The most vivid image that comes to mind when I think about cyclones is my uncle Rodney, drenched in his thongs and shorts and tropical shirt, machete by his side, crouching in a sodden orchard. He’s holding a drunken parrot in the palm of his hands and he’s laughing.
This was in the days that followed Larry, which crossed the far north Queensland coast near Innisfail on 20 March 2006. The Bureau of Meteorology forecast Larry as a category five severe tropical cyclone, although a re-analysis of the data would later suggest Larry was a category four system when it crossed the coast. Whatever, Larry blew hurricane-force wind speeds of well over 200km an hour and we had the eye pass directly over us. So let us not quibble about categories.
I couldn’t say precisely what day it was. Fallen trees and giant stands of bamboo blocked the single road to our farm until the army and council brought heavy machinery to clear a path some time after. We were without running water or power for days, maybe weeks, the packing shed a makeshift kitchen where we ate meals cooked off a gas barbecue and drank instant coffee made with rainwater and UHT milk to the hum of a generator. Nineteen years later, it is all a blur of sounds and images – like my uncle and the parrot.
The rainbow lorikeet and all its mates, including a crackle of sulphur crested cockatoos, were plastered on the fermenting rambutans rotting in the muck of what had been our idyllic tropical fruit farm north of Innisfail off the road to Cairns.
I say ours, it was a joint venture of my uncle Rod and aunt Jan with their daughter, Bec, and son-in-law, Ian, who at that point had two sons, a toddler and a baby. There’s been two more boys since. I was 18 and spending the first half of my gap year working for my family on the farm in the tropical north.
Rodney was laughing at the cruel irony of the situation as he cradled the bird. In the two and a half years since they’d bought the farm, they had tried everything to keep birds and fruit bats from plundering their fruits.
Nestled in the foothills of the jungle-clad Mount Bartle Frere – Queensland’s tallest mountain – and surrounded by a patchwork of sugar cane and banana plantations, our farm had been planted decades ago by a veteran who returned from Vietnam with a taste for exotic fruit. Rambutans and mangosteens were the commercial crop, but we had about 70 other varieties, from durians and longans to breadfruit – all of which looked, to my eyes, like they belonged in a Dr. Seuss book. The birds must have thought they were pretty wonderful too. Rod put up nets, but they’d sneak through and have a feast. Ian, an entrepreneurial type, brought in a raptor handler to have his wedge-tailed eagle try to scare them off. My brother Tom, a musician and a dreamer, had just joined the outfit as something of a human scarecrow.
‘For days leading up to Larry’s landfall, meteorologists had charted its course as heading directly towards us.’
What Rodney would have given to have gotten his hands on a parrot just days earlier! And here they were, literally too drunk to fly. But what did it matter, now that the farm had been so utterly devastated?
As I hunker down in Brisbane awaiting the landfall of Cyclone Alfred I call Rodney to see what he remembers of Larry. He just turned 82, but he hasn’t forgotten those cockies and lorikeets.
“Oh yeah!” he says but can barely get his words out for the chuckles. “They were drunk as skunks weren’t they?”
There’s not too much else to laugh about. Ian’s vision had been to turn the farm into a tourist destination – a sign had just gone up days before Larry and multiple tour buses were scheduled on a weekly basis.
Larry killed that dream in an instant before our eyes. Afterwards, Bec and Ian had to move for jobs in the city down south. Rod and Jan stayed and tried to revive the farm. Until, five years later, Yasi – one of the most powerful cyclones to ever strike Queensland – wreaked havoc upon the farm once more. They sold it after that for a fraction of its value. Rod thinks its new owners run a few animals there, but doesn’t want to know, or face going back.
The most vivid sound I recall – or absence of sound more accurately – also involves birds.
‘We didn’t sleep much that night. Not for worry of the snakes, but for the howl of ever building winds.’
For days leading up to Larry’s landfall, meteorologists had charted its course as heading directly towards us. But we were unconcerned – well, the northerns were and Tom and I were trying hard to be a bit less southern in our outlook.
