I got drenched in the two metres between the shop verandah and the car. By the time I had dumped my groceries on the passenger seat and leant back to slam the door, the inside of it was wet. It hadn’t been raining at all half an hour earlier when I left our accomodation to slip out and buy something for dinner. There was a bit of cloud around and there had been a rumble of thunder, but I drove the ten minutes wearing sunglasses against the sunny glare. Now this! A tropical downpour. Welcome to Queensland.
I am visiting Queensland on a brief trip. Three and a half thousand kilometres across the continent and a completely different climatic zone. I had left the warm temperate summer of the south coast of Western Australia and was now in the subtropical wet season of south-east Queensland.
I drive away from the shops with my headlights on and wipers going flat-out in an attempt to maintain some visibility through the windscreen. Water drips down my back from my wet hair. I make a brief stop to buy a bottle of wine. This time I have to dash across the road. The water is two inches deep on the bitumen. My trainers fill with water. I select a bottle of Riesling as the bottle shop’s lights flicker in a power surge. It’s fortunate I have cash because the EFTPOS stops working.
I splash back across the road to the hire car and continue on my way, slowly. I come to a halt at a T-junction. There aren’t many cars but there is a lot of confusion. It takes me a minute to see the problem. There is a floodway on the road to my left and it has done what floodways do: it is flooded. A stream of brown water gushes down the hill and across the road, filling the floodway. The depth indicators show it is almost a metre deep. When I drove to the shops, the road was clear. There was no water. Now it is impassable. Luckily, I am turning right, so as soon as the cars in front of me give up on the idea of going left, my way is clear.
I think about stopping to take a photo of the water running down the hill towards the floodway but I just want to get back. I know I have to go under an underpass and I’m worried that might also be flooded. The longer I take, the more likely this seems. The rain doesn’t seem to be easing. If I can’t get through, I’ll have to find an alternative route. I’m in unfamiliar territory, in unfamiliar conditions, in an unfamiliar car.
But when I get to the underpass, the road is clear. The rain in easing.
It has almost stopped by the time I pull up at the gate to the accomodation. I get out and open the gate without getting any wetter. In fact, I’m already starting to dry. The air is warm.
By the time I am recapping my little adventure to Rob, it has completely stopped raining and I have stopped dripping. He tells me it poured here too. Bucketed down for a bit over five minutes. In hindsight, I could have waited in the shops for the storm to pass, rather than driving in it, but I didn’t know that at the time. It felt like it was going to rain forever.
I sit on the deck, drinking tea, listening to the raucous calling of the channel-billed cuckoo. It’s an outrageous sound. So loud! This is no melodious cuckoo-clock sound. Incidentally, that sound - cu-coo - comes from the common cuckoo, which is native to Europe, Asia and Northern Africa. But there are cuckoos all over the world and they have diverse calls. The common feature is that they are parasitic; cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and leave the job of raising their young to the unsuspecting surrogate parents. (Hence, the term ‘cuckooed’ to refer to someone being exploited.) In his book Where Song Began, Australian biologist Tim Low writes that Australia is “richer in cuckoo parasites than its size would suggest, and could be the place where the deception first began.” For their part, channel-billed cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of crows, currawongs, butcherbirds and magpies. They migrate from New Guinea and Indonesia to north-eastern Australia for the summer. Weighing in at around half a kilogram and over 60 centimetres long, channel-billed cuckoos are the largest cuckoo. But the birds themselves are hard to see.
(Image by Imogen Warren, sourced from Shutterstock)
I wander around trying to follow their calls, looking for them. (Actually, I was gazing upwards into the tree branches trying to work out what the hell was making the racket.) Finally, I catch a glimpse of them as they fly across a clearing between tall trees. They are big, grey birds and their huge bills are evident as they fly over. My bird book describes them as looking like flying walking sticks, which makes me smile and wish I had thought of that description.
I cook pasta and salad and we wash it down with the Riesling, sitting in the cabin with the ceiling fan going flat-out and the louvres open to the breeze.
Later, it rains again. The same fat, splashing, smashing raindrops, crashing through the rainforest. Then it is gone again. Thunder and lightning roll around the atmosphere, forking the landscape, filling the air. All night, flashes and flickers illuminate the cabin. It’s hot and humid and wet.
The whole scenario - the rainstorm, the driving, the birds, the tempest - is thrilling. It makes me feel far from home and energised. It’s so different to the thunderstorms we get at home, so delightfully foreign.
See you outside,
Jill
As a Queenslander recently returned, it gives me great pleasure to read this account of our summer downpours. Particularly the size of our rain drops. It is my third summer back here and I am savouring it all, including the pattern of heat and humidity build-up and the relief of a storm. Thank you for capturing it so well!