A Cockeyed Bob?

 

Police station and residence. The government house we lived in was identical.

Those of you living in south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales have probably had enough of cyclone Alfred. 

We've been minimally effected, and apart from my bush house doing the watusi which meant that everything on its shelves ended up in a heap on the floor, life has proceeded as usual.

Tropical cyclones are part of my lived experience, having grown up in north Queensland, and my earliest memories are those surrounding a cyclone which crossed the coast at Carmila on March 11th 1950. I was about three at the time, but can remember parts of it, including sheltering under a sturdy oak table in our kitchen whilst the school residence broke up around us.

This link takes you to a newspaper account in the Townsville Daily bulletin of 13th March 1950. It took two days for the full story to get through, a contrast to the real time reporting we're seeing today. Dad gets a mention in the report.

The house lost all its corrugated iron roof, and part of the gable end at the front. We were obliged to live in the school for a couple of weeks whilst the residence was re-roofed.  

Another early memory was the smell of burning linen. A family down the road from us also moved into the school, and one of them came down with Tuberculosis. Back then, we were advised to burn all bed linen used by this family. My mother had taken bed linen out of storage which had been a wedding gift, and loaned it to this family.

Repair crew that was sent into Carmila by rail.

Mum was very upset when it had to be burned, and I recall the smell, and her distress.

Since then, I lived in Townsville for a while, and was there when cyclone Aivu crossed the coast near the Burdekin River between Townsville and Bowen on April 4th 1989. Whilst that cyclone didn't do a great deal of damage around Townsville, it caused lots of flooding to the north, and for a while looked to be a major threat.

This may have been why,  given my recall of the Carmila experience, I moved my family overnight to my new school which had been built to cyclone proof standards in 1987. I rationalised that if the school was going to be declared a cyclone, I would be prepared by being on site.

As I write this, in Queensland, at least, no lives have been lost, although the same can't be said for Northern NSW.

And the term "Cockeyed Bob?" I haven't heard it used for decades, but apparently it was once applied to severe and unpredictable storms.

That would describe Alfred.