NORM Cox wants to demolish his home. Only four months ago, he and wife Dorothy spent their life savings renovating it.
But looking at the mud-coated, putrid shell of what is left after a raging torrent ripped through his suburb of North Bundaberg, Norm knows his house is unsalvageable.
"It just doesn't seem real and I don't think it will for a while yet," he tells AAP.
As he holds back tears, Dorothy picks through piles of stinking sludge in her garden.
"Nothing matters anymore," she mutters to herself as if it is a simple fact.
The hopelessness and despair is repeated in almost every street that police had cordoned off as an exclusion zone until Saturday.
Roads are now sinkholes big enough to fit buildings inside. Houses just simply aren't there.
A few bricks, some stilts or a single letter box are the only indication a family had once called that spot home.
Just behind the Coxes in Tallon St, Miguel and Marina Velasco are trying to come to terms with just how fast the water must have gushed through their home.
Beds have been throw on top of cupboards. A washing machine and a fridge lie tossed across the living room floor.
Every inch of the house is covered with the same foul mud that permeates the entire suburb.
"We want to clean up, but where do we even start?" an exhausted Marina asks.
"How can we clean with all this wet mud still everywhere?"
But the cries of despair and frustration in the suburb are tempered by sighs of relief.
Tyson Hepi-Tehuia and his pregnant wife Krista had been told their home had gone under.
Most of what was stored under their home had disappeared, but the upstairs, inhabited level remained completely intact.
"We're just so relieved," Tyson says.
"We did lose some stuff, but just look around - we can't complain."
Long-term Bundaberg resident Harry Hartfiel remembers the terror of the 1942 flood as an eight-year-old, but insists this is the worst destruction he's ever seen.
"I'll never forget this for the rest of my life," he says.
And as north Bundaberg residents decide whether to give up or rebuild, it is a statement that almost certainly rings true with them too.
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