From the mid 60s to the mid 70s South East Queensland was battered by numerous cyclones, in fact I recall battening down the hatches every Friday night for 5 weeks in a row around 1974 or 75, including one period where sets were roaring across the Pacific Highway into the front bar of the Kirra Hotel, and that still didn’t deter Joe Larkin and the thirsty locals from beers after tools down.
We lived on the beach at Rainbow Bay when Cyclone Dinah scored a pretty much direct hit on the Goldy in February 1967. Dinah ambled down the coast at a snails pace, the surf was 20+ for over a week, and there was footage on the nightly news of cars from the Wreckers being shoved over the abyss that was now an eroded foreshore cliff to save the newly minted Apollo high rise in Surfers Paradise from being claimed by the ocean.
The maelstrom known as Dinah lashed the southern end as well. I set out to survey the damage .First thing I noticed was that my father’s 18’ fishing boat that lived right on the beach was gone. There was a huge cliff of sand along what was left of Rainbow Bay. It was actually a scavenger’s treasure chest because 20 years of lost money was there to be extracted like an archeological dig. I recall finding a 10 pound note and my dig probably added to the erosion.
Around the corner at Coolangatta was a most interesting sight. Cooly Surf Club was Hanging 10, it was literally on the on the precipice of a 30’ cliff. I realised this had all happened before when I saw a line of exposed telegraph poles running for hundreds of metres south towards Greenmount. They had been placed there as fortification after a much earlier cyclonic event.
I raced home to Google the history. Hang on, it was 1967, no I didn’t. But 40 years later I did find a site that featured all the Queensland Cyclones of the 20th Century, and in an attempt to seek out a pattern, or a cycle, I began my studies. I uncovered the source of the telegraph poles.
During the entire decade of the 1930s there was an average of 6-8 cyclones off Queensland every year, and they all seemed to roar down the coast to the NSW border, and some beyond. I then correlated that to the mid 60s to mid 70s and there it was again, multiple cyclones roaring south, running parallel to the Queensland Coast.
Was that a cycle running about 35-40 years apart? What did this mean, has anything changed atmospherically – ocean temps, climate wise? It wasn’t like the cyclones suddenly stopped in 1975. I remember a photo of Ross Phillips in a big black barrel in 1979, Cyclone Abigail in ‘82, Richard Badger arms in the air at gaping Kirra in ‘92, and many in between.
We ran the Billabong Kirra Pro in cyclone surf in ‘92,’93,’94 and ‘95. Standing on Burleigh headland with Gordon Merchant, wondering if we had asked for too much as Cyclone Roger presented 15’+ Burleigh and the next day, the first day of the event in ‘93, 6-8’ perfect Kirra.
The century turned and wow, has it been a placid first 24 years. I go to meetings and get laughed at for even raising the word cyclone. “Why would you make contingencies about a one in 15-year event?”. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have relocated to SE Queensland over the last 20 years and haven’t battened down the hatches QLD style once.
Sure, there have been East Coast Lows and they thump, but they are more local, a low pressure system forming and spinning off Fraser Island is way different to a tropical cyclone roaring in from 1500 kms off the Coral Sea, accompanied by a 7-10 metre North East groundswell that lasts a week.
There has been massive flood events caused by ex-tropical cyclones that have crossed way up north then drifted down just inside the coast, especially in La Nina years like 2011 and 2022. And of course, there have been awesome swell events, mainly caused by seasonal lows pulling on the handbrake in between New Caledonia and north island New Zealand. They produces a guaranteed 10 Day, 17 second interval wave train that awakens Kirra, how could it not.
One of the indicators for me has been the wait to see the effect of a full-blown cyclonic assault in the era of TRESBP (Tweed River Entrance Sand Bypass Project). Implemented in 2000, the sand pumping has had to react and pivot and then recover from numerous swell events, in particular May 2008 when back to back to back 10-12’ swells created storm banks that are traditionally extremely adverse to sand configurations. In lay terms that translates to messed up sand deposits, the exact opposite to groomed point breaks.
So for the first 25 years of sand pumping, we are yet to see a week long 20’+ swell event out of the North East, courtesy of a cyclone. As I wrote this last week, in the back of my mind I was thinking it is still cyclone season and one will probably form as soon as I publish this. Sure enough, Cyclone Alfred formed in the Coral Sea overnight, but Alfred does not answer the nagging question of where have you been hiding for a quarter century?
The sand bypass system has not had to recover from one of the massive erosion events that cyclones create. It has not been truly tested by the full might of the ocean. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have relocated to the Gold Coast since 2000, one gets howled down at meetings with comments like “why would you even talk about a one in 20-year event”. All kinds of fencing and sand dune seeding and proposed structures east of sea walls have been implemented and are underway; it is as though cyclones coming south of Queensland’s Tropical and Central Coast are a thing of the past.
We do not fully understand the long-range cyclonic cycles. We have seen decade long patterns of sustained seasonal cyclonic activity, widespread and not contained to the far north. Now we have seen a 20 plus year period of placid patterns. Of course there have been cyclones – Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, Cairns, the Gulf of Carpenteria – and many in the northwest, however the well documented pattern of cyclones tracking south into cooler NSW waters has been absent.
There are noticeably less 6-8’ northeast swells spinning off the remnants of cyclones and travelling a long way south. I used to spend a week or ten days in the January break on Sydney’s northern beaches, catching pumping northeast swells at Whaley, North Narrabeen, Little Av, and a couple mysto spots.
Marine biologists, coastal engineers and climate scientists have reported that over the next decades we may expect more swells from an easterly direction as opposed to predominant southeast swells. Point breaks generally love east swell, however sand transportation feeds off southeast wind and groundswell.
One might hypothesise that a warming ocean and planet would spawn more cyclones. The northern hemisphere hurricane season and typhoon alley in the western Pacific have definitely been intensely active and cyclones have regularly spun along Australia’s northwest, but the traditional domain of cyclonic activity, the Coral Sea into the Tasman Sea, has been strangely quiet so far this century.
Who knows what this all means. Are we in for a wild decade or has there actually been some kind of shift. My gut feeling is that nobody knows for sure but if and when the east coast cyclones bust out of their malaise, we better buckle up and have our galoshes ready for a beer at the Kirra Hotel.
