Over at Homo Ludens Paddington wallows in the British floods and evokes great watery apocalypses of myth and literature.
Speaking of Dreamtime floods… a great cinematic rendering is Peter Weir’s The Last Wave [1978]. The premise is ever-so-slightly cliched: modern civilisation with its delusions of linear progress runs up against an Aboriginal vision of a cycle (and, of course, civilisation is on the down-stroke). But the execution is wonderfully creepy. Check out Pitt Street under water:
Shamefully, The Last Wave is out of print in Australia, and you can’t find it in the video store. I had to import the US Criterion Collection version.
Another great literary flood is in Wakefield’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which my evil twin blogged here.
