Week 16 of #52ancestors focuses on storms, and I can recall a few very memorable ones.
I lived the first few years of my life on a sheep station on the Darling River, roughly half way between Mildura and Broken Hill, and during my time there I witnessed some spectacular dust storms. Dry, usually hot, with strong winds picking up the dry red earth, dust storms turned the sky a strange orange-brown color and sent us all inside to shelter. Fine grains of red dust got everywhere, no matter how tightly we sealed up the house. Carpets and furniture changed color as they were covered with a layer of grit, beds would have to be cleared of the dust before we went to sleep at night. Sometimes even the food tasted gritty, and I pitied the poor animals outside. For a short time afterwards we would even have red sheep!
I hadn't started school when my family moved to Moama, on the Murray River directly north of Melbourne. We still saw the occasional dust storm there, but they were nowhere near as frequent or as spectacular. Thunderstorms were more frequent, however, and had their own inpression. My mother hated thunder and lightning, but my father would stand out under our carport (safely under cover) to watch them, and taught my sister and I to count the seconds between lightning and thunder to calculate how far away the storm was.
Thunderstorms at night were a different matter. Dad was profoundly deaf, and once he took out his hearing aids he heard nothing. A storm could rage all night and he would happily sleep through it. Our house was located in the same street as the local fire station, on the opposite side of the road and two houses down, (Dad could sleep through the fire siren too) and during one memorable storm it was struck by lightning. The bolt hit the tall antenna of the fire station and blasted down into the ground and the phone lines that ran at the front. It happened at about 2am one stormy night, and I have never heard a louder sound. Mum and I thought our house had been hit, and we were up and out, looking for damage and with our ears still ringing, before we were properly awake. Dad sat up and said "Did I hear something?" - the sound was so loud it woke him up!
In the morning we all had a sharp lesson in why you should never use a landline telephone during a thunderstorm - because the lightning had grounded in the phone lines several phones in nearly houses had been blasted across the room. The phone in the fire station itself was found (badly damaged and melted) in another room - it had actually gone through an internal wall. The station itself was damaged as well, especially the siren, which for years after would stick on the highest note instead of oscillating up and down.
Dr Clare Makepeace trawls the archives on a quest for the truth about a Far East prisoner of war
