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Joe Hinchliffe

Eerie calm in Coen as remote Aborignal community prepares for cat 5 Narelle

An eerie quiet has descended upon Coen, as the remote Aboriginal community prepares to bear the brunt of what has the potential to be a category five cyclone – and could be its worst in living memory.

Wind and rain began buffeting areas to farther south overnight, but there were patches of blue sky in Coen on Thursday morning. The trees in town stood unruffled. A crow cawed and a few birds cheeped in the streets but the bush, normally raucous, was largely silent.

The Coen Regional Aboriginal Corporation general manager, Lucretia Huen, says the town had no official cyclone shelter, was low on fuel and had already not had a food truck come for several months.

People from surrounding outstations and homelands have been evacuated, she says, some moving into the town of approximately 400 people, others fleeing farther afield.

“They are on high alert,” she says. “They are not panicking. But they are concerned. They are worried about how this will impact them and, obviously, long term issues – if houses get damaged.”

But they are also quite happy how the community has come together.

Huen herself was in Brisbane, saying it was highly stressful to think of what her family and community was about to go through, not just in coming hours, but the potential weeks of isolation to follow.

“They say it’s very calm and still,” she says. “Very eerie. It’s eerily silent. They can’t hear birds.

We anticipate that this is the calm before the storm.