'We thought a truck had hit our building' - Irish near Melbourne react to earthquake

Emergency workers survey damage in Melbourne, Australia, where debris is scattered on a road after part of a wall fell from a building during an earthquake.

A pregnant Irish woman in Melbourne describes her house as "bouncing" during the magnitude 6 earthquake in the city in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

The quake hit 80 miles northeast of Australia's second-most populous city near the town of Mansfield at a depth of 10 kilometres (six miles), the government agency said.

Media showed images of damage to brickwork in Chapel Street in the inner suburb of South Yarra.

The Victoria region has been told to bra e itself for aftershocks in the coming weeks.

Mansfield mayor Mark Holcombe told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation he was not aware of any damage reports in the town, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison said there were no reports of serious injury.

City in lockdown

With Melbourne beginning its eighth week of pandemic lockdown and bracing for a third day of anti-vaccine protests, most residents were at home when the quake struck.

The earthquake was the largest to rattle Australia since a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck 130 miles off the northwest coastal town of Broome in 2019.

Due her first baby in three weeks Aoife Tierney was sitting on the ground filling her washing machine when the earthquake hit.

"I was up really early and cleaning the house and I was putting on a wash. The mop fell and the roof was making such a weird noise.

"Our house is only three years old, but you could feel it moving under you. I knew it was an earthquake straight away, you just knew. It lasted 15 or 20 seconds," said the school teacher, originally from Dublin, who now lives in a Melbourne suburb, an hour from the city.

She described the experience as more "weird" than scary, even though there was damage done to her home.

There are cracks in our house, the plaster is cracked in a few places. The ground proper shook, I thought the tiles might have cracked but they haven't, it was like a bouncing.

"I was just waiting for it to stop, I probably should have been more scared but it was definitely the weirdest experience," says Aoife, whose Australian partner had to evacuate his chocolate factory.

A police officer closes an intersection where debris is scattered in the road.

"The racking was right on the verge of collapsing and they had to stop production and do a walkthrough to assess for any damage," says Aoife.

Another Irish expat in Melbourne, Daniel O'Halloran from Co Clare and who also works in a factory, told the Irish Examiner how he and his colleagues thought a truck had crashed into their building.

"I was working in my office on the second floor when we felt the building move and shake. Initially, we had thought a forklift or truck had hit our building so we ran downstairs quickly to the factory floor, with my boss shouting at our factory manager who was driving the forklift: 'What did you do?'

"It was then we noticed the steel roof moving and metal racking swaying. It was all over in about 20 to 30 seconds and was quite surreal," said Daniel, who is originally from the Burren.

Emergency workers survey more damage.

"As we are not used to earthquakes here at all, we didn't realise what it was until it was near its end," he added.

The Clare man said the epicentre is about 180kms away from him, but he has been warned of aftershocks for weeks to come.

- with additional reporting from the Press Association.