This 1911 picture is believed to be the oldest one of a tornado in Australia. (Credit: Museum Victoria)
MR C. HOSKEN JUST
happened to be in his backyard with a camera when a large tornado tore
through the town of Marong, central Victoria, on the 27 September
1911.
As the tornado approached his property from the
northwest, he began taking photographs. These images are believed to
be the earliest photographic records of a tornado in Australia.
"It's
almost unbelievable that in 1911 someone had a camera there...and this
thing touched down virtually in his back yard," says Clyve Herbert, an
avid tornado researcher from Melbourne Storm Chasers.
"I've searched for years and I've never found a photograph of a tornado in Australia as early as that."
A trail of tornado devastation
The storm lasted no more than
half an hour. By the time the tornado had passed through Marong, and
the thunder and falling hailstones had stopped, one person was dead and
dozens more injured. In the nearby outback town of Lockwood, every
building was levelled, trees were stripped of their bark, and hundreds
of metres of fencing was carried away.
These scenes were also captured on film by Hosken, providing lasting evidence of the scale of damage.
"They
found a six-tonne gold crushing machine carried three to four miles
into the forest, which gives you some idea of the strength of [the
tornado]," Clyve says. "There are not a lot of entries about how many
were injured in Lockwood, but the entire town was almost obliterated."
At
the time, the Bureau of Meteorology called the Marong Tornado one of
the most violent and destructive events in Australia's meteorological
history.
The Ballarat tornado of 2007 was one of several large storms to hit the "tornado triangle" in recent years. (Credit: Clyve Herbert)
Tornado rating scale
The Fujita Scale - which rates a tornado
between F0 and F5, depending on intensity and destruction - wasn't
around in 1911, but Clyve says Hosken's photographs, and a 1911 BOM
report, suggest it may have been F3. This same rating was given to the
1976 Sandon Tornado, which touched down a few kilometres to the south
of Marong and, according to Clyve, had a similar path and lifespan.
He
calls the region bounded by Daylesford, Seymour, Bendigo and
Maryborough the "tornado triangle" because of the many extreme weather
events that have occurred there.
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