The north sees plenty of cyclones and Rodney reckoned they always took a dog leg left when they approached the coast. Right up until the day before, Ian was in Innisfail selling our produce at a tropical fruit festival.
Despite my best efforts, as the sun set on 19 March, I was gripped by an intense eeriness. I ring up Jan; Cyclone Alfred has her stuck in Redcliffe now with Bec, Ian and the four boys. Eerie is how she remembers the night before Larry too.
It took some time for the conscious part of my brain to realise what was so unsettling my subconscious that evening in the north. The farm’s border was a clear flowing creek of ice cold water, full jungle perch, that flowed down from Bartle Frere and the vast expanse of world heritage Gondwana rainforest that began at the water’s edge.
‘Church groups and a small army of friends, and their friends, came to spend days cleaning up the farm.’
Normally the jungle throbbed with the whoops and calls of birds and the buzz of insects. That night, when I realised it was totally silent, was the moment I knew we’d been kidding ourselves.
Jan and Rod left their home by the beach in the evening to come and sleep with my brother Tom and I in a derelict old Queenslander that was our quarters. It had microbats roosting in the roof, bandicoots below the floor boards and was occasionally visited by pythons in the night – and, once, a deadly taipan – but they were all the least of our worries.
We didn’t sleep much that night. Not for worry of the snakes, but for the howl of ever building winds. In the predawn gloom we made a mad dash to the main farmhouse to join Bec and Ian and the boys in their modern kit home, built for cyclonic conditions. I remember laying down on a mattress in the most sheltered room, watching the slash pines planted as a windbreak bend towards 90 degrees and listening to the thud of coconuts smashing the steel frame fibre board walls. Jan remembers the sound of the wind like a freight train running at us for what felt like hours. Ian, the wave of air pressure. I’m sure Tom can’t forget him and I going out into Larry’s eye and sprinting back to shelter. Don’t do that.
‘I remember laying down on a mattress in the most sheltered room, watching the slash pines planted as a windbreak bend towards 90 degrees.’
The little boys thought it was all great fun, us mucking in together on mattresses with a wooden train set. It was, I have to admit, exciting. But it was also, no doubt, traumatic, Jan says.
There might have been times when she wasn’t sure the house would stand up, she says. But that wasn’t it. It was the fact she knew, we all knew: the farm, this beautiful project that had brought together three generations and multiple strands of the family clan, was curtains.
But that is not what Jan reflects on when she reflects on Larry.
Jan is a deeply spiritual person and often contemplates things like the nature of love in Christian study groups. Larry left us a mountain of work and the weeks that followed were filled with chainsaws and tractors and busted irrigation pipes. It might have been all too much, had it not been for the help. Jan says all the government support we received makes her so grateful to live in Australia. Church groups and a small army of friends, and their friends, came to spend days cleaning up the farm. Now that they have retired to Townsville, Jan says she bumps into people to this day who say, “Oh I was on your farm after Larry”, and she can’t remember them because of the sheer number who volunteered to help.
One man she can’t forget is Richard. Richard was a bushie who came up from New South Wales in his motor home with his new dog. The skinned tail of his old dog was wrapped around his akubra as a hatband. But Jan remembers him because he was a total stranger who came unannounced and worked beside us tirelessly for months without ever asking for payment in return.
All cyclones are different and Alfred, if it hits us in Brisbane and Redcliffe, will not be nearly as intense a storm as Larry. But where the latter struck small towns and farms in a place where people are so used to cyclones they still hold their festivals the day before a category 5 is forecast to hit, the winds, waves and floods Alfred could bring might affect millions of people in a part of the state where cyclones are such rarities evacuation centres aren’t even cyclone-rated.
If and when Alfred hits, hopefully people are cared for like we were after Larry and, despite it all, left with a memory to laugh at years later like mine of Rodney and the drunken parrot.
“We often talk about: when did you feel the most love? Or most cared for?,” Jan says.
“And it’s always Cyclone Larry. Always, for me.”
