I'm Shocked
Anji, Steve, Caitlin, and Ryan are moving to Brisbane.

I've been to Cairns and Townville (and Mt Isa etc.) -- but it was a long time ago. I remember being ringed by bushfires. That trip I went to Alice Springs twice, and traveled both up and down the unpaved (then) Stuart Highway. It was 1979 -- the year Skylab fell in the outback. Although I was in the outback at the time, it missed me (nyah nyah!). I remember standing atop Uluru looking at the endless miles of spinifex grass -- it looked like the ocean (Rayne, I can identify with your experience). That was also when Lord Mountbatten was murdered.

I was in Delaware for Three Mile island, the outback for Skylab, and then moved to Washington just in time for Mt St Helens, which made day into night and deposited a thick layer of volcanic ash over everything. It was very peculiar waking up in the morning to a pitch black day -- didn't realise what'd happened at first. That was the second eruption -- the first was merely something I watched and photographed. Before that I'd watched the slope of the mountain bulge out further and further in the weeks preceding the eruption. I think the rest of the disasters I've been part of have been family and personal disasters.