'I can't get back to her': Eugowra's Jeanette Norris and Mavis Cross' tsunami heartbreak

Attached (figuratively) at the hip, they refer to themselves as "Ada and Elsie" - female radio show characters who played comical, boundary-breaking roles back in the 1940s and 50s.

"They were two sisters, but they were just so funny these little old ladies, these funny little maids," Mrs Norris said.

"But I'm Elsie and she's Ada. Because [Mavis has] got the brains, she makes the decisions."

Barely able to finish their sentences from laughter, the pair went on explaining one another's roles in a treasured friendship.

"Yes, I put her into line," Mrs Cross said, "'you can't do that, Jeanette', I'll tell her."

But it wasn't long before the gags and witty statements came to a crashing halt.

The pair were forcibly separated on November 14 during the 2022 deluge that ripped through their Eugowra village.

A day of harrowing events that neither recalled with fond memories, it was still a sorrow-filled time for them to reflect on.

"I wake up through the night sometimes and I do, I cry about it," Mrs Cross said.

"But then I go back to sleep, because I know I've just got to keep on going."

This is 'Ada and Elsie's' story

After receiving word that an impending flood was fast-approaching the town, Jeanette collected her handbag and headed straight to Mavis' house on Evelyn Street.

Peering into the distance around 8.30am, they remembered water hurling in their direction.

They described it as a rapidly-rising "tsunami" only moments later.

Saying "you stay here, I'll be right back", Jeanette rushed to collect medication from her car.

But she was never able to return to her best friend.

"By then, the flood was really coming and I couldn't get back in to tell Mavis because my phone was left on her table, I just had to drive away," Mrs Norris said.

"I thought 'I've left her. I've left her and she's drowned'."

Jeanette said she waited with bated breath at Eugowra Showground on Noble Street, the evacuation point for the town.

Unbeknownst to Mrs Norris, though, best buddy 'Elsie' was just beginning one of the biggest battles of her lifetime.

"Racing inside" to get her own handbag and the pair's mobile phones, Mavis closed the kitchen door and found herself amid fast-building floodwater.

Making it outside to the edge of her verandah, the water then climbed even further; it had reached a level above her hips.

Rubbish bins, pots and pans from her own kitchen, long-loved furniture - Mavis watched on helplessly as the innards of her house washed past her.

"[The floodwater] was up to my waist when I got to the end of the carport," she said.

By the time she'd reached the back fence of her property barely metres away, the water level was sitting just below her shoulders.

"I was hanging onto the gate and screaming for help," she said, "and I just remember thinking that was it. I thought that I was going to drown."

Passed Mavis' son George on the way to the showgrounds, Jeanette had been heading in the opposite direction.

"In a big hurry" to find his mother, she said he eventually found his mum Mavis clinging to the gate.

It was then that George and three other men started their quest of pulling people from rising floodwater.

"A neighbour from the opposite corner said 'I've got ya' Mavis' and I could see my son [George] was coming from across the street," Mavis Cross said, "he was just trying to get to me.

"So I did that and [the group of men] got me over to the corner of the next house. I had to hug the verandah post there for a while."

Trying not to be swallowed by the raging current, Mrs Cross said she was unaware that a house had torn away from its foundation just a few streets away.

The floating home narrowly missed her on that Monday.

It still sits displaced there today.

"I didn't see that house coming, but the men could see it and that's why they were trying to hurry me over," she said.

"The tree wasn't very big that stopped the house, but I'm very lucky it did because that would've killed us all."

Mrs Cross asked where George was after being pulled onto the back of a truck

'He's 'right, he's standing on the side of the truck', they told her.

"And when we were going across the water, they said 'keep standing up' and I said 'I can't' because I was on my tippy toes and I just lost my feet," she said.

"Those memories are only coming [back] to me now, but I can hear the crashing and banging from the water. It scares me."

Mavis eventually arrived to the evacuation site, learning that Jeanette had been relentlessly searching the grounds for her.

Finding the "soaking wet" Elsie to her Ada, Jeanette felt nothing other than relief.

"We got [Mavis] all rugged up and she warmed up a bit on the backseat of my car," she said.

"But I'd never been so pleased to see her and I thought 'I didn't let her drown, I didn't let her drown'."

With a lady from Gooloogong handing out bags of clothing intended for charity, Mrs Norris and Mrs Cross got around the site in matching white t-shirts.

Reunited and with all family members accounted for, the pair slept in Jeanette's car on the Monday evening.

It was a night one of the two women will never forget.

"Mavis had the back [of the car] and I had the front, and we did try to sleep but I never slept a wink," Mrs Norris said.

"But I did hear her crying in her sleep during the night, it really affected her. It was a tsunami that happened, not a flood.

"It was a tsunami."

Mavis lived in her granddaughter's caravan immediately after the floods before moving into one of her own, supplied through the at-home caravans program, which arrived one week before Christmas Day.

During the past two weeks though, she's since been able to return to (one small part of) her Evelyn Street home.

She continues to rely on "incredible" support from family, friends and tradespeople to restore the house she's lived in for the past 66 years.

For Jeanette, she is still residing in a caravan and is "a long way" from being able to live back at home again.

Passed down from her aunty to her father, Mrs Norris is also the current owner of Eugowra's Central Hotel.

In the same family since the 1930s, the hotel had only gone on the market in November - just five days prior to the inland "tsunami" which ripped through and gutted the site.

"The chap who was leasing it walked out and left it, it's still a very sad place there," Mrs Norris said.

"My daughter took over the hotel and David, my son, has been marvellous the whole lot of them have been fantastic.

"They're working very hard to get it together, but it's still very sad there."

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