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.

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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 

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Whitlam

 

Today is the 50th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam government. 

That event has enormous significance for the country, paralleled for me by nostalgic personal recollections.

On the day of the election, 2nd December 1972, I worked as a polling clerk at the then Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane, which was an interesting experience. I'll write more about that later on this blog.

At the end of the 1972 academic year, I had just completed twelve months on a Labour and National Service post-discharge Rehabilitation Scholarship, which had set the foundation for the following ten years part time study culminating in two degrees. The day's salary for the polling work with the AEC was timely. That scholarship, although requiring me to do factory work during the university vacation to pay the rent, was one of the few positive outcomes from my service in Vietnam.

In 1972 I was still technically a member of the army reserve, but nothing short of nuclear attack would have put me back in uniform. I'd had the army up to here. One of Whitlam's first actions in government was to abolish conscription. The existence of the scheme which targeted 12% of twenty year olds had been a moral blight on the nation since its introduction in 1965.

At the time I had commenced, mostly by accident, a career in special education, and there was a happy coincidence between this and the election of a government which reformed support for people with disabilities through its focus on human rights and social justice.

Subsequently, initiatives taken by the Labor government in the relatively short time it held power, transformed the quality of lives of children with disabilities, initially by securing support for mainstreaming, and by the time it lost office, setting up institutional structures such as AHRC which gave teeth to legislation supporting their right to full access.

In Queensland (and most other states) at the time of Whitlam's election, children with severe disabilities went to school in segregated institutions, mostly in capital cities, and run by charitable organisations, such as the (then) Spastic Welfare league, Crippled Children's' Association and the (then) Subnormal Children's' Association. The titles of these organisations reflect very accurately the social attitude to disability at the time. 

In 1971, immediately on return from Vietnam, I worked as a teacher at the State School for Spastic Children, New Farm. On the same campus was a separate training centre for students with cerebral palsy who were considered ineducable. Above a certain IQ, they went to school. Below it, they attended the training centre. This was anathema to the ALP reforms.

Some of my class at New farm 1971

The fact that the IQ tests used at the time weren't standardised on a population of children with cerebral palsy was not considered relevant. During the time I was at the school, the training centre was closed, and the school was staffed with teachers from the state system. Similar processes were on the way in regional centres up and down the coast in Queensland, and the institutionalised schools for the blind and deaf in Brisbane were losing enrolments as special education units for students with hearing and vision impairments were being established in local schools.

As part of the move of students with disabilities from special to regular school settings, I worked as an itinerant visiting teacher in the mid-seventies, preparing both schools and students for mainstreaming. This was enjoyable and fulfilling work, and post retirement as a principal in 2005, I returned for a time to this work. It remained enjoyable, but these days the pioneering aspect has gone. 

Mainstreaming was driven by Whitlam's reform agenda. 

Children with these very common disabilities were now able to stay with their families and attend school with their non-disabled peers. 

All of this was driven initially by the human rights reforms championed by the Labor reforms, and even though the Whitlam government was relatively short lived, these structural changes became firmly embedded in public education provision in Queensland and elsewhere. These reforms profoundly improved the quality of the lives of these children and their families.

Later, in the early eighties when the money driven by Whitlam's reforms began to cascade from the commonwealth to the states, I was again in the right place at the right time, and spent six months offline developing a design brief for a new special school in Townsville. When opened in 1987, this school moved about seventy children with physical impairments from a 1940s model boarding institution to a school to which they travelled every day. 

I founded this school, built with $2.8 million of Whitlam money, which was not small bikkies at the time. When the National Party state minister for education (Lin Powell) arrived for the official opening, I was sorely tempted to remind him that the money to build it was a result of Labor reforms, but thought better of it.

Lin (Lionel)  Powell - Qld Minister for Education 1987

So when I look back on the anniversary of the 1972 Whitlam victory, I feel deeply privileged to have been able to participate personally in the transformational reforms created for Australians with disabilities.

I wouldn't have missed it for quids.... 

