1992 The Kiama Blowhole Tragedy

The north coast of the state of New South Wales, Australia, where your almanac is produced, is very beautiful, but for picture postcard scenery, take a drive south from Sydney along the Prince’s Highway. After a few hours of picturesque countryside and coastline and you will arrive at the small town of Kiama, famous for a spectacular natural phenomenon.

The Kiama Blowhole is a natural cavern or chasm at Blowhole Point, on a seaside cliff near town. When the seas run from the south-east, a spectacular plume of water erupts as high as 60 metres (about 65 yards). Something like 600,000 people a year come to the Blowhole to marvel at the sight.

The British naval surgeon and explorer of Australia, George Bass, was the first European to see this sight, when he anchored his whale boat in the sheltered bay, now known as Kiama Harbour, in December, 1797.
Bass wrote: “The earth for a considerable distance round in the form approaching a circle seemed to have given way; it was now a green slope … Towards the centre was a deep ragged hole of about 25 to 30 feet in diameter and on one side of it the sea washed in through a subterraneous passage...with a most tremendous noise ...”

The Blowhole and the adjacent lighthouse have long been a popular tourist attraction. In January, 1889 a tightrope walker named Charles Jackson attracted large crowds to see his daring crossings of the mouth of the chasm.

Tragedy strikes Kiama
Kiama had been the site of a tragedy on February 22, 1949 when a ship called the Bombo, a steel vessel of 640 tons built in Leith, Scotland in 1930 especially for carrying blue metal from Kiama to Sydney, sank in a gale with the loss of all but two of her crew. The Blowhole itself has also been the location of a number of suicides. In 1992, tragedy struck the town again, this time at the Blowhole. And it was not to be the last occasion.

On Saturday, July 11, 1992, 26-year-old Afghan refugee Fared Cina, his wife Angella, 28 and their four-year-old daughter Baran, were standing by the blowhole as so many have before and since. Enjoying the “whoosh!” of the famous blowhole with the the Cina family were Mrs Cina’s nephew Arash, aged 7.

Nasarin Zobair, 37, her daughter Kahlida, 21 and eleven-year-old son Mustafa were also watching Nature’s show with their friends, when the water rose up with tremendous force, knocking all seven of them into the chasm and rushing them out to sea, with three relatives left standing hopelessly nearby. Mr Cina’s body was never recovered.

At the time I had very close associations with Australia’s relatively small community of Afghan people, most of them refugees who suffered unspeakable abuses under the Communists and Taliban, and I remember well the pall of grief that fell over this already benighted community.

Tragedy strikes again
Tragically, on April 10, 1997, the bodies of Sydney cousins Masuda Khushbakht, 16, and Khatera Nawabi, 20, both relatives of four of the people who died in the blowhole in 1992, were found floating in the ocean off Kiama.

Those who lost their lives in the Kiama Blowhole in two separate incidents were refugees from oppression who had settled in Australia, or else their children. The mother of one of the victims of the 1992 tragedy, Mahboba Rawi, who had formerly walked for ten days from Kabul, across mountains to Pakistan to escape tyranny, suffered as any woman would suffer when losing a child. However, after some time, which saw the breakdown of her marriage to a fellow Afghan refugee, she turned her attention to the plight of others whom she considered less fortunate even than herself. She helped to establish programs to aid the people suffering in the refugee camps of Peshawar, Pakistan, where she herself had been forced to live in the 1980s.