The first boatloads of aid arrived on Tuesday in the Solomon Islands tsunami zone to aid desperate survivors, as more bodies were found amid the rubble triggered by a massive undersea earthquake. Flights over remote coastal villages in the stricken Western Province of the islands on Tuesday reported widespread destruction.
Ivana Edwards’s friends and neighbours laughed when she and her husband built their steel-reinforced concrete house 20 years ago to withstand any weather that tropical northern Australia could throw at them. But as category-five Cyclone Larry arrived, she knew they had been right.
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/ 30 September 2004
When mutineers from HMS Bounty were looking for a place to hide in the Pacific in the late 1700s, their leader, Fletcher Christian, exploited some sloppy map making to set up home on an island they knew was in the wrong place on British Admiralty charts. It was an inspired choice that led to the establishment of one of the world’s most isolated communities.