The Carmila Cyclone

Photo courtesy Courier Mail

On March 10th, 1950, I was a three year old living in Carmila with my mother and father (who was principal of the school), and my sixteen month-old brother. 

Dad had been principal (or head teacher as it was called then) since the beginning of 1948. We lived in a solidly built school residence and there was extensive bushland surrounding the school.

On the evening before the cyclone struck, the wind had built up swiftly and rain squalls became more frequent. It was a Thursday, and as the evening came on, the phone began to ring incessantly, as dad had a barometer and local people were phoning (on the party line as it was then) asking about the readings. They were dropping quickly, and I remember dad saying "The bottom's going to drop out of the bloody thing if this keeps up".

Back then, there was no forecasting through radar imaging, and nobody really knew where the cyclone was.  

By midnight, the wind was howling, and the house began to shake with the walls moving in and out. We sheltered under a very large and heavy dining room table and said the rosary. I don't recall being especially frightened, thinking that it was all a bit of a novelty. Mum and dad obviously kept us calm, and if they were frightened were hiding it well. At about three in the morning, the roof began to peel off, and according to a case study written by Jeff Callaghan, (a severe weather forecaster from the bureau of Meteorology), the winds peaked between 3.30 and 4.15 am and the eye passed over at about this time. I remember the howling wind returning from a different direction.

The school in the fifties

Over the sound of the wind, you could hear objects striking the walls of the house, although I don't know exactly what they were. Neighbours who lived about 300 meters away made their way to the school residence, miraculously dodging corrugated iron and assorted debris, and joined us in the kitchen. By sunrise, the wind had dropped and we were able to see the aftermath. My little brother had recently learned to ride his tricycle and charged it along the verandah which was covered with puddles of water, proclaiming "This is the beach!"

I remember that you could see for kilometres, as the trees that hadn't been uprooted had been stripped of foliage, and there were dead and injured possums and koalas scattered around. A sheet of corrugated iron from the residence had been blown into the school fence which had cut two grooves 30 cm long from the fence wire in the sheet. That gave us some idea of the power of the wind. The only time I have seen anything resembling this was during a visit to the Cyclone Tracy museum in Darwin in 2015. 

What we didn't know, and was hidden from us, was that a seventeen year-old girl had been killed by a falling tree, and four other people injured. (Carmila had a population of about four hundred in 1950). Reports at the time indicated that only eight buildings were left standing, one was the school residence, and another the school building. We moved into the school building because it wasn't as badly damaged as the residence, and stayed put for two weeks as the residence was made habitable.  

Unfortunately, one of the members of the family that had moved in with us the night of the cyclone came down with tuberculosis. Back then, any bedclothes used in a house where tuberculosis had been detected had to be destroyed. I remember mum piling the sheets and blankets into the base of the copper used to boil clothes, and setting fire to them. My mother's distress, and the smell of the burning bedclothes remain one of my most vivid memories.

Eventually, life began to return to normal with the aid of special reconstruction trains sent with materials and tradesmen down the rail line from Mackay.   

This particular cyclone was especially destructive as it zigzagged backwards and forwards between the coast and the mainland, causing drownings in Mareeba and Innisfail before wrecking Carmila. 

As far as I know, it wasn't given a name, and is known in the record as the Carmila Cyclone.

Here is Jeff Callaghan's report. 

Here is a report from the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin of 13th March 1950.

Here is a report from the Townsville Daily Bulletin of 13th March 1950, where dad gets a mention.

Comments closed.

Tales from the Booth

Pic courtesy CBC

Right now, elections are very much in the news, but what prompts the timing of these stories is the recent 50th anniversary of the December 2nd 1972 election of the Whitlam government.

In 1972, after returning from Vietnam at the end of 1970, I had taken advantage of a Department of Labour and National Service Rehabilitation scholarship.

This meant I had taken leave without pay from my job as a teacher at the then State School for Spastic Children New Farm, and was paid an allowance (equivalent to the basic wage at the time) for the duration of the university year. Back then, the academic year lasted 40 weeks (as it still does), which meant that I had 12 weeks without income.

I had to find work to fill the gap, and I did so, working in the J C Cooke nail-making factory (in Morningside from memory). That's another story which I will relate here at some point. I also took advantage of working for the AEC* at the polling place at the then Greenslopes Hospital in Brisbane on the day of the poll. It paid well.

I was reasonably familiar with the protocols of the AEC, as I was brought up as the son of a bush school principal who was routinely chief polling officer at his school when state and federal elections were held. Bush schools were almost always the polling stations as they were ideally set up for it, and the teachers were almost always the poll workers. I reckon I was a veteran of half a dozen such elections as dad's offsider by the time I left home to go to boarding school, so felt entirely comfortable in the job. As noted above, it paid well, and I didn't need much training.

I had two jobs on 2nd December 1972. The first was to conduct a mobile booth (on a trolley on wheels) to move around the wards so the old diggers (mostly WW2 and Korean veterans) could get to vote. Myself and another teacher did this, and it wasn't too difficult until we came across an old soldier who had a stroke and was both paralysed and unable to speak. As a newly-minted teacher of non-verbal children (I'd been doing this for a whole year in 1971), I reckoned I had the solution. We'd take him through the list of candidates on the ballot, and use eye-blinks (one for "yes" and two for "no"). This worked a charm, except that his wife was present, and for the first time in their fifty-year marriage, realised that he had been voting in exact opposition to her all those years. We saw the funny side - she didn't.

My other job, when the mobile booth work was done, was to cover the stationary ballot boxes in the hospital foyer, This was a doddle. All we had to do was check the voter's name off the roll, give him/her the initialled ballot paper, and make sure it was slotted into the ballot box on the way out. 

Greenslopes back then

This was fine until about 30 seconds before the booth closed, when an old digger, very much under the weather, staggered in through the front entrance to the hospital, demanding a paper so he could "vote for bloody Billy McMahon".  He'd been on a day release from the hospital and accomplished a fairly comprehensive pub crawl. His name was on the electoral roll, so we gave him a ballot. He wasn't happy when Billy McMahon's name wasn't apparent, but grudgingly accepted the explanation that he could vote for the Liberal candidate if he wanted. He staggered off, in the direction of the toilet, rather than the ballot box, and as I was the most junior polling clerk, I was assigned to follow him so the initialled ballot paper didn't go missing. 

He disappeared into one of the toilet cubicles and I began to wait. By this time the polling had been finished for twenty minutes and the count had started. Eventually I peered under the cubicle door, and noted that he was passed out on the toilet. The unmarked ballot paper was on the floor, so I reached in and retrieved it. The vote was counted as "informal" so he never did get to vote for Billy McMahon.

I summoned a couple of orderlies who carried him off to sober up.

It had been a very interesting day. 

*Australian Electoral Commission 

Comments closed