Australians woke to red, apocalyptic skies yesterday after a huge Outback dust storm swept across the east of the country, leaving Sydney shrouded in a thick cloud.

Flights were diverted and ferries suspended after visibility was cut down to a few feet as dust coated cars, buildings and beaches.

The emergency services were inundated with calls from people fearing a major bushfire in the city while dust particles triggered scores of fire alarms and, in one Sydney train station, an emergency evacuation.

Inland, the swirling storm blacked out the Outback mining town of Broken Hill, forcing one mine to shut down.

An intense low pressure system sweeping in from central Australia brought wild winds that whipped up tonnes of dust from the state's drought-ravaged interior and spread it across New South Wales.

The extraordinary weather conditions also fanned several bushfires across the state.

"This is unprecedented. We are seeing earth, wind and fire together," Dick Whitaker from the Weather Channel said

Callers to ABC, the national radio station, likened the scenes to the end of the world.

A housewife from Sydney said that she woke up to find the red dust had covered her floors and birds had been blown out of their nests.

"It did feel like Armageddon because when I was in the kitchen looking out the skylight there was this red, red glow coming through," she said.

The blanket of dust stretched hundreds of miles along the coast and inland from Sydney, coating towns from Canberra to Newcastle and reaching as far away as Brisbane in Queensland, 620 miles (998km) north of Sydney.

Barry Hanstrum, regional director of the Bureau of Meteorology, said that the cloud could reach New Zealand, 1,200 miles away.

"There's a fair chance that it will keep going out into the Tasman Sea and it won't dissipate quickly,'' he said. "They may see some effects of reduced visibility as far east as New Zealand.

“An event like this is extremely rare. It's one of the worst, if not the worst."

Officials said that particle pollution was the worst on record, and the New South Wales state ambulance service said it had received more than 250 calls before midday from people suffering breathing problems.

Most people remained inside all day; a ten-minute walk in the dust left commuters complaining of headaches, sore eyes and clogged sinuses.

Inland, as rainstorms swept in, the rain fell as mud over cars and houses. One caller told local radio: "I have a green car and it's now an orange car. The wipers are barely able to cope with all the mud."

Dust storms are not uncommon in Australia, but for the most part are restricted to the drier inland areas. However, during widespread drought, they can affect coastal districts when high winds whip up the loosened topsoil from the outback and carry it over the country.

One of the most spectacular storms occurred in Melbourne in 1983 when a dust storm that extended across the entire width of Victoria covered the city with a huge cloud of dust.

It was estimated that 1,000 tonnes of topsoil was stripped from inland Victoria and dumped on the city in just a few hours.

In a day of wild weather across Australia, hailstones as big as cricket balls fell on the town of Crookwell near Goulburn, in New South Wales, damaging windows and tiles.

Two small earthquakes measuring 3.0 and 2.6 on the Richter scale rattled Melbourne, although there were no reports of damage.

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