A TYPHOON IN AUSTRALIA.

Kumara Times, Issue 1150, 5 June 1880, Page 4

A TYPHOON IN AUSTRALIA.

A correspondent at Mysia of the “Bendigo Independent,” writing on Monday last, gives the following particulars of a typhoon which occurred north-west of Boort last week, and which had been related to him by an eye- witness:—“About noon on Wednesday last a vast bank of clouds extending along the Western horizon, and moving rapidly to the south, was observed from the residence of Messrs McLean Brothers, Woolshed Lake. The weather at the time was fine, and the air perfectly calm. Shortly, however, a westerly wind set in, when a storm approaching at a fearful rate was noticed. The wind increaced in violence and blew from every point of the compass. ‘Suddenly,’ says my informant “ we heard a loud roaring sound in the west, and Immediatly afterwards noticed several large trees falling within a hundred yards of our residence. We hastened to the kitchen (a detached building) for shelter, the door of which we closed. Everything got quite dark, and the roaring sound was now frightful, the storm being at its height. We heard loud crashing noises all round the house, and we were in fear every moment of being crushed to death. The extreme violence of the wind continued only about a minute, and then we ventured to open the door. The whole space between the kitchen and dwelling-house was thickly strewn with large limbs of trees and timber, which had been blown there fr'>m a distance of 60ft. A large limb from a tree fifty yards distant was carried on to the roof, fortunately without doing much damage except bending it in. A tree standing twenty yards from the house was entirely stripped of its branches, another quite rooted out of the ground, leaving a large excavation. Three-fourths of the roof was blown quite away, sixteen large sheets of corrugated iron being found 150 yards distant. One large sheet was carried with such force from the roof that it caught in the limb of a tree 100 ytrds off. The force of the blow snapped the limb, the stump of which pierced a hole through the sheet of iron, and there it now remains wrapped round the trunk of the tree lute a sheet of paper. Nearly all the sheets of iron were destroyed, being twisted and bent in all directions. The width of the whirlwind varied from twenty to perhaps sixty or seventy yards, and within these limits it took almost everything before it. Its path can for also be easily followed by the fallen timber, which marks its course nearly two miles.