We had no inkling anything was going to happen.

There was a little bit of rumbling and then the whole house shook.

It was like being in a washing machine being swirled one way and then the other.

My sister-in-law got hit on the head. A CD stacker had fallen on top of her and she had a very nasty cut to the forehead.

All this happened in about a minute and a half, around 4.37am. It was 7.1 [on the Richter scale], which is not mammoth but it's strong enough to cause an awful lot of trouble.

I was worried that the upper storey was going to come down.

The whole house had been shaking and suddenly the lights went out so we were in darkness.

We were in the dark and trying to clean up my sister-in-law's wound. There was blood everywhere.

The quake was only 10 kilometres underground and we're only 7km from the epicentre.

A lot of the damage to buildings was internal, with ceilings breaking away from walls.

The next suburb was even worse. There were walls not joined to anything.

It was amazing how the house we're in withstood the shaking. It's a weatherboard house and it withstood it very well.

We lost power until lunchtime and we're still under water restrictions.

We're still shaking. We've had two more this morning [Monday].