2042: The Great Cataclysm (19 page)

In 2025 Australia changed rapidly when it was selected by the World Government to house millions of Indian and Chinese evacuees. Ten million Indians were sent to Queensland and fifteen million Chinese to Western Australia. Both Government were forced to contribute to rehousing, and the social welfare of these immigrants, and money was tight since the world crash of the Stock Market in 2020.  India was a poor nation at the best of times, because of mismanagement by government officials, and it’s population explosion to three billion.  China had continued it’s one child policy managing to keep population growth to a reasonable level, but India had no such policy and had surpassed China’s numbers in 2022, doubling it’s population of 2012.

With insufficient subsidies from these countries, the Australian Government had built substandard satellite cities in rural areas, but the people wanted to be where there were established infrastructures and pleasant surroundings, so many abandoned these satellite towns for the popular urban coastal areas. The result was thousands of ten to fifteen-storey square boxes providing affordable council flats, occupied by a mixture of the Indian and Chinese population. The impact on these cities was devastating, the Gold Coast’s population rose from one million to three over the years from 2025, turning the small city into a metropolis. Many of these immigrants were largely uneducated, unable to speak English and therefore unable to find work, as a result they felt isolated and abandoned by their governments. The Chinese Government had become the power house of the world with a burgeoning economy, so it’s refugees were provided with a better standard of housing and a decent weekly income, whereas the Indians received just enough for their daily existence. Their youth became insolent, and resentful of the Australian and Chinese citizens, taking out their frustration in waves of crime and violence. This pattern was repeated in the larger cities of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Nick thought of those satellite towns and guessed many survivors would find their way to them, and although they were ugly and substandard, at least they would provide a roof over many heads.

Chapter Twenty-three

Landing at Coolangatta Airport was an anticlimax, and a minimum of fuss accompanied their arrival as they pulled into a small hangar away from the main passenger terminals. Their arrival raised little interest, apart from some admiring glances at Wave Rider from a group of people gathered around a nearby Veto. Tall palm trees dotted the perimeter of the terminal and gave it a tropical feel, and the cool colours of the arrival lounge beckoned travellers from the heat outside. It was once a busy place, yet now light aircraft that once squatted on the tarmac watching big jets coming and going, waiting for their chance to sprint off on their charter flights, lay dormant and gathering dust in their hangars.

Nick left the pilots to secure Wave Rider and headed off to the Trancab station. It was a thirty minute journey from the airport to Nick’s apartment in Surfer’s Paradise, and he hoped Marie, the apartment manager, had opened up the place and had it cleaned. His apartment block was one of the few that remained in demand from holidaymakers from nearby Brisbane, and Marie had often urged him to rent it out while he was away. This was something he refused, because the thought of strangers using his things was intolerable. He explained his unexpected visit as business, and reminded her that this was exactly why he refused to rent.

He had ordered the Trancab to take the beach-side route to his apartment, but the scenery that had filled his heart on previous visits now alarmed him more than he liked. You could no longer see the ocean along the entire length of the urbanised spread, or the beaches that long ago fronted family holiday homes. High rise apartment buildings thrust their towers into the sky at varying heights, and at the end of the cross streets where white sand once stretched a wide path to the blue ocean, dykes ten metres high held back the sea.

They had experienced challenges here in the summer season,
when the dykes had failed to contain the sea surges brought on by
cyclones in the North, when waves crested over them, flooding the streets with foam and damaging some of the grounds and buildings on the edge of the land.

As he rode the lift to his apartment on the twenty-fourth floor in the Contessa Apartments, Nick wondered how this building would stand up to the tsunami. Feeling extremely unsettled and out of his element, because lifts were not his favourite place, he contemplated their demise.  Not a lift in town would be operational once the Pacific Ocean rolled in.

He knew little of their construction but it would need to be exceptionally strong to withstand the flood. Maybe it could survive the first wave but there would be several, all of different heights and intensity, usually arriving in intervals of between fifteen minutes and one hour. No-one had any way of knowing how many, just as they could not predict their height. They travelled across vast distances at almost the speed of a plane and history had recorded that the third wave was often the most dangerous.

***

When Nick entered his apartment, the usual sense of homecoming eluded him. He gazed sadly around the room and at the soft comfortable lounge where he had spent many relaxed hours.  Masculine colours of burgundy and deep forest greens provided a perfect foil for his treasures. Several pieces of art inherited from his grandmother, who had died prematurely with cancer before he was born, some of his mother’s craft-work, and pieces collected from exotic places he had visited. A large glass bookcase housed boat books of every kind. When he was not on board Platypus he collected these books to sooth his separation anxiety, and often found himself reading well into the night. His interest was broad, from luxury super yachts to Navy battleships, as long as it floated Nick wanted to read about it.

Visitors once marvelled at the scenery here that changed when viewed from different perspectives. Looking west from the kitchen to the blue haze of the Hinterland Mountains, one could see the myriad of canal systems and parklands spread out like a snakes and ladders board game. The canals now fed by the ocean through two dams, one across the Seaway entrance, with a secondary dam across the mouth of the river at Southport, lie dormant now without the ebb and flow of the tides. Small boats moored at pontoons and jetties on the edges of the canals replaced the luxury ocean going cruisers that could no longer traverse the shallow canals, that were now locked into the inland waterways, unable to take their owners out deep sea fishing or whale watching.

Along the eastern front where the ocean met the land, stone and earthen dykes ten metres high, twelve metres wide along the top, and twenty metres deep at the base, protected the skyscraper apartment buildings and shops and homes from the encroaching sea.

