IT’S BACK SO MONSOON
Warning to stock up as rain threatens to cut supply lines
INUNDATED roads have authorities warning of supermarket food shortages as a monsoonal downpour swings back for another onslaught on the Far North.
Emergency Services Minister and Barron River MP Craig Crawford said residents of Cairns and the Far North should be prepared to be next in the firing line following record-breaking flooding in Townsville.
“We don’t know what this system is going to do,” he said.
“The monsoon trough currently parked on top of Townsville is pumping out hundreds of millimetres of water every day. Places like Tully, Innisfail and the southern Tablelands need to be especially vigilant.
“We expect significant rainfall all the way out to Wednesday.”
At Cairns Airport 119.4mm fell in the 24 hours to 9am yesterday on top of 787.2mm, which fell in Janaury. The Bruce Highway between Cairns and Townsville has had water over the road north of Ingham at the crossing of the Herbert River.
Mr Crawford said people in the Far North needed to be prepared.
“It’s like having a cyclone, we start having supply issues up here,” he said. “We’re likely to have a supply issue of f fresh food and perishables.
“People need to not panic buy but stock up on those se important things now. It’s ’s not about having enough stuff uff for three days – it’s about having enough for five or six.”
THE year 1911 was a tough one before it even started, with a grasshopper plague so monumental that trains struggled to grip tracks through a blanket of crushed insect carcasses.
Ernest Cummings wrote: “When the train used all the supply of sand, the firemen had to walk and shovel dirt on the rails from the Mulgrave River bridge to Gordonvale station.”
It was February 11 when the first cyclone hit.
The second one – and it was a stonker – arrived about five weeks later, causing significant damage to the town.
The Cairns Post reported on March 17, 1911: “One cottage in Lumley St was lifted clean off the stumps and deposited intact and in a perfectly upright position a few yards away.”
Even worse was the destruction at Port Douglas, which was entirely flattened but for about seven partly standing homes, the Queensland National Bank, the Customs House, the Post Office and McLean’s Hotel. A report from the Brisbane
Courier on March 22, 1911 states about 40 people took refuge in the town’s Government Bond building on account of its apparent structural integrity.
“The faith placed in the stability of the building, however, was not justified, for the occupants (numbering 40) had just taken timely warning from its nerve-shaking tremors and emerged from the doorway to reach the fence round the Cus- toms building, when the bond store collapsed,” it continued.
That was just one of myriad calamitous acts of God described by historian Dr Timothy Button, whose book Cairns: City of the South Pacific charts the region’s tumultuous history from 1770 onwards.
With saturated catchments and a consecutive run of volatile weather systems battering Queensland’s northeastern coast in recent weeks, it sometimes feels like history is doomed to be repeated.
Statistically, it is only a matter of time before the region faces another test at the hands of the heavens.
But Dr Bottoms said history had proven time and time again that the people of the Far North had the gumption it took to overcome, rebuild and flourish.
“It’s patently obvious that despite all the cyclones, floods and all the rest of it, that Far North Queenslanders have really managed to get on top of it all and keep on going,” he said.
“We are still here despite all of those setbacks.
“Even though one can look from an indigenous perspective and say there are things definitively wrong in how we portray our history, there have still been magnificent achievements.”
As the timeline at right reveals, the 1911 cyclones and floods have plenty of company.
In 1879, Old Smithfield was abandoned and later rebuilt further up the hill after a townshattering murder-suicide and earth-shattering floods.
As Clem Lack (1900-1972) says in The Town That Was Drowned: Some North Queensland Memories and Anecdotes, the settlement – a rival to Cairns – had only been built in 1876.
“Our Wild West and Wilder North were as colourful as anything that the annals of the American West can show, but neither Craig nor Smith were gunslingers, and Craig was unarmed when he walked across the street to Smith’s hotel, expecting that Smith was about to pay him a longstanding debt,” he writes.
Several revolver shots followed and both men ended up dead at Smith’s hand.
It was a favourite scandal and, naturally, “extravagantly embroidered” tales of Smith riding a steed shod with golden horseshoes soon emerged.
When the settlement then got battered by consecutive floods, it was time to move on.