Write this down...
solar heated shower
gas stove
matches
candles
small pot
bananas.
Two weeks ago, Mukinbudin had an explosion of butterflies...hundreds and hundreds of butterflies. On Sunday night, Tropical cyclones Odette and Seroja bound together and cut through Western Australia. Earlier, after a five hour drive I had found a voice message saying, "Stay at home-do not travel to the wheatbelt tonight. We will close the Nursing Post as we are expecting storms". It was too late. I thought we were in for a bit of rain. I had seen large signs on the freeway saying "The Great Northern freeway will be closed from Muchea at 2:00 p.m." A group of bikers in customised motorbikes drove into Sawyers Valley as I fueled my little Nissan. One of them had three front lights in a horizontal row on his handle bars. Earlier, I had driven in treacherous conditions at 35 km an hour on Tonkin Freeway but the rain stopped when I reached the Great Eastern highway. A few hours later, near Goomalling, a single sign said, "Great Eastern highway is closing at 5:00pm". Doesn't sound good, I thought at the time. Feeling a bit uneasy, I went to bed with a long pair of trousers on and a black singlet, thinking that if I had to get up I could throw on a pair of boots in a hurry, unaware that there was a red alert and I had driven straight into the path of cyclones Odette and Seroja. They were about to thrash through the state: at 01:45 I woke up and made a hot drink...there was no sound...I was standing in a shell of emptiness. Someone later suggested that it was a pressure drop. Then it rained. Rain is such a beautiful thing. It rained for an hour at a 45 degree angle and when it stopped, there was an impossible, super sonic pause like a silent siren. Then the silence became a hollow, breathing thing...a dull, booming force like a line of trains in a tunnel of rock. It was so deceptive that I nearly went back to sleep with my leg hanging out of the bed. Suddenly, I found myself standing up thinking "What the hell was that?!" when my neighbour's fence hit the wall behind my bed and bent itself around an old air conditioner.
Mukinbudin, got off lightly. Trees were ripped out ... some just fell over. One of the small neighboring towns, Bencubbin, suffered more damage and some homes were broken to bits- destroyed. Our power was off from 02:45 Monday morning until 09:25 on Wednesday morning. No one was hurt but the same storm killed over 150 people in Indonesia and East Timor a few days before it smashed its way through our state. I found out (while discussing a little generator with hardly any fuel) that one of our doctors had become a member of parliament. He had been interviewed on television and had a determined focus on espousing the benefits of legalising marijuana for aged care: not in awe but in amazement I think I said something like "F*cking old sh*t balls". Wonderfully, some of the butterflies...elegant black and white spotted butterflies with distinctive black, white and orange markings... survived the twin cyclone weather event. Tangled in leaves and debris, and smashed by a funnel of forces, these most delicate, sensitive and beautiful things survived. Excuse me but, "F*cking old sh*t balls!".