The endless dyke abutted Nobby’s Hill,
the nine metre headland at Miami to the south
, then continued south to Burleigh Heads. It wove it’s way south like the great Wall of China, sometimes shooting back to the mountains in places, where towns had been sacrificed to the Pacific thrust.

The northern sea dyke stopped just past the Southport Yacht Club where it met the ocean dam, then continued along Stradbroke Island from the other side of the dam, to meander further north to Brisbane. The massive earth works had begun in 2016, when the temporary walls proved to be useless against the lashing waves of the Pacific Ocean. The government, like most in the world were forced to impose substantial levies on all businesses and residents, to help pay for the exorbitant costs of having earthmoving machines and trucks working twenty-four hours a day, year in and year out, constructing or raising the dykes all along the coastal areas on seal level.

The marinas of the Southport Yacht Club were mostly devoid of the ocean going yachts and cruisers that once moored here. A few wealthy people had stubbornly kept their luxury vessels here and used them more for floating entertainment venues for their friends, rather than cruising up and down the coast line, and they could still find their way north to the city of Brisbane through the inland bays fed by ocean dams. The white canvas sails above the Marina Mirage shopping village pointed sharply skyward, emulating the graceful sails of a nineteenth century tall ship, struggling to be noticed, dwarfed by the imposing walls of the dyke.

The blue Pacific to the east beat out her rhythm, once providing excitement and fun to surf riders and swimmers, now threatening man’s seaside existence, as it crashed against the dyke, sending up great clouds of spray and foam.

The north-western backdrop was of row upon row of fifteen-storey council flats; hurriedly assembled grey boxes resembling Leggo building blocks like something out of 1980 Russia, had been constructed to house the mixture of Chinese and Indian immigrants who had forsaken their homeland cities.

Nick walked to the large Navilon sliding doors and onto the generous balcony, and stared miserably out to sea. He looked at the calm cobalt water and the waves lashing the dyke in ever continuing troughs, and a cold chill ran down his spine. He had seen storm waves in action many times and knew the havoc they unleashed, and he had studied the North Sea where man-made breakwaters constructed from thousands of tons of iron, cement and boulders were destroyed in minutes by ten to fifteen-metre waves. Man had no defence against such force.

Most of the high-rise buildings around him, including his own, had been built to withstand cyclones, but the forces of wind could not be compared to that of a tsunami. He looked across to the vast ultramodern Phoenix complex of four, twenty-six storied towers linked by an ingenious steel and Navilon-domed skyway, and wondered if its designers had thought about tsunamis. Surfers Paradise’s semitropical climate invited the occasional bad storm that eroded the sands from time to time, but they quickly recovered. Now there were no sandy beaches, just ugly dykes. The local council had enforced strict building codes in recent years but the entire area was once swampy marshes and much was reclaimed from the sea, so all those
safe
buildings stood on unstable sand.  Nick could only imagine what would happen when the ocean unleashed its fury and reclaimed that land.

Far below he watch a family enjoying a picnic on the narrow grass strip abutting the dyke, where once they would have lain on the warm white sandy beach. They prepared to move out of the dark shadows cast by the tall buildings, and the young children laughed happily, but the parents faces were sad as they recalled previous times when there was blinding white sand and rolling, frothing surf.

Behind them across the narrow street, a small sidewalk cafe bustled with people sipping fragrant Italian coffee, where once bright umbrellas for protection against the morning sun were made redundant by the ten metre dyke blocking the rising sun from the east. He watched the passing parade of bored groups of youths and girls, old couples out for a quiet afternoon stroll, and the occasional disenchanted Japanese tourist.

He used to love to watch the large fancy kites that once had danced in the wind above the beach, with their waving, clever colourful shapes and fluttering bright tails dipping and diving overhead, anchored to fragile strings held by laughing children and geriatric grandparents. The sun-filled streets once teeming with jostling, laughing people were dotted by empty shops, their owners long since accepting the grim realisation that business would never return.

Nick returned inside and flopped on the couch. ‘Phone. Josh please.’ He commanded.

‘Nick, it’s about time you called I’ve run out of excuses. Where are you?’ Josh said.

‘I’m home mate. Australia. You can stop lying now, they can’t do anything about it, besides I thought they’d be too busy. Have you been able to contact Laura?’

‘Yeah, she’s okay. She said to thank you for sending Maxime. She’s worried, wants me to look out for you. How did you get there so quickly?’

‘It’s a long story, but what about Laura, is there any chance of springing her?’

‘Not right now. It’s chaos here man, she’s better off where she is.’

‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ Nick sighed. ‘Well, if you talk to her again, give her my love. Okay?’

‘Yes, I will. How’s the Australian Government taking it?’

‘Stoically as expected. They’ve got operation Star Flight rolling here as well. Listen mate, I mightn’t be able to keep in touch now I’ve got so much to do here. I know you’ll be okay, and I want you to know how much your friendship’s meant to me.’

There was a pause on the line and Nick’s eyes flashed across the sea. That cold shiver passed through his spine again as Josh replied. ‘Thanks buddy, I feel the same. We’ll meet again when this is over, I know it. Don’t try to be every body’s’ saviour, you can only do so much. Look after yourself and let the experts look after everyone else. The military’s in control now.  God help them.’

‘Hooray mate. See you whenever.’ Nick said.

‘Bye Nick. Take care, don’t do anything stupid.’ He disconnected.

Nick looked around his beautiful apartment
.
Damn
!
He thought
,
everything was going so well.  The bloody devil’s got his pitchfork in my back again, this time he’s bloody-well twisting it.

He ruffled his hands through his hair and threw himself down on a sofa where he sat quietly thinking, feeling miserable and full of self-pity, and wondering what he was going to tell his brother
.
This’s no good, have to pull myself together
,
he thought. It was time to call Brian.