, ongoing impediments and was extremely difficult to deal with. In the end the council introduced them to someone experienced in dealing with insurance companies.

Before they worked on the house, they needed to make their shed a place they could live in. They were offered temporary accommodation by their insurance company but they initially decided to stay in their motorhome on the property to prevent any looting which sadly was occurring.

On the positive side, the community spirit that we all like to imagine lives on in Tasmania showed itself almost immediately and continued to do so. Julie said, “The community was fantastic.” Neighbours and complete strangers brought food around, had them in for dinner and sometimes washed their clothes, while Hill Street Grocer brought hampers, the chemist sent items, the Salvation Army helped as did others who wish to remain anonymous. In addition, “We were very grateful to Dick and Kate [Warner – Kate Warner was at the time Governor of Tasmania]. They called in after the flood, then two or three times after. They really did take an interest and it gave us a lift.”

It was a labour of love and determination, often working from 8am until after 6pm. The house had to be stripped out, including removing all the floorboards in order to move the massive farm rocks underneath. Lance describes how to lift your house: “To get the outside suspended, we punched a few holes in through the outside walls. We fastened some timbers onto the studs in a few spots, jacked them up and then packed each end so the whole house was swinging in mid-air.” He makes it sound simple but listening to them both it’s obvious it involved a lot of hard work and sound engineering knowledge.

After the floorboards were removed, Julie and their son Michael dug four trenches under the house into which they slid large steel girders. Across the front and back of the house they laid another two to create a frame underneath the house. This whole process involved a lot of digging, bracing back into the studs, packing underneath, jacking up and welding. The two double fireplaces (each with an estimated weight of 6.5 tonnes) were braced with steel girders in a frame, before being lifted and concrete blocks placed underneath.

With the foundations in place, the house was put back together with some of the original floorboards, windows and doors while others were found from various places. Their backyard became a workshop where Lance and Julie made all the cornices, architraves and skirting boards. Julie did all the painting. The last job was the garden which had been wrecked by a combination of the flood and digging extensive trenches to insert the steel girders under the house.

Five years after the flood, it’s finished and we sit in a lovely extension on the back of the house looking through the photographs that document the story. I can’t imagine either of them sitting still, and wonder what they’ll do in their spare time.

Julie and Lance Lunson


Pen Tayler is a Tasmanian writer and photographer. She photographed 12 towns for Towns of Tasmania, written by Bert Spinks, and has written and provided images for Hop Kilns of Tasmania (both Forty South Publishing). She has also written a book about Prospect House and Belmont House in the Coal River Valley.

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