About tsunamis

Waitakere City Council warning sign, New Zealand. In places with a high tsunami risk, like the coasts of New Zealand, there may be warning sirens, but if you feel tremors, play safe and go uphill.

In August 1805, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser reprinted a letter from Norfolk Island, a Pacific sub-colony, describing a ‘freak tide’ on 8 May 1805. At 3.30 pm, almost at low tide, all the water drained from a channel that usually had 2 to 3 fathoms (4 to 6 metres) of water in it, and in two minutes it was left dry. Suddenly, the water rushed back and came inland, reaching the military barracks, usually 20 metres above the high tide mark. Then, the water all ran out again.

You can read the story here: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 4 August, 1805, 1 – 2, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/626869

The “town of Sydney” that is mentioned there is now called Kingston.

This event was later called a ‘tidal wave’. In Japan, where this happened more often, people called it a ‘harbour wave’, or in Japanese, a tsunami. A tsunami is far bigger inside a harbour than it is out in the deep ocean, and it actually has nothing to do with tides. It is caused by movements in or under the sea.

English speakers adopted the Japanese name when we began to understand what causes these waves. Out at sea, a tsunami passes under boats without anybody on board noticing. The wave is not just on the surface: the disturbance reaches deep into the water and, as it approaches shallow water, the bottom of the wave touches the sea floor, it gets slowed down, and the water starts to pile up.

On Norfolk Island in 1805, the first warning of looming trouble came when the sea level fell. This often happens with a tsunami, and there will always be people who walk out onto the exposed seafloor when the sea goes out. If you ever see this kind of fall in sea level (with or without a starter wave), move quickly to high ground, because the several following waves will be larger!

In Sri Lanka, when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami hit, the biggest wave was the third or fourth, which gave a British geologist time to warn people to leave the beach. In the ocean, those waves were a metre high, but their tremendous speed—almost 1000 kilometres per hour—is converted into extra height in shallow waters.

We live on top of a 65 metre hill (for primitive societies, that means 200 feet above sea level. Nonetheless a dodgy insurance agent tried to sell us tsunami insurance. and several fellow-residents scurried to sign, until I pointed out that any tsunami hitting us had to come through, 70 metres high, meaning that most of Sydney would be devastated, and the insurance company would be bankrupt, so we would never get any money back.

That aside, I told them, our coastline was unlikely to allow any surge to come our way. The most dangerous place to be during a tsunami is in a steep-sided inlet like a fiord or in a wedge-shaped bay. These shapes funnel the wave’s energy in, increasing the force and the danger.

In 1946, a magnitude 8.1 earthquake in the Aleutian Islands in the northern Pacific Ocean produced a tsunami that killed 96 people in Hilo, a town on a wedge-shaped bay on the eastern side of the island of Hawaii. The people of Hilo had two later tsunami warnings, in 1952 and 1957, but these waves were small and people had stopped worrying about mere waves. A few years later, in 1960, a magnitude 9.5 earthquake in Chile sent another huge wave into Hilo’s bay, killing 61 people. Seven hours later, the wave reached Japan where 142 people were killed.

Some of my Californian friends have just (December 5, 2024) been through a tsunami scare, and while they got off safely this time, there may be another quake that does produce a quake in the near future. Note the may. All I offer is a reasonable hypothesis.

A tsunami can happen when there is an earthquake resulting from a large part of the seafloor moving suddenly up or down; or when there is an earthquake or volcano that makes a large mass of rock tumble into the sea; or when a large solid piece of a meteor falls into the sea.

These days, people receive alerts if a tsunami is coming, but there was an insufficient warning system in place when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami happened in the Indian Ocean, after a quake with a magnitude of about 9.1. In hindsight, that event might have been predictable, because a week or so earlier, there had been a powerful earthquake with a north to south sideways movement of the Australian Plate, south of New Zealand.

Sideways movements make no waves, but they transfer force and, sooner or later, the northern end of the Indian Plate had to slide under the Burma micro-plate, bumping it upwards. When the slide happened, 30 cubic kilometres of water were moved, leading to waves that were about one metre high, out at sea, but up to 15 metres high as they came ashore. With no warning, about 230,000 people died across 14 countries. 

This may perhaps happen off California: every seismic movement transfers stress to to a new place.

At other times nobody may notice. On 16 January 2022, Little Manly beach in Sydney harbour had repeated surges from a tsunami triggered by a volcano near Tonga. Only the present writer was aware of the continued one-minute ebb-and-flow, and my camera caught it: I managed to crop out members of the public and children, but they all remained blissfully 

To the left of those pictures lies North Head, covered in a deep layer of aeolian (wind-blown) sand from the last ice age, but there is at least one Australian geologist who claims the sand was deposited there by a tsunami. If I were to assess this, I would need to use rude words. Let me just say excreta tauri...

