Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred brought out the worst in humanity as people mocked the natural disaster for clicks and likes, risking the lives of pets in the process, writes Tom Tanuki.
I STARTED WRITING this on a laptop which I charged to around 20 per cent from a local shopping centre. By now we’re mostly past the ongoing effects of ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred, although there are still around 70,000 people without power (down from just under half a million people). At the time, nobody had any power at home, so you recharged where you could.
I feel I’ve now been twice-baptised to Queensland life’s tropical excesses. (My first experience was the 2022 floods, which were so catastrophic for the people of northern NSW.) Debris took out powerlines and destroyed substations across the south-east. My house went into blackout for five days. It was miserable, dark and dingy in our little old rental apartment, wedged as it is between obnoxious Queensland high rises — but we survived and were safe, thanks to camp stoves and great stores of patience.
It should go without saying that these moments aren’t crafted for my enjoyment. We’re meant to make sober preparations – “prepare for the worst, hope for the best” is what I hear the experienced say about it in Northern Queensland – before locking in, staying tuned in to emergency services advice and commencing a patient wait. That’s what we did and yes, I hated it.
But I didn’t book a Timezone birthday party, so I can hardly complain to the manager about not having fun. It was a cyclone. No surprise that I’m not entertained, nor that I have no control over the duration of the event. I’m just grateful we’re okay.
I said above that my reactions to this weather event ‘should go without saying’. Actually, very little of my worldview “goes without saying” anymore. I’m in South East Queensland. A lot of morons get about.
Mind you, if you took the sneering word of Melbourne and Sydney Twitter Auspol incels for gospel, you’d think idiocy in an emergency is location-specific to Queensland, or the Gold Coast. As though Melbourne in the pandemic didn’t manage to conjure up 100,000 blokes in hi-vis to stumble up the West Gate Bridge singing ‘Horses’, for more-or-less no reason.
I very quickly sensed that I would be faced with the idiocy of my countryfolk in a manner reminiscent of the pandemic when, two days before the order to take shelter took effect, I went to Coles to do some shopping. I spotted the iconic sight of shopping trolleys full of toilet paper again. Ah, I thought, we’re back here again.
The truth, if you ask me, is that we’re all stuck in Australia, where we are all stupid, cringe losers. But I admit there’s something a bit more flagrant about it in South East Queensland.
Case in point. Apart from interstate sneering and letting meteorologists scare and confuse me, my main form of online “entertainment” over the past week was watching Aussie Larrikin Legends Having A Go. I mean videos of people surfing when they shouldn’t. Jet skiing when they can’t surf anymore. Getting carried away by cyclonic swells. Other larrikin legend stuff like that.
Australians eat this kind of content up. I think it makes them like a fearless bronzed Aussie icon, immune to the elements and braver than the weather.
A viral video from the past week showed a clip of a hysterical news anchor warning of the impending category 2, before switching to a compilation, backed by thumping music, of people being all-Aussie larrikins. There’s a guy who flips upside down and launches metres in the air off a monster wave. Legend! Kids who get swamped by swell and foam, dragged into an inlet. Legends!! A bunch of kids nearly dying. Legends!!!
After viewing a thousand of these videos, I’ve come to the decision that this brand of “larrikinism” is selfish degeneracy and that anyone who participates in it – purveyor or viewer – is a lower life form. I’m not entertained by videos of people debasing and endangering themselves for a viral video while others shoulder the collectivist burden for them. Forcing time-poor emergency services personnel to go out and rescue them when they wind up in the obvious danger that they placed themselves in, “for fun”.
You must think I’m fun at parties. Perhaps you reckon I could keep charitable opinions like these to myself. And yes, thought about doing so for a bit. But then, I began to see the videos of people nearly drowning their dogs.
So far I have seen three videos of that. I’m sure there are many more waiting for my consumption.
In one video, two dogs are being walked on the shore during a cyclonic swell, between the many ‘Beach Closed’ signs. The water hits and it threatens to drag every loser on shore away. Thankfully, the dogs are unleashed in this video, so when the wave barrels in they are at least at liberty to paddle to safety while the owner flounders about nearly dying in the surf. (They didn’t die. Who cares?)
In another video, a woman walking her tiny dog has it on a leash. When the wave comes in and suddenly she’s up to her chest in foam, she’s basically strangling the little dog as it gets lifted from the ground, barrelled about and dashed repeatedly against a freshly eroded cliff-face.
It made my blood run cold to see. I hope that dog was okay and that it goes on to experience the joys of living with a better human.
Taking the Aussie larrikin legend shit in hand with these would-be dog murderers, it’s all too much. I am not trying to deny people their fun or their laughs during a disaster, as that’s an expression of community in times of danger; but this is not community-minded stuff. This is more like venerating a monkey masturbating in a public zoo enclosure. What a legend! Look at him, having a crack!
Sorry, that’s not fair to the monkey. Nobody is endangered by its masturbation. Worse, this is like venerating Harambe, if Harambe were masturbating while holding that little child hostage and dragging it about. If that were happening during a natural disaster, your average Aussie would share it and say: Legend! Good on him for getting out there and having a go! Ignore all the government stiffs going on about the correct way to hold a toddler. He’s having a crack!
We are truly in an age of the individualist, pilled moron with permanent main-character syndrome. The prevailing logic afterwards was: the weather event didn’t affect me, because I didn’t personally witness a big Looney Tunes-style cyclone dancing outside my front window. Therefore, it wasn’t real. It was a “fizzer”. Another false alarm from the climate radicals at the Bureau of Meteorology.
Some cookers thought it was all a product of High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) radar weather manipulation — essentially a fun, dumb version of climate change for conspiracists who don’t want to talk about climate change.
Catastrophic weather events are really hard, dangerous events. It’s important we all come together – and laugh and smile, sure. But it all takes so much effort to stay safe in these moments as a wider community. Not to mention rebuilding afterwards. Just ask Energex crews out desperately rushing to fix up to half a million homes experiencing power outages.
Hopefully next time there will be no shopping centres open at all, so I don’t get to charge my devices up and see dying dogs being walked by selfish losers. For me, it was yet another reminder that when disaster hits, our main form of resistance to it is in spinning fairytales and distractions for each other. We’re truly in no position to handle the climate emergencies of the future.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.
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