‘House started shaking’: Aussie mum of five on moment quake rocked small Victorian town

When Anakin Martin was jolted awake by the sound of her entire house rattling earlier this month, her first thoughts were that a semi-trailer was hurtling by.

Ms Martin, a young mother of five, said it felt as though the phantom truck was “almost driving through the house” as the building rocked back and forth on its elevated foundations.

“The house started shaking and the bed started shaking. The noise was loud enough to wake me up and my son next to me. It basically woke up the whole house,” Ms Martin said.

“At first I genuinely thought a truck was right out the front of the house. We live quite rural so we have neighbours that drive big semi-trailers.

“My Halloween decorations went off and made the whole thing a little bit more exciting.”

Within a few seconds of the rattling coming to an end, she decided to check her phone, and an alert on her screen told her the true source of the rumbling — the area had just experienced a magnitude 4.9 earthquake.

The earthquake is timestamped on the Geoscience Australia earthquake mapping tool at about 2am, and is represented by a large yellow circle which appears just northeast of Korumburra, a small farming town in Victoria’s Gippsland region.

After the quake, there have been at least five aftershocks reported in the area, spread apart by a matter of days.

Geoscience Australia seismologist Tanja Pejic said while 90 per cent of tremors took place along the edges of tectonic plates, some areas, including the Gippsland region, regularly experienced “intra-plate seismicity”.

“If you take a piece of paper and pull on the top left corner and bottom right corner, somewhere along the middle that paper will tear, even though you’re applying stress along its edges,” she said.

“The stresses that are accumulating along the plate edges are actually transferred towards the interior of the plate.

“Obviously they aren’t transferred uniformly and equally, but there are often certain parts of the plate that experience more stress and Gippsland is one such part of Australia.

“Gippsland is one of the more active seismic areas in Australia among others like the Flinders Ranges and the Goldfields in WA.”

Dr Pejic said high-magnitude intra-plate tectonic activity was uncommon, but they could “absolutely” still reach serious levels of severity.

“As it stands, Victoria does have some numerous mapped faults that could potentially host an earthquake of substantial size.”

“In saying that, severe large earthquakes in these areas are rare, and I wouldn’t want anybody to think ‘oh my God, how am I going to live now?’

“These are such rare occurrences that generally within someone’s lifetime, it is unlikely that they will experience this. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

In the event of an earthquake, you should drop to the ground, cover your head and neck with your arms, and shelter under a sturdy desk or table.

If there is no safe shelter nearby, you can crouch alongside a bench or an inside wall.

You should hold on to your shelter and be prepared to move with it until the shaking stops.

If you are outside, you should keep clear of buildings and other structures such as power lines, trees and vehicles.