BOXING DAY TSUNAMI 15 years on
Survivor Joe Giardina will be spending the anniversary of the tragedy remembering the life of the son he lost that day
This Christmas Day will be one of mixed emotions for Melbourne businessman Joe Giardina. As the rest of the country celebrates with loved ones, Joe will instead travel to Canberra on a very personal mission – to mark the death of his son Paul, 15 years ago, in the Boxing Day tsunami. Joe, 62, was one of the main instigators behind the building of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Memorial, located on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin in Kings Park.
For Joe, this place in the nation’s capital is sacred ground, a place to reflect and remember the calamity that claimed the life of his son, who was only 16 when he died.
“It’s the 15th anniversary and it’s very important to be there,” Joe says. “I want to place some flowers at the memorial to remember Paul, and to mark what happened that day. It’s something that should never be forgotten.”
An estimated 230,000 people died across 14 countries during the 2004 tsunami, which swept across the Indian Ocean on the morning of December 26, 2004.
Paul, who had Down syndrome, was one of the 26 Australians who died.
It is with a fond laugh that Joe describes his son, who this year would have been 31.
“Paul was a happy young man, and we used to call him ‘the love machine,’ ” he says. “He just loved to put his arms around people and hug them. We were so blessed to have had 16 years with him, but we still miss him every day. Joe, his wife Ivana and Paul spent Christmas 2004 at the Phuket’s Seaview Hotel on Patong Beach in Thailand, while their daughter Carla remained in Melbourne. On Boxing Day morning, the trio were having breakfast overlooking the beach when their lives changed forever.
As the Giardinas were enjoying the view,
“We still miss Paul every day” —Joe Giardina
they noticed the waters of the beach beginning to swirl. Within moments, a wave rushed up the beach towards the hotel, and then kept moving at an accelerating force.
“We saw a car being pushed along the road, and that was when I knew we had to move, so I grabbed Paul by the arm and we ran back inside the hotel,” Joe recalls. “The wave then hit us and it was already waist height.
“I grabbed Paul and pushed him up against a pillar and put my arms around him in an attempt to hold him there. Ivana had been pushed in another direction and there was a car stuck between us.”
Just as Joe thought he and Paul were safe, the impact of the wave threw them over a retaining wall. “I had Paul by his collar, but then something hit me on the back of my head, I went under and I lost Paul. I held my breath for as long as I could and then was knocked unconscious. I don’t remember anything else. ”
Joe was later found floating in the water by Sydney couple Mark and Michelle Tang, who dragged him to safety up on the fourth floor of the hotel. He had suffered severe injuries to his left hand, broken ribs and a punctured lung.
The devoted father realised his son had been swept away.
Ivana had survived and was desperately looking for her husband and son. She was
later found by another Australian visitor John Fahey, who knew Joe had been rescued, and she was reunited with him. Their son, however, was nowhere to be seen.
It was three days later that Paul’s body was located in a morgue. “We were hopeful someone might have been able to pluck him out of the water but it didn’t happen,” Joe says. “We were then able to bring him home and lay him to rest. It gave us the closure we needed.”
In the year following the tsunami, a grieving Joe and Ivana returned to Phuket twice to visit the place where their world changed. Each visit, Joe recalls, helped with healing their sorrow. “There is a part of Paul that’s there, but we also went to remember what the Thai people went through as well,” he says. “We did not want to forget.”
Joe was determined none of the Australians who died or survived the tragedy would be ever be forgotten, so he lobbied to have a memorial built in Canberra.
In 2015, then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull unveiled the wave-shaped Indian Ocean Tsunami memorial, which features 26 separate pillars representing the 26 Australians who died. The pillar with Paul’s name on it is where Joe plans to lay the flowers for his lost son.
“We’ve now got a place where we can go to reflect, and it’s where their names are acknowledged as a group,” he says. “It’s important to keep their memories alive.”
In the years since, Joe and Ivana opened an Italian shoe import shop – Ricardo Ferro – in Ivanhoe, Melbourne. “When we got back, we went into survival mode to keep ourselves busy as there was a huge void in both our lives. This shop helped us cope,” he says.
“It is very easy to fall into a state where grief overtakes you, but you need to continue to live and you learn to live with it. But we never forget.”