REMEMBERING THE NEWCASTLE EARTHQUAKE
The reports at the time claimed the Newcastle earthquake sounded like the ground cracking apart, a train crashing into a wall and a deafening rumbling. But to Bruce Hounslow, then a paramedic, the sound as the earthquake tore through the NSW steel city 30 years ago is one he will never forget.
“I remember hearing an almighty bang,” Bruce, now 70, says of that day that changed his life. “When I went out in the street, I quickly realised something terrible had happened. It was chaos.”
At 10.27am on Thursday, December 28, 1989, an earthquake measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale shattered Newcastle.
Thirteen people died, 160 were seriously injured and 50,000 buildings were damaged, at a cost of around $4 billion.
The Newcastle earthquake remains one of the worst natural disasters in Australian history, wreaking physical, financial and emotional havoc across the country’s seventh biggest city.
On this year’s 30th anniversary of the disaster, Bruce admits time has done little to erase the pain of that day.
As a paramedic, he found himself on the frontline of the rescue efforts at the two worsthit locations – the collapsed Newcastle Workers Club and along devastated Beaumont Street in Hamilton.
“I was in a shop in Hamilton at the time of the quake, and if I had walked out even a few seconds earlier, I would have been killed, as the roof of the shop fell onto the footpath,” he recalls. “It was devastation everywhere and people had been crushed under collapsed awnings.
“I phoned the ambulance station, and I still recall my supervisor’s exact words – ‘We’ve had an earthquake and the estimates are hundreds dead and thousands injured’. All our teams were then sent out to rescue people.”
Bruce spent the following hours treating survivors along Beaumont Street, as well as searching through broken buildings. After four hours in Hamilton, he attended the Workers Club, where nine people had been killed and many more were trapped after floors had collapsed.
“As we arrived at the club, one of my colleagues came climbing out the wreckage and said, ‘It’s
a bloody mess in there’,” Bruce recalls. “I looked into the crushed building and thought, ‘How could anyone survive this?’”
For the next 16 hours, Bruce and the other emergency workers combed the building, desperately looking for survivors.
“We knew there were people still alive and we wanted to get them out,” Bruce says.
“I remember seeing some ambos carrying a man out on a stretcher, and thinking, ‘Great, another one who’s alive!’”
Bruce was finally sent home, but was back on duty the next day to attend to injured people across Newcastle. “That was when the extent of damage sunk in,” he says. “Everywhere we went, the city was broken.”
Months later, Bruce met Margaret Turnbull, who had been a receptionist at the Workers Club, and they became a couple. On the first anniversary of the earthquake, they attended a special service in Newcastle’s Civic Park, which became an important turning point for
Bruce coping with the horrors.
“I cried that day and it had taken me 12 months to cry,” he says. “We were all too busy focusing on survival, but I had never stopped thinking about everything we saw in Hamilton and at the Workers Club.”
His relationship with Margaret ended after five years, and Bruce was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and underwent specialist mental health care, and retired from the ambulance service in 2009.
Bruce has been married to his current wife Katherine for 15 years and they have one daughter, Jade. He is also father to four other children from his previous marriages.
As this year’s milestone anniversary approaches, Bruce admits he has taken to looking through his old scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, as well as visiting the earthquake exhibition at the Newcastle Museum a few times.
“It actually helps to remind me we all survived, as this could have wiped out Newcastle,” he says. “This needs to be remembered for what happened, and so we don’t forget if it ever happens again.”