Rain already

(Woy Woy walk #85)

One day, when I'm sufficiently good at photography to counter all the shadows in the lanes, I'm going to make a collection of dodgy fences. I love dodgy fences. Don't want of my own but they're fun to look at. Walking down the lanes you see a lot of dodgy fences. There's also quite a few gates that used to be bedsteads but it's the fences I like best.

Today there was a rather beautiful one. Doubt if the neighbours are keen on it, it was on the point of collapse and had a lot of weeds growing along it. But I liked it. It had been a red-painted tin roof at some point in its career. The paint was soft and faded, pink in places and still quite red in others. It was nicely framed by the greys of a wooden paling fence on either side of it and the weeds provided a bright green border along its bottom. Took a photo on the off chance but it turned out crap. Maybe the fence'll still be there when I go back.

Shortish walk this morning. It's bloody muggy and quite dark. It better bloody rain. Last night was hideous. Not as bad as New Year's Day but pretty evil all the same. Muggy as hell. Could hardly sleep. A cool breeze came in after midnight but there wasn't enough of it. I tossed and turned and dreamed the cyclone had come down the coast to Woy Woy. It blew half the houses away but it got rid of the bloody humidity.

It's getting late for cyclones. The season is generally spring and summer and it's offically autumn now. This one, Larry, was a category 4 on last night's news but this morning's paper says it got to a category 5 by the time it hit. That's bloody powerful. They rarely get that bad. Tracy, our most infamous, is referred to as a category 4 but the equipment measuring wind speed got blown away halfway through.

Tracy hit Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974 and flattened the place. It killed 71 people and left 30,000 homeless in a town of 43,500. Emergency services and volunteers turned up from all over the country and at the Boxing Day cricket in Melbourne the players collected cash in buckets from the crowd for the relief fund. Every time there's another cyclone you hear people who were kids when Tracy came talking about how they took their Christmas presents to the local supermarket on Christmas Day to be sent to the Darwin kids.

Larry's hit Innisfail, a town of 8,000 near Cairns. The Herald quotes from someone from the Bureau of Meteorology as saying: "Category Five is the highest category cyclone. 'Wind gusts to 290km/h [180.20 miles] ... we're going to see extensive damage, there's not much doubt about that.'" There's another cyclone behind Larry but it might come to nothing.