Outback farmers poke fun as Sydney sweeps up the dust

Sep 24, 2009, 11:08 GMT

   Sydney - Householders on Australia's east coast cleaned up Thursday after the biggest dust storm in 70 years gave an orange tinge to cars, clothes and even dogs.

   With the gales over, the red dirt blown out into the Pacific Ocean and the skies back to picture-postcard blue, what was left for Sydney's 4 million people was to swap horror stories of waking up Wednesday to a Martian landscape.

   The miasma was the product of winds lifting topsoil 1,200 kilometres west of Sydney and carrying it along an 800-kilometre front to the coast.

   At the height of the storm, 4,000 tons of dust an hour - enough to fill 4,000 containers - was sweeping over Australia's biggest city.

   Farmer Samantha Townsend wrote to the Daily Telegraph urging those on the coast to recognize what might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for them was an everyday occurrence for drought-ravaged Outback folk.

   'So Sydney, harden up, because we don't know what all the hysteria of face masks and complaints about the end of the world is all about,' Townsend wrote. 'It should remind city-slickers who aren't aware about how bad it can get in the bush.'

   As if to highlight how divorced the affluent coastal fringe is from the hardscrabble Outback, Sydney homeowners were told that water restrictions were dropped for the next week so they could use as much water as they liked to hose cars, paths and patios.

   New South Wales state Emergency Services Minister Steve Whan admitted that a lot of the horror stories were just that. Drenching rain and hard-working washing machines would restore Sydney's shine in no time.

   'The dust was quite spectacular, but didn't in itself cause a lot of damage,' he said.