Natural Disasters and Building Community
As I’m writing, communities in northern Queensland, Australia, are waiting for the onslaught of what is predicted to be Australia’s most severe cyclone. This afternoon, authorities upgraded the cyclone to a category five, putting it on par with Hurricane Katrina and instilling terror into communities of usually unflappable Australians.
The path of the cyclone is expected to cross the very towns that, less than a month ago, were devastated by Australia’s worst flood disaster in recorded history. Floods that killed more than 20 people, and destroyed tens of thousands of homes.
In the past two weeks the state of Victoria has also seen some of the worst floods in living history, which I have experienced first hand as part of my job – to say the least, work has become more of a lifestyle than an occupation lately.
Driving North from Melbourne into rural Victoria, it’s difficult not to be struck by the sheer destruction that water can cause. Instead of the lean threads of wheat and barley and occasional canola crop that usually adorn Victoria’s fertile plains over summer, a brown, dirty haze has descended over everything.
The aerial photos show an enormous ‘inland sea’ stretching kilometers across, but they don’t capture the gloom. Paddock after paddock lies dead, and strewn across these paddocks at regular intervals are twisted lines of posts strung with filth-clogged wire: farm fences in memory only.
These natural disasters are misery on a grand scale, and for those of us in the shelter of cities, it’s difficult to imagine how depressing things must be for those who live, breathe and work this land.
But out of all this destruction, a curiously and touchingly Australian phenomenon has been born.
Nicknamed the ‘Gumboot Army’, more than 60,000 people have registered to volunteer as part of the clean up efforts – one of the highest numbers of volunteers the Australian Red Cross has received at any one time.
People thousands of kilometers away in other states bought plane tickets and descended on Queensland, and for many days the highway into Brisbane was gridlocked by cars packed full of brooms, gumboots, buckets, spades, and eager hands.
The army has worked tirelessly for weeks now, removing ruined furniture from homes, scraping mud out of people’s living rooms, re-fencing shattered farming boundaries, helping, leading and listening. Eschewing the ‘every man for himself’ mentality that tends to follow natural disasters, Australians instead have been united in their compassion, spirit and sense of community.
For a long time, folklore and rhetoric here have spoken of the ‘Australian spirit’ – a vague and ethereal concept that tends to lack a little in practical application. Even though it sounds cheesy, the physical elements of nature that Australia has faced over the past month have tested the moral elements of our own nature, and I think we might have passed.