This draws on my recent and about-to-be-pitched What on Earth: behind earth science.

So to my Californian friends, I advise a degree of vigilance.

Christmas in Australia

Well, Advent has kicked off, so it is time to look at how we know and mark Christmas in the Antipodes, or, at least, in the Australian part.

In 1952, a small boy heard and learned a song. If you go to this link and start at 4:10, you can hear it. The words of the magic part go like this:

The north wind is tossing the leaves.
The red dust is over the town;
The sparrows are under the eaves,
And the grass in the paddock is brown...

The red dust is less common these days, but 15 years back, a dust storm near Kati Thanda (we still called it Lake Eyre back then) gave the small boy, now of advanced middle age, this view from his study window:

Christmas in Australia comes at the height of summer, so we enjoy it on the beach or by water, in very different ways. For us, the north wind is hot, three days without rain, and the grass starts to grow brown, and to us, that is normal.

The small boy, raised on English literature, suddenly realised that Christmas is not about snow and robins, not where he lived. He found a new sense of Australlianness.

These days, we find lawn ornaments like this one that you can see on the right. When these appear in early December, we know what is coming.

To me now, the harbingers of Christmas, aside from lawn decorations are fading jacarandas, fruit bats passing in the dusk as I look out that same study window (you can see them above), cicadas shrilling—and that song.

Because I have been working on a large work of history this year, I have drawn on my files to look at how we invading Australians have moulded Christmas to meet our conditions. The child in the illustration below is probably a new arrival. Emus are not that dangerous, but they can hurt, and are best avoided. In the late 19th century, this was less obvious.

Christmas: 1797

David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol 2, 51.

There were at this time in the town of Sydney three schools for the education of children; and this being the period of their breaking-up for the Christmas holidays, the governor was gratified with the sight of 102 clean and decently dressed children, who came with their several masters and mistresses, and in form paid their respects to his excellency, who examined the progress of the elder scholars in writing, specimens of which he kept for the purpose of comparing with those which they should present to him on the following Christmas.

Christmas: 1813

In 1813, tinned meat was a new invention. George Evans had gone out with a small party to map the land west of the Blue Mountains which had penned in the settlement at Sydney. I see Evans as a happy hobbit of a man who enjoyed his food.

George Evans’s Journal of his journey to the Bathurst Plains, entry for Christmas Day, from Ernest Scott (ed.), Australian Discovery.

The day is so hott the Fish will not bite; it is the only time they have missed; therefore I opened my tin case of Roasted Beef.

Maybe this man is trying to catch an Aussie Christmas dinner of snake? This is how we frighten off dauntful wannabe immigrants, by showing pics like the one above. My guess is that it is a python,

The shot below shows a 2-metre python which caused me to block traffic on a tourist road, 9 km from the heart of a city of 5 million people, earlier this year. We don't kill our snakes any more: we guard them, especially when they are crossing a road.

Christmas became a time for merry-making, and dare I say it, drunkenness.

Christmas: c. 1842

Louise Ann Meredith (Mrs Charles Meredith), Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, 1844, 128.

The prevailing vice of drunkenness among the lower orders is perhaps more resolutely practised at this season than any other. I have heard of a Christmas-day party being assembled, and awaiting the announcement of dinner as long as patience would endure; then ringing the bell, but without reply; and on the hostess proceeding to the kitchen, finding every servant either gone out or rendered incapable of moving, the intended feast being meanwhile burned to ashes. Nor is this by any means a rare occurrence; as the crowded police-office can bear ample testimony.

Christmas: 1855

Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia, 160.

We rowed down the river to church, as we thought the cool shade of the spreading trees overhanging the water would be pleasant, and in the evening some friends joined us in endeavouring, by the help of roast beef, plum pudding, and mince pies, to cheat ourselves into the belief that it was Christmas day, while the heat of the atmosphere compelled us to put our handkerchiefs to our faces continually in a very unaristocratic fashion.

Below, George French Angas shows people by a river, with far more clothes on than they need (see later for how they should have been attired). I can see six bottles for eight adults...

We had no holly bushes, but we had other decorations:

Christmas: 1861

William Woolls

The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 1861, 8. The writer was the Rev. William Woolls, an excellent but now little-known colonial botanist. He wrote extensively for the SMH as WW. Most of his articles in Trove have been tagged with his name, mainly by the present writer.

