When the going gets tough, throw some shrimp on the barbie!

I've always loved the rowdy Australian spirit and highly-developed sense of fun, but nothing shows what these people are made of like their actions after the devastation of Cyclone Larry.

Did the victims of the storm curl up and shiver, wailing and weeping? Nope.
Did they go to the media, hands out and demanding help? Certainly not.

These people went out and fired up the barbies and had the grandaddy of all barbecues! Any food that would spoil was cooked up and shared with anyone who cared to partake.

INNISFAIL, Australia - After their town was torn apart by a terrifying cyclone — amazingly without loss of life — the people of Innisfail responded with a most Australian of gatherings: a barbie.

Butchers and restaurant owners in the town offered up their wares to survivors rather than see them rot in refrigerators warming quickly in the tropical heat after the storm cut electricity in this town about 1,200 miles north of Sydney.

More than 1,000 residents turned out to munch on donated lamb chops, steaks and sausages amid twisted metal roofing sheets and palms trees stripped bare.

"It's looking after our home, isn't it?" said Jeff Baines, one of the barbecue organizers, who wore a chef's uniform as he cooked up dozens of sausages. "If we don't look after our home who's going to?"

The barbecue reflected a determination to make the best of things in the town of 8,000 people Tuesday, a day after Cyclone Larry — the most powerful cyclone to hit northeastern Australia in decades — lifted the roofs off scores of homes and devastated hundreds of square miles of sugar cane and banana crops.

What fortitude and generosity, very humbling and heart-warming at the same time.

Good on ya, mates!