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How An Earthquake Made Me Realise the Earth Is Not My Friend
The planet far beneath your feet is not even solid
I’d never been in a real earthquake — until last week. Maybe I’d felt tiny tremors some time? I can’t remember. But when I stood at my back door in Melbourne, Australia, where earthquakes don’t normally happen, and felt my house sway around me… I knew. The earth will do what it wants or needs to do. I’m totally inconsequential.
So is my fear.
It made me think about other times when the earth has rolled and heaved and broken. Those times are more recent than we want to think. Where I live, the city is pretty flat, and it curves around a huge bay called Port Phillip Bay (named of course after some white British man). The Bay is 1,930 sq km in size (359 sq miles), with a 333 km (206 miles) coastline and over 1,000 species of marine plants and animals. But not that long ago, in geological terms, the Bay was dry land.
First Nations Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri people both have stories about how the area of plains was originally good hunting grounds for kangaroo, river fish and birds. The Bay filled with water and was formed very quickly, and the water never drained away again. Earthquake? Possibly. And if it happened when First Nations people were living there, that’s less than 100,000…