The genus Ceratopetalum is so called from the horn-like petals of some species. C. gummiferum is the Christmas bush of the colonists, and is well worthy of the name. Dr Bennett, in his “Gatherings of a Naturalist,” remarks that “in every instance in which an attempt has been made to remove it, the tree has perished, nor have seeds succeeded except such as have been self sown.”

Below is a picture of Christmas Bush, from Bennett's book.

Others suffered at Christmas, out in the wilderness. It has to be said that Warburton was a chancer, a whinger and an incompetent: he wasn't really one of us. Just a Brit in Australia.

Christmas: 1873

Peter Egerton Warburton, Manuscript journal (from a typed transcript of the original journal), kept as leader of Messrs. Elder and Hughes’s Exploring Party.

25 December 1873: We cannot but draw a mental picture of our friends in Adelaide sitting down to their Christmas dinner, whilst we lay weltering on the ground starving, and should be thankful to have the pickings of any pig’s trough…Our last Christmas at Alice Springs was miserable enough, as we then thought, but the present one beats it out and out.

Ernest Giles was British-born, but he fitted in. He was not far from Warburton on this Christmas day.

Christmas: 1873

Ernest Giles, Australia Twice Traversed, 25 December 1873. 

Christmas had been slightly anticipated by Gibson, who said he had made and cooked a Christmas pudding, and that it was now ready for the table. We therefore had it for dinner, and did ample justice to Gibson’s cookery. They had also shot several rock-wallabies, which abound here. They are capital eating, especially when fried; then they have a great resemblance to mutton.

Christmas: 1882

Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, ‘Amusements’.

Christmas Day falling on Monday in 1882, business did not begin again till Wednesday. So on Friday everybody had to lay in their stock of bread and meat to last till Wednesday morning. In wholesale business, in the professions and amongst the working-classes, the whole week from Christmas Eve to the 2nd of January is practically a holiday. It is quite useless to attempt to do any business during that period.

Christmas: 1893

Clarence and Richmond Examiner (Grafton), 24 June 1893, 3.

Several kinds of beetle larvae of the Lamellicorn tribe, including the so-called Christmas beetle and several cockchafers, were found at the roots of the cane, but in no cases were they found numerous or destructive.

Christmas beetle: they are rare, now.

Christmas: 1896

The Advertiser, 9 January 1896, 6.

I believe at Hannan’s on Christmas Day one publican took no less a sum than £500—a Christmas box he will have reason to remember. Truly the hotels appear the best dividend-paying concerns that have up to date been discovered in West Australia.

Christmas: 1901

Here is one reason why they are now rare...

Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), 16 February 1901, 40.

…when Christmas time came round we would always have a box ready with sugar in it, into which we would pop those pretty Christmas beetles which we found on the bushes and thistles.

Christmas: 1913

Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 8 December 1913, 5.

FOR AFTERNOON TEA ON THE LAWN, GET
ARNOTT’S CHRISTMAS CAKES.
THEY ARE THE BEST,
Order from your Grocer Early.

Christmas: 1931

Miles Franklin, Old Blastus of Bandicoot, chapter 2.

“Never mind, Arthur. You hill the potatoes as Father told you and I’ll see that you get a Christmas present too,” said Mother.
“Aw, a pair of Blucher boots I suppose, w’en me toes are acting potatoes outer these. Why can’t I have me photer taken too?”

Christmas: 1933

News (Adelaide), 7 December 1933, 15.

Adelaide’s kindergartens are busily preparing their Christmas tree parties. These little festivities are the red letter day of the years for the little people who go to “kindy.” Each kindergarten is managing to strike a delightfully festive note in the invitations it has issued.

Christmas: 1952

The Inverell Times (NSW), 29 December 1952, 4.

Many Inverell residents described the Christmas “rush” period as the “biggest and longest” they could remember. One man who has lived here all his life said the main streets on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were “like Pitt Street, and too much for him.”

Christmas: 1971

The Canberra Times. 17 December 1971, 12.

The crowd will get together on Sunday night at a Christmas party in the gallery’s garden where the hosts will be serving “nibblies and wine”.

With luck, our Christmas morning will kick off like this, unless it rains, as it sometimes does.

But if it does rain, we will walk out in it, just keeping a hand over the wine glass. We don't care where the water goes, so long as it misses the wine.

                    And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
                    "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

                    Peter read those lines out, then gave a little grunt,
                    I don't care where the beer goes if it doesn't go down my front. 

My Kiwi granddaughter brought me that as a Christmas present. That was light beer...

Taken at Waiheke near Auckland: NZ Christmases are much like ours.

And so, as Tiny Tim said, 'A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!