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Media Bias

The Victorian state election has been and gone, and the ALP has been returned with Daniel Andrews as Premier.

As a Queenslander, this event is of peripheral interest to me, but there is one aspect of the campaign and the result that is more than remarkable.

Elements of the Victorian media ran a sustained and relentless campaign against his re-election. It was characterised by the introduction into the discussion of events that had absolutely nothing to do with Andrew's policies, but focused on two fairly recent events involving himself and his family.

The first was a motor accident that involved a collision between Andrew's Ford Territory and a cyclist on 7th January 2013. The cyclist was badly injured, but did recover, losing his spleen. The police took no action after an investigation and statements describing the incident as - 

Cyclist was travelling along the unpaved surface road and crossed Ridley Street into the vehicle as it turned right. Cyclist collided with the front drivers side of the vehicle, causing the cyclist to be ejected onto the windscreen, causing it to smash. 

Photographs of the vehicle published by the Sun Herald show damage to the area in front of, but to the side of the vehicle's mudguard, and the smashed windscreen. This is consistent with statements given to the police by Mrs Andrews.

The accident happened in 2013, nine years ago, and after the initial reports had largely been forgotten. It is then resurrected two weeks before the election together with lurid claims of a police cover-up.

The Sun-Herald produced front page coverage for a number of days, and the outrage was picked up by Melbourne shock jocks who dined out on it right up until the eve of the election.

Then there was the story of an accident on 9th March 2021 when Andrews fell on wet stairs whilst on holiday on the Mornington Peninsula. He was placed in intensive care after this incident which caused several broken ribs and a broken vertebra. Andrews took four months to recover from this incident, which generated all manner of conspiracy theories on social media, and generated front page coverage (again by the Sun Herald) on Sunday, November 6th, a few weeks before the election. 

Again, this accident happened over a year ago.

Herald Sun November 6th 2022

This accident had absolutely nothing to do with the election campaign, but was used in a clumsy attempt to smear Andrews.

Now these media organisations have to make money, but the issue of ethics of how this is done seem somehow to have vanished into the ether. There appears to be no real accountability, and the Press Council (as I learned many years ago) is a toothless tiger.

And of course, media can publish opinion, but when they actively campaign (rather than report) in the lead up to an election, they should at least be honest enough to inform their readers.

In the end, none of this seems to have influenced Victorian voters. A Royal Commission into media ownership and bias is beginning to look like a pretty good idea.

The Politics of Fear (Reprised)

Image courtesy Delaware Online

I have clear memories of the sixties and seventies and the culture of fear that was evident at the time.

The cold war was at its height, McCarthyism had been and gone, and we were assailed in the media daily and from the pulpit weekly with horror stories about the evils of Communism, the domino theory, and how we would have to "fight them there" (SE Asia) so we didn't have to "fight them here" (Australia).

The prophets of doom never really defined who "they" were, or what their ways and means of invasion and domination were, but that didn't really count. 

It was enough just to be afraid. Thank the good Lord that we didn't have social media back then.

None of this would have mattered that much to me, a bush kid growing up in Queensland, except that in 1965, Bob Menzies introduced a significant amendment to the National Service Act, and it wasn't very long before I was patrolling the jungles of Phuoc Tuy province with an SLR and in the company of good men caught up in the same boondoggle.

This was an outcome of that climate of fear that had kept a Coalition government (with the help of DLP preferences) in power since 1949.

I can't help but look at the climate of fear and loathing that has developed in the USA since the advent of the Tea Party movement, and draw the parallels between that phenomenon and events across the Pacific (and to a lesser extent in this country) since.

There are a number of core components of this climate that were evident in the fifties and sixties, and are once again obvious now. They include denouncements, outrage, branding, and conspiracy theories. These days, they can be harnessed by media that thrives on that same outrage, hate, fear and anger, and harnesses these base aspects of human nature to make money and build corporate empires.

Infowars and Breitbart are great examples.

Politicians interested in making a dollar out of the phenomenon include John Bannon, Newt Gingrich, and of course, Donald Trump. Bannon and Gingrich may, to some extent believe in the philosophies driving these movement, but Trump is a different animal entirely.

