50th anniversary of the 14th October 1968 Mw 6.5 (Ms 6.8) Meckering earthquake: Australian Earthquake Engineering Society Pre-conference Field Trip, Meckering, 15 November 2018

At 10.59 am on 14 October 1968, the town of Meckering, approximately 110 km ENE of Perth, was destroyed by an MW 6.5 earthquake. Approximately twenty people were injured, but incredibly, no one was killed (Gordon and Lewis, 1980). The Meckering earthquake is the second largest recorded onshore earthquake in Australia (Storchak et al., 2015), and remains one of the most significant in Australian history in terms of the damage to infrastructure and the subsequent cultural upheaval. The earthquake occurred in a well-documented zone of enhanced seismicity known as the Southwest Seismic Zone (Doyle, 1971), and was associated with a surface faulting that extended for 37 km and locally reached up to 2-3 m high (Figure 1). The 1968 Meckering earthquake was the first of nine historic earthquakes in Australia documented to have produced a surface scarp. All nine have occurred in the ancient cratonic rocks of central and western Australia, and none show evidence to suggest a prior event in the geologically recent past (Clark and Allen, 2018). This raises the question of whether the interplate models commonly used in seismic hazard analyses to describe earthquake recurrence in intraplate cratonic regions are appropriate.