“I’ve been in Townsville for 20 years and nothing like this had ever happened,” Ning shared.
“About a month after shooting the show and the Christmas period, I was dealing with evacuating our entire home and uprooting the lives of me and my three children.”
“We frantically pushed everything in the house to the back and threw all the kids' toys onto their beds," she recalled - detailing the family taping up her home in an attempt to save it.
“I felt really helpless and so trapped. I couldn’t help my children because I couldn’t help myself the whole time," she confessed.
The family were rescued by army services.
“When the army arrived, we put life jackets on the kids and got on a boat that was like Noah’s ark. It was crowded with people and all these animals."
“As traumatic as it was, there was a funny moment on the boat when I was carrying this little umbrella trying to shield my kids from the rain," she recalls.
"My daughter just turned to me and said, ‘We’re already wet, what are you trying to do?”
Ning has since found another home to live in with her children.
Ning's candour is what made the country fall in love with her.
And it seems her ex is included in that list.
In a recent interview, Mark confessed his devotion to his ex-wife.
"I’ll defend her," Mark gushed.
"Yes for the start, she was very cold which was confronting, but I think I figured out she’d been a product of her environment for 33 years."
"That was something that was difficult to break down at the beginning [sic] but in the end, we saw the real her."
Mark continued: "What the viewers didn’t see was a very, very funny, very caring, selfless person.”
Listen to his interview below!