If you follow his trajectory, it becomes completely obvious that he has no love of country or political philosophy that can be identified, but possesses a bloated ego, and a belief that there are only winners and losers, rather than "people". People are to be used and discarded when they are no longer useful. 

An examination of his married life is best evidence of that, as well as the unbelievable rate of turnover in his 2016-2020 administration.

The fact that he has, in sequence, lost the popular presidential vote (2016), the 2018 midterms, the 2020 presidential election, and most recently, contributed to an historically poor showing in the 2022 midterms doesn't seem to have sunk in. 

Or perhaps, the experience he most fears (losing) is haunting him to such an extent that he continues to attempt to lay the ghost.

All of this has some significance for Australians (as I learned in 1969/70), but the most frightening element is the seepage across the Pacific of some of the trends we're seeing now.

I find the social media conspiracies about our very efficient and independent AEC the most disturbing.  I take solace in the fact that it doesn't seem to have penetrated beyond the lunatic fringe.

As we used to say (about the Yanks) when I was in Vietnam - 

"You can tell them anything - sell them anything". 

Now that is a vast over generalisation, but Australians tend to be far more pragmatic and less naive as a bunch than our transpacific friends.

Let's hope it stays that way.

Grallina Cyanoleuca

We had a very windy couple of days last week, and this critter appeared on our lawn.

It was a fledgling Peewee which had been blown out of its nest by high winds that had been around for a day or two. As they say in the classics it was one of those winds that would blow a dog off a chain.

Obviously, it had a very bleak future exposed on the ground, and at the mercy of cats, dogs, and crows, but had not yet learned to fly, so was going nowhere.

It was also completely naive, showing no sign of fear when I gently moved it under a shrub, out of sight and out of the sun.

I could find no sign of the nest, so when it was still there late in the day, it became time to attempt to get it to safety.

Some quick googling revealed a phone number for National Parks and Wildlife Queensland, and the helpful person there gave me the number of a rostered vet who was looking after injured or stranded wildlife.

This one wasn't injured, but was definitely stranded, so I put it in a box and drove it to the vet.

She said that this wasn't the only fledgling that had been brought in, as they were just at the stage of development when they were about to come out of their nests, but the unseasonal winds had created a problem for that particular population.

I never did enquire whether it had been successfully relocated - perhaps I should.

I have no idea what the protocol is for critters handed in, but assume there is something in place. Apparently, this is a better option than trying to care for them at home.

It's not a straightforward process, especially in terms of what they should be fed on.  The vet said that most well-intentioned people give them the wrong food which usually causes their fairly swift demise. 

A New Constituency

                                                    Pic courtesy AFR

Green's MP Max Chandler-Mather on Tuesday night, after the treasurer's budget speech, moved to amend a series of bills in order to make a protest speech about the government’s stage three tax cuts.

In doing so, he made the following statement -

The perversity of it is that we all sat here, hearing the treasurer talk about a sensible budget with tough choices, but everyone in this place is going to get an extra $9000 a year once the stage three tax cuts come into effect.

What are the tough choices that we’re all making here? What are the tough choices that the billionaires and millionaires are making, who are going to get the $9000 extra a year out of the stage three tax cuts?

Why on earth are my fellow MPs would wondering why people don’t like politicians. The amendment we’re moving tonight is to highlight the hypocrisy of a government that claims to care about ordinary people but gives $9000 extra a year to the politicians in this place who are already well overpaid.

This is, of course, a stunt, but it will play well with his constituency.

That constituency, gentle reader, is urban dwelling young people who are paying high rents, and can't see any prospect of getting access to the overheated housing market. It's an angry, and ever increasing group, and the Greens (and to a lesser extent the Teals) will continue to get strong backing from these people, who are articulate and resentful. 

Labor ignore them, and the Coalition ridicule them. Both major parties do so at their political peril.

Maybe, to apply a cliche, the writing is on the wall. That writing is in bold font with text in teal and green.