Cyclone furies
of the North-West Seas
By ERNESTINE HILL
For the ninth time, the town
of Onslow, alias Beadon,
North-West Australia, has
been severely damaged in a
willie-willie, its homes levelled
to the ground, and one of the
finest steel and concrete jetties
of the coast wrecked.
Weary of the attentions of a too
frequent and unwelcome visitor of
late years, Onslow has taken to
changing its name and tucking it
self away into unexpected corners
of the sandhills — but the willie
willies still find it.
Even so, the appalling record of this
town runs only third to those of
Cossack and Roebourne, which have
completely disappeared 15 and 11 times
respectively.
Perhaps there is no other coast
on earth which bears such a tragic
history of these summer cyclones
as that of North-West Australia,
between Carnarvon and Wyndham.
Pioneers of this part of the world
have built again and again on the
slopes of Vesuvius.
The most notorious danger-zone lies
between Exmouth Gulf and the Eighty
Mile Beach. Onslow, Roebourne, Cossack,
Port Sampson, Port Hedland, Balla-balla,
Broome, Derby, and the now defunct
settlements of Fortescue and Condon, each
in its turn has blown away, some of them
twice in one year or three years in succession.
Tales Of Horror
DROWNED in willie-willie's run
countless pages of old fatality records
in Roebourne's police station,
while the stumps of costly jetties, the
twisted lines and bridges of many a
railway, and hundreds of wrecked
schooners and luggers, rotted in the
mangroves, tell tales of unimaginable
horror in the stormy past.
To track back the history of the
north-west cyclones is to stand aghast
at the concentrated malevolence of
Nature upon these isolated Australian
coasts, and to marvel at the magnificent
courage of men.
Up here, where the seasons are up
side down, after a winter of unbroken
blue and gold, Christmas comes in with
squalls of lightning, wind and rain,
known in the north as 'cock-eyed
Bobs,' or. more briefly and familiarly,
cock-eye.'
Purely local, these storms that leave
the barometer without a quiver and
usually work out their fury in a 15
miles radius, are baby hurricanes in
mad onslaught that might veer any way
at any moment, and invariably pass
over within an hour. To the number of
three and four a night, to little ships
at sea they are a circumstance to be
reckoned with, with a few wrecks and
fatalities to their credit, but seen from
a safe anchorage a magnificent natural
phenomenon.
'Cock-Eye'
OUT of the splendor of tropic evening,
the serenity of a glorious sun
set, a wicked little snake-tongue of
lightning suddenly flashes along the
base of the clouds, lighting the hills
and gullies of dream into a vivid
perspective, and accentuating the green
and gold of the sand dunes, the jagged
teeth of the reefs, in stereoscopic light.
Swiftly following comes a whip
crack of thunder. Mustered under
the lash of the wind, the clouds rise
to a towering Matterhorn that, like
a living and menacing Djinn, comes
striding across the sea.
The world goes grey before it. Near
shores fade deep into rainy mist, though
all the skies beyond still hold the frail
tints of evening light. The storm
swings on, perhaps to sheer at a sharp
right angle and disappear with a low
grumble of thunder in the distance, per
haps to sweep on and engulf us.
The lightening has now become vicious,
writing its menace in Morse upon a
narrowing horizon. The wind increases to
full gale, howling and whining in the
rigging at 80 miles an hour, and then
the cloud-burst breaks in a pandemonium
that would strike terror to the
hearts of those unacquainted with its
whim and its brevity.
Savage Seas
SEAS that mirrored the sunset ten
minutes ago bare their teeth on the
rocks in savage fury and flying spray.
Waters of the shallowest lagoons be
come a boiling cauldron. Ships drag
madly at their anchor-chains, and it
is necessary to set the engines full speed
ahead to keep them at their bearings.
Then comes a dense wall of rain, rain in
inches, thick as a felt mat blotting out
earth and sky— and even as it falls the
gale sweeps onward in the twinkling of
an eye and the seas abate. The moon
comes out from behind the clouds, a
smiling traitress, and the tranquility
of a clear bright night is unbroken, with
nothing to tell the story of sudden passion
save the faint, fresh smell of rain.
Of a far graver nature — a word of
dread not lightly to be spoken —
is the willie-willie, that rages for
many hours, with death and
destruction in its wake.
From November, to April in these seas
the cyclones can be expected at any
moment it is then that the pearling
fleets huddle close inshore for safety,
and that coastal captains watch the
barometer hourly with an anxious eye,
for the willie-willie as a rule gives notice
of its approach with a rapidly falling
glass and a seething leaden sky.
Clock-Circle Of Disaster
ORIGINATING far out to sea, or
swinging down from the north for
1,500 miles in a steady, relentless on
-slaught, with a wind force up to 120
miles an hour, they generally strike the
coast in a great clockwise sweep from
100 to150 miles in diameter, circle the
compass in a mad fury for 24 hours,
and then make off across another couple
of thousand miles of desert, east of the
goldfields, to the Southern Ocean.
Sometimes twice in a few months they
have carried away the whole of the
pearling fleet and left a trail of ruined
homesteads and settlements.
