Today I was a guest writer for a blog hop (virtual book tour) that celebrates the launch of the eBook After Yasi: What Happens After a Cyclone by June Perkins. This post is the full transcript of my interview with June in the lead-up to my article Creative Recovery: Human Responses to Calamity.
Your book is called ‘After Yasi’, so could you tell me about what your life was like before the cyclone and what it is like now? I actually interviewed a group of 25 women in the Philippines who had endured Typhoon Yolanda and asked them this same question.
Before the cyclone I was busy raising my family and quietly doing creative projects such as poetry and photography, plus establishing my writing group in the community to generate more income for my family’s wellbeing.
My husband was a local teacher, and much loved by his students and their families. My two youngest children were attending a small primary school surrounded by cane fields, and my eldest was about to start year 11. They were all doing reasonably with their studies, and the two youngest were doing particularly well.
After the cyclone, our family had to replace many essential things we lost and live with friends for a while. We moved house twice in that first year but considered ourselves blessed as some people were living in caravans, temporary structures, and garages while waiting for their homes to be rebuilt.
We received some unexpected financial assistance from charities and friends to replace some of the larger household items. This was such a moving experience and our family will never forget the help from organisations such as the Salvos and Red Cross.
I was using my creative projects to support the recovery of the community and this actually helped me develop further skills in community journalism, exhibiting, songwriting, and film. I was invited to guest blog for ABC Open, which was an amazing experience. That led to six months working for them on another project which recognised regional writers.
Incredibly, this culminated in an Australia Day award, which is something I would never have expected. Many others were also honoured for cyclone recovery work, including young people who had spontaneously assisted in the cleanup.
What, if anything, do you miss the most about ‘before Yasi’? Is it a way of life, a feeling, a relationship, or a possession?
Cyclone Yasi woke me up a lot. I needed to do more of my creative work, but with a greater confidence and commitment to make a difference to the lives of other people — well beyond what I had done before. It gave me a focus that wasn’t there before and helped me tap into an inner strength that recognised the capacity for community spirit in many around me.
Many of my friendships deepened after the cyclone and we completed projects we had spoken about for years (such as a photography exhibition for Indigenous women). I also set a goal to become financially equal to my husband, which I am still working on, but I kept thinking about how I would have coped without a partner who was there for me financially, emotionally and spiritually.
We were very committed to staying and making sure that others were alright, even though it might have been more practical to leave straight after the cyclone and return to our extended family networks for support. I’m glad we stayed because I had many parents come up to me, keen to know that my husband would still be teaching at the high school.
My younger children, although unsettled, did well at school and gained a lot from the special visitors we had to our area, like musicians Phil Emmanuel, Graeme Connors, and cricketer Damien Martyn. We took part in the local cricket community as my youngest son started playing.
However, my eldest son did his final year by distance education as he missed so much high school during year 11. He suffered migraines and other physical ailments and we still do not know how much of this was because of the cyclone and how much was that he was finding it hard living in a country area.
Straight after the cyclone, I remember him falling asleep all over the place as a kind of stress reaction. He didn’t talk about the cyclone as much as my other kids either.
The cyclone happened in 2011, almost 4 years ago, how have your feelings of the impact of the cyclone changed or evolved during this time?
It was a massive wake-up call for many to assess their priorities in life and many of my friends went through some massive changes. I saw relationship breakups, job changes, and people making decisions to contribute time to community development (like you Mel). Several families moved out of the area so their children could live closer to their extended families (if they were not strongly local).
I found that Filipino kids were terribly frightened by the typhoon and grieved over the loss of things like school books and toys. How old were your three kids at the time of Yasi? Do you think that their feelings about the cyclone were (or are) different to yours?
My eldest played his guitar all the time (we made sure we took his guitars out of the house when we had to shift locations during the eye of the storm). It was the most important thing to him to still be able to play his guitar. He still does that to this day.
The three children didn’t care about the loss of things at all, they are pretty detached from material things, but they did grieve for their pet bird that died. And they were quite upset when their guinea pigs died about a year after the cyclone, because these pets had been through the whole experience with them.
My youngest had a terrible year in the time immediately after cyclone Yasi because he had to change schools (we were relocated to another area after our house was destroyed). We had to eventually shift him to another school. He eventually settled into and had a wonderful year for his final year of primary school.
Two years after the cyclone my daughter started to struggle at school, which was a surprise to us all. Now we’ve transferred to Brisbane she is doing very well — whe’s a straight-A student and has been accepted into an excellent design program.
Is there anything you would do differently in the lead-up to Cyclone Yasi?
I wish I had already been more confident in my life generally and had made sure my eldest son was happier at school (and in life) before the cyclone. I did do the best I could but I still wish I could have done better. Since we moved to Brisbane he has really begun to blossom.
How do you feel about the response of the government, charities and insurance companies to the victims of Yasi? Do you think anything has improved since 2011.
We didn’t have insurance, so I can’t comment on that, but without the help from government and charities, we would have really struggled to replace our household goods.
The first government assistance we collected was stressful because you had to line up in big centres to be interviewed at a time when you still felt a bit traumatised. Later some of the charities visited people in their homes and met with them privately. They gave out counselling tips, listened to you, and worked out how they could help.
There were many grants and funding programs available to us, but a lot of us didn’t know about them or how to access their funds. Many of these programs came a relatively long time after the cyclone and from when they would have been most useful.
Most of these programs focused on key areas like health, industry, environment, and community. Their criteria often gave no room for individual initiatives of local creatives or small business owners and farmers whose incomes suffered after the cyclone.
Another area of frustration was how the funds were distributed. The panels who were overseeing the programs had little representation of community artists and I think there should have been broader representation that reflected the diversity in the community.
A number of temporary workers were employed for a period of three years, who were supposed to help disperse more of these funds and be close to the community pulse of things. I personally didn’t find consultations with them helpful and felt they lacked imagination and drive to really voice what the community wanted. I gained much more from the work of ABC Open.
On the whole, I think more funding should have been more focused on creating long-term sustainable projects in the community, not just short-term fixes. Of course, the Dance for Recovery, health programs, sampler tai chi classes, yoga and diet classes were good but it would have been better if they could have become regular events.