Dark days

(ahead)

Today, bunkered down in Mourilyan Harbour, hiding from nature’s fury, we are still clinging to the naïve hope that by some miracle, tomorrow Tony Abbott will not be given a mandate to trash the environment. Here’s hoping that at least the Senate will have the power to curtail some of the COALition’s extreme anti-environmental policies. Australia is almost unique in that we still have large areas that are relatively pristine, but not for much longer it seems. Without a healthy environment, nothing else can prosper, including us. We are so dependent on the natural world for our well-being, yet we seem to forget this so easily. Everything, particularly a thriving economy, depends on a healthy environment. But Rupert, Tony, Gina, Clive and co. (not to mention Kev and buddies) seem to be succeeding in the suppression of this fairly self-evident truth.

While we’ve been here hiding from the squalls we’ve had a small taste of what it might be like to be caught up in a cyclone. Of course the conditions would be many times more ferocious, but we’ve been reminded of the power of the natural world, and what will come as the climate warms. And almost every local we meet tells us how much the weather has changed over the last couple of years …

Mourilyan Harbour is a sugar port and there’s not much else here. Despite the ferocious weather a massive ship from Bangkok (up to 40 000 tonnes) came in to dock on Wednesday night at high tide. We were surprised such a monster would come through the narrow channel in those conditions, but we heard the whole show over the radio and the pilot sounded invariably calm. There’s not a lot to do here and even getting ashore has proved quite challenging in these conditions, so watching a large ship arrive, be turned in a small space, be loaded up and then sent off on it’s way has provided us with some entertainment and distraction from the fury of the wind.

Docked

Exiting in slightly calmer conditions with just one tugboat

Almost out

In a brief visit ashore we discovered rainforest