Hey! cool! yeah I was up there for 3 years, living in an aboriginal community too.. I was down on the west coast of Queensland! Beautiful country.. I'm really not trying to hype up something that happens all the time as unusual.. it really was unusual.. you might find 400 thongs wash up over 6 months or something, but never usually in a few hours.. it never happened like that while i was there.. locals said it was unusual too.

As for the storms, we got hit by Nathan (when it was a cat 1), but that was a week after this happened, and it came in from the east.. and Pam hit Vanuatu a week or so before too and tracked south towards New Zealand I think, from memory.. Vanuatu is a long way off the east coast and I'm on the west coast.. So I didn't think the debris would reach us..like matching thongs floating all the way from Vanuatu, around the cape and then down to us to land within a few hundred meters of each other.. But you could be onto something about the tradewinds thing.. I just found an article about 7154 thongs that were collected in marpoon in 2013 (http://www.tangaroablue.org/amdi/indigenous-rangers/356-mapoon-smashes-the-cape-thong-record.html).. So I know this stuff floats up all the time.. but I've never seen big bulks of stuff floating in all at once..

We do get ghostnets all the time there too.. The local artists make sculptures out of the ghostnets in our community.. and our rangers would go out and collect them from neighbouring beaches too... Anyways, I'm not saying it was asylum seekers or whatever, it could have been a storm somewhere else far away that washed everyones thongs off their front porch, and down our way.. but yeah it didn't look good.. Anyways peace man thanks for the response!! Good to know about the ghostnet bottle thing too! I was super confused by that.. haha.. Cheers!