The Dust Storm

This isn’t an amazing story, but it’s just a moment of my life that has stuck with me, so it gets a place here.

February 8th, 1983 I was a year 9 student at Camberwell Grammar School. That afternoon I was in the library, which had an elevated view back towards the city. It was a good place to be, because it was air conditioned. It reached 43 degrees that day, it was stinking hot.

Suddenly the calm and orderly business of the library was interrupted by shouts. As I rushed to the window to see what the fuss was about, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

A HUGE dust cloud was making it’s way across the city headed east. I had never seen anything like it, it felt positively apocalyptic. This probably added to the feeling of impending doom I had when I attended the Stop the Drop concert just five days later.

This isn’t my pic, but it gives you a sense of what it was like;

It was estimated that about 50,000 tonnes of topsoil were stripped from the Mallee. The combined effect of drought and dust storm inflicted damage on the land that, according to the then President of the Victorian Farmers and Graziers’ Association, would take up to 10 years and tens of millions of dollars to repair.