CYCLONE WARNINGS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 29, 3 August 1923, Page 7

CYCLONE WARNINGS

AN ISLAND VANTAGE POINT

PERMANENT WIRELESS STATION.

(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

SYDNEY, 25tk July. So useful has it proved in warning mariners, fanners, and others of the cycjones that periodically sweep down the coast during the two years that it has been on trial as an experiment, thai the Commonwealth Jiletprological authorities have decided to make the wireless station on Willis Island a pernia-nent instiution. ' ' '

Willis Island—a lonely ' wind-swept spot in the Pacific off the north coast of Queensland—is ordinarily given ifp entirely to screeching sea birds,' and it is not an ideal spot on which to spend six months on end with no glimpses of the outer world. But the" life of the two Federal officers' who have been stationed there throughout the last two cyclone seaeons has had its compensations.' Well supplied with literature and with plenty to occupy themselves with in equipping their quarters and wireless plant they have had the diversion usually denied to people on such isolated spots of a constant stream of news. Even messages from far-off Cornwall have reached the two men on Willis Island, and they have sat in the snug little weather-board receiving-room listening rapturously to scugs By divas broadcasted from Sydney; And their duties are'not arduous. Quite the contrary. But they are intensely useful. Eight in the' track of the cyclones, their warnings to shipping and the coastal towns of Queensland have been of enormous value. Daring the first year of its existence there was a singular immunity from such, visitations, and Ministers, ever on the look-out these days for fields for economy, had almost made up their minds that it was not worth continuing. During the past season, however, the Queensland Chamber of Commerce, shipping masters, and others were "able, to bring gucli abundant evidence of the use that had been made pf the timely intimations of approaching eyclpnes jjiat it was" decided to go ahead with the establishment of a permanent and iujly-equi^ped itiiiej^.