It was 5^{th January 1992, my birthday. Our van was parked on the hill at the camp on the Great Fingal mine site at Day Dawn ( 7 Kms south of Cue). At about 2-30 pm with a can of beer in my hand I stepped out of the annex and was greeted by a rather scary site. The entire southern sky from east to west was a monstrous dust cloud from the ground to the top of the sky. I called to Val (wifey) to come and have a look. We stood there for about a minute and the gentle breeze suddenly turned into a roaring wind and we could see the dust cloud was getting closer. I said we had better get back inside. Ten seconds after stepping back inside the annex it happened. With an enormous noise the annex seemed to explode and flew upwards with poles flying everywhere, cupboards flipping over and annex poles and gear going everywhere. My can and Vals wine glass got sucked up out of our hands never to be seen again. Canvas, steel poles and pegs etc flew everywhere around us and the caravan. The pantry cupboard tipped over and knocked the fridge over leaving a mess of corn flakes, pickled onions and cooking oil etc, etc spread over the annex floor. The caravan was pushed off the jacks and we werent sure what was coming next, so we werent very keen about going back into the caravan. We slowly walked at about a 45 degree angle into the wind and stood on the safe side of the other dongers and buildings. Women are lucky because they can cry when things go wrong, but the blokes have to keep a clear head. We then drove into Cue and found our son Robert who was at the local with half a dozen mates. In a very short amount of time they all jumped into a Ute and drove out to our van. They told Val and I that, the best way we could help was go into the dongers and leave it to them. Which we did. They had all the annex dismantled and folded and the annex pad clear in about an hour while the wind was screaming around them. The wind continued non stop till about 5pm that day and at Meekatharra (120 km north) they recorded 125 Kph winds at the airport. Amazingly neither of us received a scratch. About 6 weeks later I was detecting about 2 kilometres away on the side of a hill and came across one of Vals yellow plastic canisters.}

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Just to explain things we were there as caretakers of The Great Fingal mine site. It was operational during the 1930s and mainly manned by Italians who I believe were locked up during the War. We were caretaking the more modern Heap Leach operations, which was a good deal with free food deliveries every week and free fuel and Caravan parking. It filled in a 6 months gap between jobs.