Letter from Australia

Here's a letter from a friend of mine who lives in Tasmania:

G'day,

   Thanks for the thoughts. The first cyclone thankfully hit a spot with few people, but the big one coming is heading for densely populated areas so could be a more close run thing. I'm evacuating my work team - we're here trying to assess what can be done for the reef after the floods - as riding out a major cyclone when you don't have to seems silly.

   [Her husband]'s folks have faired well to thankfully and the eastern seaboard is picking itself up fairly rapidly. There has been a huge out pouring of random acts of kindness (complete strangers turning up to help save shops or clean houses etc). Its been really amazing. Sadly our politicians have seen it as further reason to say why the other side is worse financial manager, they are just so disconnected from reality - that is all but our ex-PM Kev. A roving media team stumbled across him helping evacuate Chinese students, trousers rolled up, wading through water to his hips, rattling off in Chinese (because they spoke about no English and no idea what was happening). When he saw the reporters he tossed them bags to carry too - if you're here, you're helping.

   There have just been so many stories of amazing survival and generosity (holding onto a bike rake for 3 hours while a 7m wall of water destroyed the town around you, a 13yr old sacrificing his life so that his younger brother could be saved, 28000 people turning up to voluntarily help clean up central Brisbane) it has been a very heart lifting if trying time for the county (there is literally a state of emergency somewhere in every state in Australia, due to a mix of floods, cyclones, tsunamis, firestorms, and heat waves). That and the story of the guy who scored a VC last week has reinforced my pride in being an Aussie ;)

Here's a link for the URL in the first comment, showing the size of the storm.