When we meet, Damien Rose is grateful for the small comforts: family, his dogs, the kindness of strangers and the two millimetres of tent fabric that shelters his living space from the elements outside.
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We come across him in early April at the evacuation centre in Coraki, a small town on the junction of the Wilsons and Richmond rivers downstream from Lismore.
Like many of the floodplain towns, it's a far cry from the Instagram-pretty uplands on the ridges above Lismore.
The road into the town passes numerous ruined cane fields, fences shrouded in debris and abandoned cars left at crazy angles at the whim of the floodwaters.
Damien and his partner had been homeless since February 28, when the cabin they were renting in a Lismore caravan park was washed off its piers in the flood.
"We're welcome to stay here as long as we want," he says softly, in a slightly unsteady voice which betrays the trauma he's lived through.
"There are people out there still trying to help us but we're positive at the moment. We're together and no one was hurt."
They were sleeping in an old campervan lent them by his partner's boss. They cooked, are and hung out in the tent strung from it, having to crouch to enter and exit.
It was tough but Damien is upbeat despite what they've been through.
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"We've had a couple of chest infections. My partner went to hospital with a heart attack, she had heart surgery in the middle of this.
"At the moment, we're just sticking strong. We're just trying to be positive, to think of the future."
That future included marrying his partner the weekend after we meet.
"The whole town got together to make it a really lovely day," he says.
Most of the caravans and motorhomes that crowded the evacuation centre in the immediate aftermath of the flood have moved on. A month after we meet, Damien and his new wife moved on as well, out of the tent to another cabin in Casino.
They are two of the 1240 people still in emergency accommodation after the floods. According to a Resilience NSW spokesperson, 4055 properties have been deemed uninhabitable.
For the people left in Coraki, the future weighs heavily.