The Morning After Cyclone Monica

Well it is the day after and let me tell you it was a pretty damned scary night! The dogs and I spent most of it in the computer room under the desk.

It was cosy but the whole time it sounded like there was a 747 landing in the back yard. They say by the time it hit us it had died down to a category 3 because it had traveled over a fair bit of land to get here. All I can say is that if that is what a 3 is like I can tell you without even the tiniest bit of doubt, I don't ever want to be in a 4 or a 5. There is a lot of damage around town, a tree knocked down the fence in our back yard and almost came through the roof in the living room.


There truly are no tall trees left in town, most aussie trees have a very shallow but wide spread root system because it is so dry, the roots go out to catch every drop of rain that falls before the sun dries it up. Even here where the wet floods the whole place, the trees are designed more for the dry. Also because we are at the end of the wet and the ground is so saturated and soft, it was inevitable that the big ones would succumb.

The saddest thing is that an Aboriginal lady who spent the night in the shelter at the court house, had a severe asthma attack which led to cardiac arrest and her death. She was in her 50's and a very nice lady, a very skilled basket maker and wife of one of the really good artists. Her youngest son is a regular at the shop. I saw him this morning and he was in a daze. You are not allowed to say the name of a person who has died for several years because it may upset their spirit and hinder their trip to the Dreamtime.

We still haven't heard how they fared at Oenpelli or some of the other outstations. The numbers of injuries and dollars lost will not sound impressive no matter what but not because of the magnitude of the storm, rather because the top end is so vast and mostly uninhabited, only 120,000 people in the Northern Territory and 80,000 of those live in Darwin, which was spared this time and about 20,000 more in the Alice so that only leaves about 20,000 spread over the rest of an area about 2.5 times the size of Texas.

So we are fine and Jabiru will survive albeit with less shade. All the locals say it is the first time they can ever remember that a cyclone has hit this far inland with such force. Most residents and the town itself were ill prepared because they just didn't think it would ever happen! Here are the pics to prove it did.