From north-east, east, south-east,
due south, comes the full blast of the
gale. Ships caught in the swing of the
wind have sometimes been anchored
five miles off shore in the evening, 90
miles away at dawn, and back almost
to their anchorages at nightfall, while
other ships have lain for a period of
dead calm in the centre of the vortex
before the storm came buffeting back
from the south-west with redoubled
fury
Losing Fight
CLINGING to the spinifex through
hours of darkness, watching his
home and his windmills and live
stock, and perhaps his family, blown off
helter-skelter before his eyes, his bullock
teams buried in the sand, and his
schooners swept from their moorings
and dashed on the beaches, the pioneer
of the north-west has defied these oft
recurrent calamities for 70 years— in
vain
It was on Christmas Day, 1869, that
the first pearlers and pastoralists of
Roebourne and Cossack — unwitting
settlers from England and the south
learned a lesson in a bolt from the blue.
In the course of that day the barometer
fell from 29.94 to 28.22. At the end
of it the pearling fleet had foundered,
with many lives lost, and both Roe-
bourne and Cossack were levelled to
the ground.. Of the homeless and destitute
it took three months to carry the disastrous
tidings to Perth.
In 1875 the pearling fleet was again
demolished in Exmouth Gulf, with 59
lives lost. Two years later six over
seas barques, with £20,000 worth of
guano, and six men, went down at the
Lacepede Islands, and in 1880 a tidal
wave 25 ft. high obliterated Onslow.
Big Deathroll
IN 1881, Cossack was wiped out again,
its ships driven miles inshore and
12,000 sheep drowned at the Ashburton.
In 1887, occurred one of the most terrible
disasters of the coast, when on
the Eighty Mile Beach five barques,
four schooners, 36 white men, and
nearly 200 colored men (sic) went to their
doom in a night.
In 1892, 15 luggers and 40 men were lost
at Onslow, and in 1894 Cossack and Roebourne
— at that time large and prosperous towns
with 2,000 and 4,000 people respectively
—were left with scarcely a dwelling
standing.
Year after year the same dread
story was told, a monotony of tragedy.
Sometimes calling with the regularity
of a coastal steamer at every port of
the coast from Darwin down, some
times wreaking havoc within a radius
of 100 miles, the willie-willies have
tossed away like scraps of paper
hundreds of thousands of pounds worth
of jetties and tramways and ships and
station-homesteads and streets and
stock, as many as 15,000 sheep and
2,000 cattle having been blown to sea
or buried in the sand at one blow.
Barques and brigantines and schooners
and lighters and luggers and loaded
steamers have been scattered
for miles, left high and dry in the clay
pans, or ridiculously perched upon the
crests of hills and islands.
Eleven times in three decades the towns of
Roebourne and Cossack completely
disappeared, with their connecting
railway— and still they stand, a few
gaunt stone buildings held to terra
firma with iron cables.
Terrific Cyclone
IT was as late in the year as April 27
1908, that there occurred one of the
most dreadful sea disasters in Austra
lian pearling history. Out on the fishing
grounds of Lagrange Bay, reassured
by the lateness of the season and the
tranquility of the weather, the whole
of the Broome fleet was caught in a
tremendous cyclone which gave little
warning of its swift approach, and
annihilated five large schooners, with
between 30 and 40 luggers, in a few brief
hours, with a death-roll that totalled
nearly 300 men. There is a monument
in Broome graveyard perpetuating the
memory of 140 of the Japanese alone
who perished in that blow.
Swimming for many miles and many
hours through turbulent seas, the
survivors reached the beach at Lagrange,
to find it a shambles. Dead bodies lay
everywhere, awash in the creeks or
caught in the mangroves. Somebody
kicked a diver's box and found 200
sovereigns.
For three days the shipwrecked,
white and colored (sic), naked and
shivering, groped their way through
the blinding, windblown sand to
Fraser Downs station, and it was
weeks before the fate of all their comrades
could be ascertained.
Dead sharks and turtle and dugong
littered the beach feet deep for miles,
the whole country was swept bare of its
foliage, and the coastline unrecogni
sable. Sheep and cattle had been blown
Into the fences and strangled, or swept
in mobs to sea, and there is still to be
found there the wreckage of a score of
ships. In December of the same year,
another cyclone hit the same area,
and at Wallal resulted in a damage of
£20,000 with 50 lives lost.
Fiendish Regularity
IN 1909, Onslow was again destroyed.
In 1910, Broome was blown to pieces
like a pack of cards, with 40 lives lost
at sea. In 1911, Onslow and Cossack
blew away together, and in March.
1912, the coastal steamer Koombana,
with 135 people on board, put out from
Hedland and from human ken.
The years between have seen the
willie-willies approaching with a fiendish
regularity to ruin and wrack the coast,
the most notable being that of 1926,
when the Port Sampson jetty, which
had cost the Western Australian
Government many thousands of pounds,
was blown out of existence, and the
settlement there abandoned.
From 1875 to 1925 the valiant little
town of Onslow — or Beadon — has lived
nine lives, on an unsheltered patch of
coast so often reaping the full retribution
of wind and sea. Now it has suffered
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