River Murray Recovery Stories
Peter Hunter · 59 min
Elected as mayor just weeks before the 2022 River Murray floods peaked, Peter Hunter drew on decades of school leadership to protect his town, combat dangerous misinformation, and hold a fractured community together through one of South Australia's worst natural disasters.
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Peter Hunter became mayor of Renmark just weeks before the 2022 River Murray floods peaked. With no disaster management playbook, he leaned on decades of school leadership to hold his fractured community together while fielding 3 to 5 media requests daily, battling dangerous misinformation online, and making impossible decisions about which properties could be protected.
Renmark's council decided early that they were best placed to manage the crisis. They had the contacts, the community support, and the local knowledge. Peter's first move was to ask his CEO and senior staff what value he could add, rather than assuming he had all the answers. When media outlets wanted drama over context, Peter matched their stories with facts he had and admitted plainly what he did not know yet. When frightened people came to him, he listened, wrote down their concerns, showed genuine respect for their views, and connected them to real resources. He even visited the recovery centre without revealing his title, so he could see what people actually experienced when they asked for help.
The hardest part was explaining to people outside the levees why their properties could not be protected when timelines and resources were finite. There are still no easy answers. Two years on, Peter now says rural mental health is South Australia's most pressing issue, worse than during the flood itself. Farmers, men, and families are quietly suffering as recovery stretches on and crisis attention moves away. He pushes the state government to act on the critical shortage of rural psychologists. The levees sit on 300 pieces of private land with no clear ownership or maintenance plan. The work, he says, is far from finished.
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