This is the Port Hinchinbrook marina when I visited a couple of years ago with some travel writers.
This is Port Hinchinbrook today.
Image Credit: ABC News.
I am pretty thankful that I’m not confronted with the task of putting North Queensland back on the map for tourists…
I’m a bit concerned for my Townsville friends (and friends scattered throughout North Queensland) as they prepare for the imminent arrival of Tropical Cyclone Yasi. My first day selling Townsville to the world was the day of Cyclone Larry – this is heaps worse. So North Queensland is going to need a lot of help post cyclone – not the least of their worries is getting tourists back into towns dependant on the tourist dollar.
But images like these are going to make that job difficult. This cyclone is massive and scary. And makes me glad that just over a year ago (1 year and 5 days) we moved south.
Image Credit: NASA
This cyclone is the same size as the US. Almost.
Praying for those I know, and those I don’t, staring down the barrel of this incredible weather system. And thinking about praying that a dislodged branch may fly from North Queensland and strike Danny Naliah down for the stupid dribble he brings out at times like this…
It is very sad that this dark chapter in Australia’s history is led by an atheist Prime Minister in Julia Gillard and an openly homosexual Greens leader who seems to be the Deputy Prime Minister by default, both who have no regard for God nor Prayer.
Catch the Fire Ministries president Dr Daniel Nalliah said Julia Gillard was not elected by the majority of the Australian people, but rather the personal decision of two power hungry independent MPs who catapulted Ms Gillard to the top job.
“Are we Aussies all paying for that decision? It is very well known that throughout history, in a time of national crisis, Kings, Prime Ministers and Presidents of countries around the world have turned to God, irrespective of whether they were Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim and asked for help or at least called the nation to pray for protection and for the victims of the disaster,” Dr Nalliah said.
“However, for the past several weeks, right through the flood crisis across Australia, I have not heard our Prime Minister call the people of Australia to pray and ask God for protection and for help for the tens of thousands of people who have become victims of this major disaster,” he said.
I’ve said it once. I’ve said it twice. The man is Christianity’s equivalent of an ambulance chaser. With the same propensity for cashing in on people’s misery in order to benefit himself.
My fellow North Queenslanders. I urge you. Buy milk. It won’t be here tomorrow. And by tomorrow I mean next week.
Here comes another cyclone. Hamish. Yet another pansy name. Sorry to any Hamishes that might be offended – but it really doesn’t inspire fear and trepidation.
But it does mean “he who supplants”. So do these other names. Cyclone Diego sounds much more ominous.
“Life in the Tropics” is our tagline for tourism and relocation promotion here in the ‘ville. It’s one of those suitably generic lines that is meant to be partly aspirational and partly functional. I don’t like it. I do like life in the tropics. We have water, sunshine and temperate winters. And air conditioning. Suffer in your jocks Melbournians (literally).
There are plenty of bad things that come along with the good. When I moved here an ex-Townsvillian friend from Brisbane warned me of several of them. Lets just call her Donna. That’s her real name. She told me that if the crocodiles, stingers, tropical diseases, cyclones, or sunshine didn’t kill me – I’d probably die due to lack of water. She said “it never rains in Townsville”…
For two many years Townsville was known as Brownsville. See what I did there. Two instead of too. I did that on purpose. Townsville started receiving pretty regular rain, and looking green all round, for a couple of years before the rest of the world caught on. Townsville is actually nice. And we have secured water supply. More than four times the size of Sydney Harbour.
What we no longer have is the 300 days of sunshine we claim in our marketing material. There is no way that’s true. Well, it might be, depending on your definition of “sunshine”… I think it rained on about 90 days in my first full year here. And it has rained pretty regularly since.
But I digress. I can put up with that sort of hyperbolic description of tropical life from a jaded ex-resident trying to scare me. But when the same sort of thing comes from a Channel Ten reporter bundling all of those together in the name of “news” I get upset. It creates work for me for one, and number two – it’s shoddy reporting.
So reporters of the world – you can’t have it both ways. Townsville can’t be “brownsville” on one hand and a flooding tropical metropolis on the other.
I don’t even know why I wrote this post. But it was cathartic.