For the past six weeks, Sophia Barry has been staying with relatives while she tried to find a home in Townsville. By Wednesday, after the city’s poorest neighbourhoods were flooded and her brother’s home evacuated, she had no choice but to return to Palm Island.

Local outreach groups estimate more than 1,000 Indigenous people from Palm Island, a community some 60kms away, live in Townsville or are staying for extended periods, almost as many as live permanently on the island.

Barry and many others were not eligible for federal disaster support payments that were promised to “every Townsville flood victim”, despite being evacuated from their homes.

“Half of the Palm Island people are in Townsville,” Barry says.

“We’re the ones who are suffering. Everyone else is all right. They’ve got all their money, they’ve got their homes, they’ve got their family and whatnot. Where do we go?”

'I’ve got nothing valuable left': the heart-wrenching return to Townsville's flooded homes Read more

As heartwrenching as natural disasters can be for those who lose homes and treasured possessions, they also disproportionately affect the already marginalised. Flood-prone land is typically cheaper, which means communities in those areas are more likely to be disadvantaged, unprepared and uninsured.



Collin Sivalingum, the Queensland emergencies manager for the Australian Red Cross, says natural disasters could double challenges for people in difficult circumstances.

“For some people it is the last straw,” he says. “They were experiencing challenges already, then this comes through. Especially if they’re not expecting it ... They don’t have insurances, they don’t have money. Then a disaster comes through and they’re displaced.

“You see emotional changes, but you also see a significant increase in health conditions. You see mental health conditions increase; an increase in domestic violence.”

Formal disaster relief often found its way to people directly affected, the ones whose properties appear in the most striking media images. But he says support was needed by people affected by the “indirect disaster”, including those who support their relatives, communities that become fragmented, and people “whose lives were affected even though they didn’t lose anything”.

“We are very concerned about the homeless community,” Sivalingum says. “Often in disasters like this, our experience is the homeless community is more vulnerable. They don’t have a physical address. They don’t sit within structures where they can easily access services.

“If somebody’s staying under a bridge, that’s their home. If that place is flooded, their home is flooded. But how do you put that down as an address to access some support?”

Barry says it is unfair that most Townsville residents can claim a $1,000 assistance payment if their homes were flooded, but members of Townsville’s large Palm Islander community cannot.

On Wednesday morning the prime minister, Scott Morrison, changed the eligibility rules after homeowners’ complaints were picked up by local media outlets, to extend the payments to anyone “if water has gone over floorboards in their house”.

The human services department told Guardian Australia that people are eligible for payments if they have been injured, or if their principal place of residence suffered major damage. It has offered to contact Barry to see if it can help her.

On Wednesday afternoon a small group lined up for the Palm Island ferry, the first service since the flooding.

One man, Reggie, was returning home after a few weeks in hospital. A woman was seeing off friends but staying behind at her aunt’s house because her baby son needed medical care in the city.

Barry didn’t want to go back to Palm Island. She had been staying with her brother in the suburb of Kirwan for about six weeks while trying to get access to a public housing property. She moved to another home, crammed with family members, when the floodwaters came through.

She has a daughter in Townsville and a son with rheumatic heart disease on Palm Island.

“I need to get my son here,” she says. “I’m worried he’s going to get sick from all the dirty water [on Palm Island] and that, you know. I’m trying to live in Townsville. That’s the reason I came to Townsville.”