At first, there seemed nothing to be afraid of. Joe Giardina, his wife, Evanna, and their 16-year-old son, Paul, were taking in the picture-perfect waters of Patong bay as they ate breakfast in their Phuket beachfront hotel on Boxing Day morning in 2004.
“We were admiring the view and all of a sudden the water disappeared,” says Giardina, 67, speaking from his home in Rosanna, Victoria. The water level had dropped so quickly that fish were floundering on the exposed seabed. But rather than sensing any threat, curious onlookers made their way to the beach. “The locals thought, ‘This is fantastic.’ They were running around picking the fish up.”
Now Giardina knows it’s a sign to flee to higher ground. About 550km to the south-west, a magnitude 9.15 earthquake had struck 30km below the Andaman Sea, triggering what would become the most devastating tsunami in history. Paul was one of 26 Australians among more than 230,000 people whose lives were lost across 14 countries – in some impact zones, the waves reached up to 3o metres above sea level. Twenty years on, Giardina’s memories of the disaster are as vivid as they were in its immediate aftermath.
“It really feels like it was only yesterday,” he says of that initially deceptive morning.
Within about half an hour the sea had returned to its normal level and settled, then it began to swirl, gently stirring up the sand below. Almost simultaneously, the nearby pier started to float away. A small amount of water – no more than 20cm – washed on to the road bordering the restaurant.
“It didn’t look dangerous – we said, ‘We’re going to get wet,’” Giardina remembers. But when a car was washed towards the hotel, he began to run, leading Paul by the hand and then attempting to protect his son by holding him against a pillar inside the hotel.
Seconds later, a waist-high wall of water hit them from behind, throwing them over an internal wall and ripping Giardina’s clothes from his body. Cars and tables slammed into the building as everything in the path of the 800km/h wave was lifted and flung high. Something hit Giardina on the back of the head and he went under, losing hold of Paul. Giardina found himself pushed horizontally against the outer corner of the hotel when a large object – a car, a fridge, he’ll never know – pinned his left arm to the wall.
“I’m trying with my right hand to get out, get around the corner, to push away whatever was holding me. And I just couldn’t get there. I was underwater and I held my breath for as long as I could. The last thing I recall is just opening my mouth and that was it. The lights went off.”
Today, he still finds consolation in the thought that Paul, whose body was found in a makeshift morgue by Joe’s brothers-in-law three days later, might have experienced something similar.
“I can only hope – and it’s terrible – but I can only hope that Paul went through the same experience,” he says. “There was no suffering.”
The Giardinas had weighed up whether to visit Thailand or Bali for Paul’s first overseas trip. Paul had Down’s syndrome and, while physically high-functioning, was unable to care for himself. Phuket seemed a safer option two years after Bali’s terrorist attacks and the family – Paul’s sister, two years his senior, stayed in Australia – chose to celebrate Christmas at Patong’s Seaview hotel, where Paul played ball in the swimming pool and was photographed smiling with Santa. Joe and Evanna called their affectionate son the “love machine”.
“Twice in his short life, he had open heart surgery. The second time, he’d had a valve replaced in his heart, and when he’s woken up from the surgery, what was his first comment? It wasn’t tears and crying and screaming, it was ‘What happened?’ There wouldn’t be too many of us behaving that way,” Joe Giardina says, laughing.
Giardina was found inside the hotel, lying prone and headfirst down a flight of steps on the third storey. His position saved his life: water drained out of his body. Initially deemed unlikely to survive, he was eventually taken to Bangkok hospital in Phuket, where the pain from his extensive injuries was numbed by the fear that he had lost Paul and Evanna. His wife was found unhurt and later reunited with him – she had ridden the wave to the hotel, grabbed hold of a balcony and miraculously avoided being sucked back out to sea. When Giardina was medevaced to Melbourne, the doctors’ first job was to flush the sand out of his lungs.
“The one thing that it has taught me is how quickly it can all come to an end. You appreciate every day when you go through something like that,” he says, describing the speed at which the morning went from one of tropical calm to earth-shattering calamity.
He and Evanna are grateful to have found Paul’s body among Thailand’s 5,400 victims, “because if we hadn’t, I know that there would be a sense of ‘He could be out there still’. And where do you start? We would have been walking the streets looking for him. And that would have been …” He pauses. “How do you cope with that?”
It’s not accidental that when visitors to the Indian Ocean Tsunami Memorial take in the wave-shaped sculpture on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, they are also facing the water. Giardina instigated the memorial and requested that its aspect include water. Its unveiling in December 2015 was the first time Joe and Evanna had met all 25 of the other Australian victims’ families, after a 10-year process involving three governments. It’s given them a place where they can remember Paul, and this 26 December they plan to be there again, with their son in spirit.
But part of Paul will always remain in Phuket. Joe and Evanna returned to Patong in October 2005 and again on the first anniversary of the disaster, and Joe has visited Thailand many times since, partly so that the tsunami does not dictate how he lives.
“It’s part of the healing. I feel like part of Paul is there. If I didn’t go back, the tsunami would win. It’s taken my son’s life, and now we’re not going to go to the beach any more because of the tsunami? I didn’t want that either. It’s a rare event, but when it happens, it causes damage, and we’ve just got to accept it.”
Now he can speak about the tsunami without crying – but it is a work in progress.
“As humans, we learn to cope with tragedies. You don’t forget the pain, but you learn to live with the pain. We had 16 beautiful years with Paul, but it’s the journey of life. Life is what it is and you’ve just got to accept it. And we’re grateful we were able to spend 16 years with him.”
