I thought I might explain why I have taken an ongoing interest in the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. There are the immediate reasons of horror and injustice, but it goes back further than that - to my teens.
I grew up in Bowen, North Queensland - a tropical town at the top of the Whitsundays with a population of about 10,000 people back then. In 1956, when I was 11 years old Cyclone Agnes hit Bowen. We had the day off school, some small boats on the harbour were smashed to smithereens and not much else to report. This was vastly different from what came later. An afternoon breeze it was by comparison and it had time to get a name.
In 1958, on April 1, a few days before Easter, Bowen was hit by a devastating cyclone. In those days, (please don't laugh), warnings comprised a red flag flying from the Post Office and the sounding of the Fire Brigade's fog-horn-like siren. Neither of these occurred. It started with what seemed like a fierce storm - heavy, driving rain. But it got worse. My father was away from home in Brisbane over 1500 kilometres away. My mother, my eight year old sister and I saw it through on our own: a fact with which we used to tease our father. My father was frantic sitting up at my grandparents' home in Brisbane. He sat up all night by the phone with the newsroom of Radio Station 4BK ringing him regularly with updates. (BTW, funny things stay in one's mind. My grandparents alphanumeric phone number: LM 1313.) The cyclone was very destructive and there was a small tidal surge on the front beach. We lived upstairs in a building which was formerly an old shop with a residence upstairs. The downstairs was the Dental Clinic. After the cyclone, whenever we children ran through the house, it shook. This cyclone became known as the April Fool's Day Cyclone. It never received the usual female name.
Where I slept was right over the footpath in Powell Street, Bowen's second main street. In the months after the cyclone - and before the next one - whenever the winds came up strongly, I could hear the patter patter of feet up Powell Street to the Post Office - everyone on their way to check the barometer, a cyclindrical nib and ink affair. With no reliable system of warnings established, checking the level and fall of the barometer was the only reliable indicator.
Ten months later, on the Australia Day weekend 1959, came another cyclone even worse than the April Fool's Day one. This cyclone blew up late on the Saturday night and did not exhaust itself until the Monday afternoon. When I read descriptions of this cyclone and descriptions of Cyclone Tracy which hit Darwin, there is no difference in the intensity - and Tracy only lasted one night. Tracy was more dramatic because Darwin was a bigger town and, because of ill built housing, there was more debris in the air to do damage and to kill people. In Bowen, many of the buildings that survived the April Fool's Day Event but were structurally weakened succumbed to the Australia Day Cyclone - our place among them.
Our home was looted. My father's firm had a vacant house and we moved into that. Because of the looting, we had barely enough cutlery to set the table for ourselves - and that included using bread and butter knives for main knives. My great-grandmother's gold heirloom brooch with the intertwined hair of her dead children - my great uncles - was stolen. My mother felt vulnerable and violated. My mother was distraught. She said that if she could have left town she would have left immediately. However, all roads were cut. I think it continued to rain for about six weeks. My parents were insured and after the insurance was settled my parents bought a radiogram: a record player as a piece of furniture. That did cheer us up considerably.
Again, a cyclone had hit without warning and without name. This began the steady climb of lessons learned from the disasters.
But is my girlhood memory faulty? I have called it the Australia Day Cyclone and said that it did not have a name. I remember it as the Australia Day weekend (last weekend in January) because we had planned on the Sunday to go up to Alva Beach near Ayr for a surf carnival. However, I have googled the words 'Bowen' and 'cyclone' and the result provides a different date and a name, Connie, for the cyclone.
In those days, there was no major organised assistance, no trauma counselling, no social workers. People came from Proserpine and Collinsville to help us and the Red Cross handed out dry mattresses and there was roofing iron. I remember after the April Fool's Day cyclone sitting in church on Good Friday afternoon and all one could hear all around were hammers hammering iron on to rooves. My father wasn't in church that day. He had returned from Brisbane in the early hours of that morning by train to a railway station lit with kerosene lamps. He was out hammering too.
I think that for those who have been through cyclones or major wind events, the memory of wind remains. I now live in Melbourne - famous for the changeability of its weather. We get strong winds here - even as I write there has been quite a bit of wind overnight, although it seems to be easing this morning. I hate it. I hate the noise - and I remember the birdless, leafless silence after the cyclones.
