As North Queensland braces itself before being hit by Cyclone Yasi, Queenslanders hope for the best. David Donovan relives his own cyclone experience as a youngster.
The pictures of Yasi compared to Cyclone Tracy show that Yasi is immensely larger; Cyclone Tracy, of course, levelled Darwin and was one of Australia's worst ever natural calamities. Worryingly, Cairns has about three times the population Darwin had in 1975.
The Queensland Premier, the redoubtable Anna Bligh, says the state has not experienced a cyclone like this in "generations".
"We are facing a storm of catastrophic proportions," she said today, as the storm was upgraded to a category 5.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) agrees, saying the last category 5 "super-cyclone" to hit Queensland was back in 1918.
"This impact is likely to be more life-threatening than any experienced during recent generations," the BoM said.
As we still clean up from the floods in Central and Southern Queensland, the North prepares for its own battering. We can only hold our breath and hope that perhaps the predictions are overstated—that somehow the cyclone will play itself out before it hits the coast, as they sometimes do. That our friends and family's houses in North Queensland are safe; that they have prepared well, that they are out of harm's way.
It's going to hit the North tonight. Tomorrow we will hear the tale. We pray.
I have lived through a cyclone hitting my home—once. It also hit during the night.
It happened when I was about 5, living in Central Queensland on the Donovan family cattle property, Burkan, located due west of Rockhampton. Like Cairns, Cardwell, Innisfail and Townsville, this area is in Queensland's "cyclone zone"; it was a frequent occurrence during the monsoon months to hear the eerie tones of the Bureau of Meteorology's weather warning on the radio, alerting us to the risk of high winds, tropical storms and cyclones.
Fortunately, we were about 100 miles inland and normally this left us pretty well protected from most tropical storms. However, in January 1976, the coincidentally named Tropical Cyclone David crossed near Rockhampton and passed right over our property, before tracking deep into the state's interior.
Even though I was only 5, it was an experience I will never forget—undoubtedly one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
The Cyclone came in the middle of the night. We had already turned the generator off and extinguished our candles before it arrived. Two adults and four small children sat around together in the dark, under mattresses and blankets in our creaky – at the best of times – Old Queenslander style home waiting for the worst. It had been raining all day and gradually, as the night wore, the wind rose in tempo and became an unearthly howl. By midnight, the windows rattled almost out of their casements and the corrugated iron roof seemed sure to be ripped away by the shireking, rasping, wind. It felt to me, as a a frightened child, that a demon was battering down upon our house, trying to tear it to pieces. The Old Queenslander style house is set on stilts, of course, and it seemed to me that the wind must surely pick up the house and carry it away, such was the power of the storm.
I prayed. And I remember holding my mother's hand very hard.
In just a few hours, though it felt longer, the storm blew itself out and by morning it was gone. Surprisingly, I recall that there was relatively little damage, apart from things being blown away, never to be found again, and a few large objects, like tanks, being in different places from where they had been the day before.
Terrifying as that was to live through, Tropical Cyclone David is not even regarded as one major cyclones to hit Australia's East Coast by the BoM; a list of all Queensland cyclones that have hit Queensland shows it causing damage to buildings in Yeppoon and Mount Morgan, and that's all.
Cyclone Yasi is a behemoth – a giant – in comparison to Cyclone David, which was perhaps only a category 2 when it hit Burkan. It almost beggars belief what the people of North Queensland are about to experience—the sheer terror, the potential destruction and loss of life. All we can do is pray for the people in Cairns and North Queensland. There will be many frightened 5-year-olds tightly holding their mother's hands. I hope they are all okay this time tomorrow.
