Yasi

Despite the dismal weather I went to work today. The rain poured and the wind saw to it that it poured into the most inconvenient places. I expected that many would stay at home because of the wet and it would be a casual day but I was wrong. I guess because things had been so tough around here lately parents had to go to work and so sent their children to school. Better in some cases I suppose than letting them stay at home with their friends and, perhaps, burning the house down.

My first class was year nines. Not as bad as year tens but bad enough. They were at the point where the girls wore short shorts and too much make up and the boys wore their pants so low that they would have displayed pubic hair had it not been so new to them that they had yet to get over the embarrassment of its presence. All carried mobile phones into the classroom. None admitted having them there once inside. With the right paraphernalia all could seem popular. Few actually were.

I did not even open my brief case. I looked around at the unsettled group in the room. A middle-aged man is no saint I thought to myself.

‘Sit down,” I yelled from the front of the class.

They did, for which I was particularly grateful.

Standing dead centre in the middle of a roughly wiped blackboard I gave them their task for the period. “We will not be following the usual curriculum today,” I lectured. “Today, instead, we will write 300 to 500 words on ‘Yasi’ – the cyclone that passed through Tully, Innisfail etc last night around midnight for those of you who have been living in a pillow case lately. I want to know what your experience of the cyclone turned out to be. Whether it involved family or relatives who evacuated; family or relatives who did not evacuate and experienced the full force of nature first hand; that it was the largest, most powerful cyclone in living history - anything. How did Yasi affect you or your family is what I am after? I want it to be personal - any questions?”

There were none. Well there was one but it was from Billy Bluster and it is not worth mentioning. His finished paper had a drawing of an extended fools finger on an otherwise clenched left hand and nothing more.

After the class settled into their chore, about 10 minutes, I put Delores Humbert in charge of the room and headed off, I told the class, to the principal’s office to collect some paper work, but instead, found a sheltered and out of sight alcove just outside the building and smoked a cigarette or five. I returned a few minutes before the end of period bell rang, just in time for most folks to throw a piece of paper at me as they walked out the door. Delores expected some sort of recognition so I said, “Purple suits you Delores and Thank you.” She squealed delightfully as she always did and minced her pert ass out of the room and down the hall on her pink platforms.

Most of the stories submitted  were of no interest - he said she said sort of stuff with the odd allude to something that may have happened. However, Bladstone Stump wrote something gamey. It was the best of a bad lot and probably says a lot about where we are socially these days. I neither endorse nor condone what he wrote but did notice the chime.

My parents had  ***** News on from the minute I got home yesterday afternoon. Yasi was still 140 k from the coast and as far as I could see nothing was happening. The news service had people in places like Cairns, Townsville, Bowen those places that were least affected in the end as it turns out. Reporters were serious and camera shots came from inside hotel rooms and focused on the person talking or a few fronds from a fluttering, protected garden shrub and all the time they kept talking up the impending death and destruction. Any moron could see that the winds they were recording were hardly more than what you might expect on an inconsiderate Sunday afternoon on Morton Bay. But they showed them all night.

Meanwhile the cyclone passed both north and south or visa versa of our intrepid broadcasting reporters who could only have looked the way they did the following morning from lack of sleep (sic).

If this network had been covering the Bathurst 1000 their performance would have been equal to sitting in the pitts photographing tyre warmers.

If we want to make this a spectator sport we need cyclone cam. We need cameras in the path, on the beaches, in buildings in cars. We have the technology to know where these things are likely to make land fall, we need cameras there and on places that they expect to be torn apart. We want to see, in real time, rooves torn off, crops flattened, cars flying across roads. What good is a cyclone if you can’t witness the destruction?

Our electricity people and telecommunications people need to lift their game. Now, at rebuilding, the government is going to help, which means the tax payer. Consider – fix your towers or go underground so they are cyclone 10 proof and next time charge per view. The world will watch, THE WORLD will watch, you will make 1,000,000 times what it costs those who payed for the fix, unless, again, we just see tyre warming.