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T. Inglis Moore, Poetry in Australia Volume 1: From the Ballads to Brennan (1964)

Dorathea Mackellar’s iconic poem ‘My Country’ famously describes Australia as ‘a land of drought and flooding rains’. So frequent are our natural disasters, that even since the onset of European settlement brought greater record keeping, countless moments of devastation have faded from popular memory. When it comes to the scourge of tropical cyclones, this failure of memory has exacerbated by the fact that the Bureau of Meteorology only began naming them as of 1963.

Hence, many of the most devastating cyclones of Robert Menzies’s lifetime went nameless. With the exception that their magnitude might warrant a simple descriptive monicker, such as the ‘Great Gold Coast Cyclone’ of 1954. This crossed the coast of South-East Queensland at Coolangatta at approximately 10pm Saturday evening on 20 February, bringing with it gusts of wind well in excess of 100km/h. But even in the 24hours leading up to landfall, some 900mm of rain had fallen in the town of Springbrook, near the New South Wales border.

Indeed, while the cyclone would be named after the Gold Coast, its greatest damage would be reaped across northern NSW, where a storm surge combined with the rain to cause rapid and widespread flooding. In Byron Bay, the entire fishing fleet of 22 ships went down. In the town of Kyogle, 10 people would perish when a ‘wall of water’ hit suddenly. Further deaths were recorded across Lismore, Casino, Murwillumbah and Armidale. All told, the BoM estimates that between 26-30 Australians lost their lives as a direct result of the storm.

The Menzies Government was quick to respond, arranging a funding agreement with NSW Premier Joe Cahill to help rebuild the region. In Queensland, Federal Minister for Shipping George McLeay stepped in to help repair numerous fishing boats that were vital to the local economy. Some of which had been carried off to farms far inland.

In the aftermath, Minister for the Interior Kent Hughes and Minister for the Air Billy McMahon began discussing plans for a ‘cyclone fighting organisation’, which would involve RAAF planes being used to chart cyclone movements, to ensure that emergency services were given real time updates on where the stormfront was moving. In the end, a network of cyclone warning stations were constructed, dotting the Queensland coast from Townsville to Brisbane. Which helped ensure that while future cyclones could not be avoided, at least people would be given extra time to prepare for them.