A RARE TROPICAL cyclone has begun to lash parts of eastern Australia, and is forecast to cross move across Brisbane in the coming days.

Tropical Cyclone Alfred is expected to move somewhere between the Sunshine Coast region and the city of Gold Coast to the country’s south early on Saturday, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology manager has said.

“The wind impacts, we’re already seeing those start to develop on the exposed locations along our coast, with gusts reaching 80 to 90kph. We are expecting those to continue to develop,” Matt Collopy told reporters in Brisbane.

The storm is expected to become the first cyclone to cross the coast near Brisbane since Cyclone Zoe hit Gold Coast in 1974 and brought widespread flooding.

Cyclones are common in Queensland’s tropical north, but are rare in the state’s temperate and densely populated southeast corner that borders the state of New South Wales.

More than four million people lie in the cyclone’s path.

Alfred was around 275km east of Brisbane and moving west on Thursday with sustained winds near the centre of 95kph and gusting to 130kph, Collopy said.

The storm is expected to maintain its wind strength before hitting land.

The greatest fears are for the expected flooding over a wide area. Modelling shows that up to 20,000 homes in Brisbane, a city largely built on a river floodplain, could experience some level of flooding.

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said that 660 schools in southern Queensland and 280 schools in northern New South Wales closed today as weather conditions worsened.

The federal government has also delivered 310,000 sandbags to Brisbane and more were expected to be on the way.

“My message to people, whether they be in southeast Queensland or northern New South Wales, is we are there to support you. We have your back,” Albanese told reporters in the country’s capital, Canberra.

Brisbane’s streets were largely empty of traffic and supermarket shelves had been stripped bare of basics including bread, milk, bottled water and batteries.

Public transport in the area was stopped today, and hospitals were limited to performing emergency surgeries until the danger had passed.

Strong winds had cut power to 4,500 homes and businesses in northern New South Wales on Thursday, officials said.

Rivers were rising across the region due to rain, and emergency teams were preparing to start evacuating people from low-lying areas on the New South Wales side of the border.

The coast near the border has been battered for days by abnormally high tides and seas. A 12.3-metre high wave recorded off a popular Gold Coast beach on Wednesday night was a record for the area, officials said.

People living in the cyclone’s path gained an additional 24 hours to batten down after meteorologists revised their forecast of the cyclone making land to late Thursday or early Friday.

But the cyclone’s slower progress towards the coast had a downside, meteorologist Jane Golding said.

“We’ll have longer for the rain to fall and the wind to do the damage,” she said.