JUST A PHOTOGRAPH

There’s a photo on my fridge door that has haunted me every time I have gone to the refrigerator since the tsunami disaster.

It is a simple photo of a happy family sitting on a couch. A fat and proud beaming Dad with his four kids. He is close to 90. Not one of those offspring is under fifty.

Since Boxing Day 2004 when the tsunami hit and caused such grief and destruction there has been a shadow over that happy snap.

Mainly because of people like Kalandar Umma. She is a 60-year-old grandmother in Sri Lanka. The carnage cost her 19 members of her family. Can you even contemplate that? Many people in this country have seared with the agony of the loss of a loved one. A car crash. An industrial accident. A beach drowning. Instant tragedies causing awesome pain.

But imagine. Kalandar Umma lost 19 members of her family. She ended up in a tree and has no idea how she got there. She lost one son, five granddaughters and two grandsons including an 18 months old boy.

She’ll never have a photo in her old age of sons and daughters in their fifties.

I mention this because that picture on my fridge is of my family. My Dad. My brother and sisters. And horrors like the life destroying tsunami make you realise how lucky we are and how fortunate we have been to even get to where we are on this “frantic granite planet” as Gene Pitney would say.

Not that it didn’t come without cost and family pain. My Mum was diagnosed with cancer, reluctantly agreed to chemotherapy and was dead within eight weeks at the age of 69. My cherished sister had a teenaged son, Rodney, who was shot dead, by his best friend, in a rabbit-hunting accident on a farm the weekend before he was due to start his first job. A sister had breast cancer and my brother is resiliently recovering from a stroke.

But the family unit survived. Hence the fridge photo. We lost loved ones over the years and grieved but a giant wave did not obliterate 80% of our family in one hit. Didn’t rob us kids of a life at the age of two or ten. Not to mention the carnage that destroyed houses and shops and livelihoods.

I go to that fridge door and stare at a “happy snap” of my Dad and my brother and my sisters – taken at an idyllic, bucolic, farmhouse in New Zealand, in the lee of the second most perfectly-formed mountain in the world. Mount Taranaki (formerly Mt. Egmont) the place where Tom Cruise made The Last Samurai.

Behind me, as I open the door to a fridge crammed with food and drink I can hear Sky News on the telly behind me bringing in to the living room the latest horrific words and images from Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Reminding us that, even for the living the suffering from the tsunami will go on for years. Maybe for a lifetime.

How can a man who has spent his life fishing, like his father and his father before that, catch fish when his boat has been splintered? How can he feed his family in the short term –even if he could fish – when the fish market was destroyed? Not to mention the myth that has swept the islands that fish, the staple diet for so many villagers, should not be eaten by superstitious Buddhists because they had probably eaten flesh from human corpses.

As I said on radio the other day, there is an insensitive but graphic and accurate expression surfacing in disaster-struck areas – especially where there are tourist resorts. People are referring to a second tsunami. An economic tsunami.

When all the dead have been counted, and while the grieving continues, what about the living? Their lives must go on and they must find ways to make money to feed and clothe what’s left of their families. Even people in areas of Sumatra and Thailand which were not touched physically by the murderous waves – especially in the vital tourist areas -- have to make a living.

Several weeks after the tsunami commercial operators and government officials in many countries are pleading with foreign tourists not to abandon them. Stick to your travel plans. We need you more than ever before.

Without tourist dollars even unaffected resorts will have to layoff waiters, and housemaids, and chefs and front office staff.

It reminds me of the human and financial aftermath of the Bali bombing. The relentless economic ripples hit thousands of people who were nowhere near the bomb blasts and who did not lose family or friends in the disaster.

Beach peddlers used to live day to day. What they earned today – from selling fake gold jewellery and souvenirs – paid for the food for their kids next day. No tourists. No income.

I visited Bali three months after the terrorist attacks. We dined one night at a Japanese restaurant at the Hyatt. There was a full staff in the kitchen and six waiters on the floor. There were three customers. I wondered how long before staff would be culled.

The same thing is happening now in places like Phuket. The biggest resort on Patong Beach usually holds 1200 people on a Saturday night. Last Sunday there were forty. That means layoffs or sackings for waiters and chefs and in hotels they will layoff housemaids and front of house staff.

People, watching the TV news, understandably think that Phuket, one of the most famous tourist destinations in Asia, was destroyed. In fact, thousands of resort rooms were untouched.

In other parts of Sri Lanka life goes on. Like in Colombo. Thankfully, for that country, the exports of cars and clothes and tea still generate dollars that are now needed more desperately than before. Sri Lanka’s International airport never closed. After the initial awesome generosity the recipients are pleading that we don’t close our minds to Sri Lanka and Indonesia as holiday destinations.

January 16, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004