When the wheels come off, I’ll be your spare
The Middle Kids. Stacking Chairs
When the party’s over, I’ll be stacking the chairs
When the world turns on you, I will be there
I will be there
A new school year. A new class. The year 1 students are learning all about the letter A: der Apfel, die Ameise, die Ampel. Together with the Year 2s we are reading the picture book “Why I love Australia”. Another word with A. We are drawing big fat boab trees in Art and I ask the children to draw their families in their tree, linking in a little part of our “All About Me” activities for the month with the discussion on how we are all different.
At the same time, two events take place outside our classroom walls – totally unrelated yet not without some strange kind of connection to what is going on inside our classrooms. Number one, my own little boab tree offshoot in shape of my oldest son is visiting Australia. Is visiting me and I could not be happier. Together we have planned a weekend away as part of his two-week stay with his partner. Which brings me to number two: said planned weekend away suddenly got derailed by another word with A: Alfred the tropical cyclone.
Months ago, when my son announced their plans to visit me in Downunder, my adventure-planning mode kicked in immediately – any excuse to plan a trip, no matter how big or small. He wanted to show his girlfriend the Great Barrier Reef, which we had visited together in 2022, and I was all game. Except that the Great Barrier Reef wasn’t. At least not at this time of year. November to April, so I learnt in my extensive research, was cyclone season. Not extensive enough to find out what a cyclone really was but it sounded serious and I knew that this was not the right time to return to beautiful Far North Queensland with its largest city Cairns (not so beautiful) and white endless beaches, lush green rainforests, gushing waterfalls and, of course, the crystal blue ocean with its coral reefs.
So I played it safe and opted in my bookings for not-so-bad-either Noosa, on the Southern Queensland Sunshine Coast. Cyclone safe and very pretty as well with lots of beaches, lakes, and lush hinterland. Splurged a little and even booked a day of 4WD driving along Rainbow Beach. Weather forecast: Five days of endless sunshine.
Until it started to rain. In Noosa. And not only that – the weather app suddenly showed five extreme weather alerts: flooding, strong winds, heavy rain, large surf, and the dreaded word CYCLONE! This was not supposed to happen. We were supposed to fly out in two days and, according to the satellite picture, straight into the eye of this tropical storm. Memories of the movie The Day After Tomorrow came to mind. But I was no Denis Quaid and my son not Jake Gyllenhaal. Still in denial, I kept checking the weather app every five minutes, hoping that this was simply a glitch, a mistake, an app gone wrong. Until our Air Bnb host in Noosa called to cancel. Flights were cancelled. Supermarkets emptied. Beaches closed. They were preparing for the worst. And I had prepared for nothing. At least not for an erratic cyclone hitting land exactly when and where we were supposed to be.
Cyclone Alfred, or Alfie as the Australians with their love for nicknames call him, had been travelling up and down the east coast of Australia for the past two weeks. While I was greeting my son at the Sydney airport, excited about our upcoming trip to Noosa together, Alfred was gathering speed. While we were learning about A’s and the Australian boab tree, it was turning into a Category 4 Cyclone offshore, creating intense winds and whipping the beaches of South Queensland with erosion-causing waves. While we were slurping oysters in Manly, dancing to the iconic Sydney Band “Middle Kids” in Taronga Zoo, hiking in the Blue Mountains, Alfred moved the wrong way and was getting ready to make landfall much further south than normal. The last cyclone that far south had been 50 years ago. Why now? Why the? Why exactly where we were supposed to be in two days’ time? Oh Alfie!
But I wasn’t going to let a tropical storm – and especially not one with a ridiculous name like Alfie – ruin our plans. If Noosa was the new cyclone Mecca, then Cairns all of a sudden wasn’t and we would simply go there. Fly over the whole mess and go where we had wanted to go all along. With some luck and determination I was able to rebook us all to spend a few days in Palm Cove where we had been 2 and a half years ago. And we even got a special deal – after all, it was “cyclone season” at the Great Barrier Reef!
As for Cyclone Alfred and the Sunshine coast – eventually it did hit land as far south as Brisbane. Though it had weakened to below tropical cyclone strength, it caused great damage through destructive winds and heavy rains, causing flooding, power outages and washed away beaches. Peregian Beach south of Noosa lost up to 30 metres of width. Erosion cliffs (called scarps) of up to 3m high appeared. Just in a week, millions of sand on the beaches seemingly disappeared. The beaches of the Sunshine Coast were scarred by dramatic sand cliffs.
Beaches in Australia constantly change and are very resilient. I noticed that at my local beach in Newport. One day you were able to walk down a few steps to get to your morning swim in the ocean, the next you had to jump down a two meter scarp to get to the beach.
They adapt by changing their shape. When there is a lot of energy in the waves and currents, the beach will become flatter and narrower (which is exactly what happened here in Newport). The sand has been pulled off the beaches and washed off offshore to form sandbanks, which in return naturally protect the remaining beach, as they break the waves before hiting the shore.
Eventually, much of the sand will naturally be transported back ashore, making it steeper and wider again. This can take months, or years, depending on the waves. Some sand never returns. In this case, I am pretty sure they will speed up the process by simply dumping extra sand on their beaches. After all, the show for the tourists must go on.
As cyclones, go, Alfie was a whimp. But it gave us a chance to return to a magical part of Australia that I would return to any time. Just not with Alfie!
Thoughts From the Upside Down 