Soon after the ‘hard blow’ at around 2 am, the crew member from HMAS Arrow who’d counted seventeen vessels in the harbour looked around to see none left. ‘All had presumably sunk.’ Soon after that, the Arrow hit the Stokes Hill Wharf in the harbour and there was a series of explosions as the ammunition on board went off. Some of the men managed to get onto the wharf before the boat sank. They held on to whatever they could in wind and rain so fierce it ripped off their clothes. The boat’s skipper, Bob Dagworthy, got to a life raft. Out on the Anson Bob Hedditch recalls: ‘By 2 am we had no lights, no steering and only the main engine to keep us going…We lost both our anchors and I didn’t have a clue where we were.’
Bishop Mason sat drinking beer with Bishop O’Loughlin, both men feeling regret at having held midnight masses. The Wilsons decided their house was no longer safe and were forced to put the cats and dogs into the car and leave them to it while they staggered towards the roadway. Bill put Patricia’s arms around a street sign but then ‘her feet lifted off the ground, the wind was that strong. It’s like those cartoon things you see with people hanging onto a sign, almost horizontal.’ No one, and I mean no one, was adequately dressed for the occasion. Elizabeth Carroll wore her new long nightie, one pretty enough to wear as an evening dress, into the toilet. She stood there, alongside three adults and five children, for the entire night. The independent member for Nightcliff, Dawn Lawrie, escaped her collapsing house with nothing but her kids, a dog, the puppy and its puppy food.
Well, there were already seven people in the car. So with my husband, myself, our three kids and the two dogs, we somehow piled on top of these. And out of the gloom staggered a drunk, and we said: ‘Quickly mate, hop in [and] we’ll get you to the college.’ And he said: ‘No, she’s right. I’m looking for a party.’ I said, ‘You crazy man, the whole town’s blown away.’…That was the last we ever saw of him [laughter]. Presumably, he was blown to Timor.10
When she got to the cyclone shelter she put her kids in an industrial fridge for safety.
Wendy James, a much-loved figure in Darwin, had moved there in 1937 when she was a small child. When her sister-in-law Barbara James warned her about the cyclone she’d sent two of her four sons to her mother Pearl’s house in Rapid Creek, so they could keep an eye on her. Quite a few people weathered the cyclone at Pearl’s. That house stood strong while Wendy’s collapsed around her and her family after a tree crashed through the roof. She, her husband Earl and their two younger boys went downstairs to hide in the shed. Only when the door had slammed behind them did they realise that the pool chemicals kept there had exploded through the tiny room. They tried to get out but something had blown across the door and they were locked in.11
Constable Terence David Barry lived on Trower Road in one of the newer northern suburbs. At two in the morning his house, like many, started to disintegrate.
I placed two mattresses on the floor of the hall [and] the three eldest children lay down on them. I was just about to fetch the baby, when I heard a crash from the baby’s bedroom. I rushed in and saw that the whole ceiling had fallen onto the cot that the baby was in. Had the infant been on the bed, he would surely have perished. I picked up the child, who was laughing, and went into the bathroom, where the wife had placed the other three children. I placed a mattress in the tub and placed the children in there. The violent shudders of the house were coming at the rate of about 30. Sec. each. I opened the bathroom door to see what was going on. I saw that we had no roof what so ever. Then the ceiling of the bathroom fell in on us. My wife and I supported the ceiling for about ten minutes. I then opened the door to have another look, I saw that the master bedroom at the end of the house and the lounge at the other end had almost completely disintegrated. At this stage I had no idea of the time, but I would guess that it would be about 0130 to 2000 hrs. on the 25th. I then called out to the wife and children that we had better get out of the house and try and get the car. I took the three eldest children and my wife took the infant, we went down the hallway over all the rubble to the back door. I kicked it open and we went down the stairs, I shelterd [sic] the three eldest kids behind the laundry wall, I then gave assistance to my wife with the infant, to get down the stairs. I thought we were all behind the wall, when I noticed that the three-year-old boy, Kevin was missing. I thought all sorts of terrible things had happened to him, then I looked around the corner and saw him hanging on for grim death to the door handle of the car.12
It’s at this time the cyclone rates a mention in the Fannie Bay Watch House diaries, where it was noted that at 2.05 am blankets were taken to the front counter to keep members of the public warm.
Barmaid Paula Dos Santos had lived in Darwin for more than twenty years. She was huddling with her grandchildren in the corridor of her house in Rapid Creek when:
someone opened the top of a can, and the whole roof went. And where the manhole was—that had gone—and we were looking up at the stars—there was no rain. And we could hear the noise going away. I went out the back and there was already a great deal of debris in the backyard, and I could see this big black ribbon like a tornado, going down towards Nightcliff. I glanced over here and I saw another one.13
Dos Santos was not the only person who lived around Rapid Creek who reported seeing tornados and, while tornados within a cyclone are unusual, they’re not impossible. More surprising was Curly Nixon’s description of tornados south of Humpty Doo, twenty miles or so from the coast.
Well, I think the missus hit it on the head, and Snowy seemed to half agree with her; but he, being a seaman, I don’t think he wanted to. She reckoned it consisted of a lot of cockeyed bobs—it wasn’t a cyclone as a cyclone was—it was more a corkscrew and then little corkscrews around the outside of it and if you got hit with one of them little corkscrews it was ‘goodnight nurse’.
Some have surmised that it was the fact that tornados formed within the cyclone that meant the wind speeds were, at some moments, excessively high—estimated to be three hundred kilometres an hour or more—and why the destructiveness of Tracy was not predicted. In other words the town was not just struck by a cyclone, but by dozens of small tornados as well.
At 2.40 am the windows of the Fannie Bay Watch House blew in. By three the phone had gone down. Grant Tambling, a member of the Territory’s first Legislative Assembly, remembers being ‘amazed by how far glass could bend before it would break’. Sister Arthur was now in the final stages of labour. ‘They couldn’t give me anything for the pain because they had run out of injections…Our son, Barry, was born at 3.23. Shortly afterwards, the plate glass window in the Nursery began to bow dangerously.’ Then the lights went out. ‘A big tree fell on the maternity ward, then the toilet block (which collapsed), hit Ward 2 and then hurled back into Ward 5.’14 It was 3.30 am and Darwin was in the cyclone’s eye.
*
‘It was just like coming in to land—when your ears pop. It was very strong pressure in the ears, nausea, and then all of a sudden the wind dropped. Deathly silence.’15 This is how Peter Spillett describes the pressure drop that accompanied the eye’s arrival. Stars could be seen and sheet lightning moved around the cyclone’s walls. Liz Foster: ‘There was this utter, utter silence, stillness, and there was like a glow in the air.’ Harry Giese described the eye of the cyclone as the
most frightening period.
It was one of the most eerie experiences that I think you can have. At one instant there was this horrific wind and rain lashing everything, and you could hear the trees, branches, breaking off and crackling, and the next moment there was an absolute dead silence. And you wondered then whether it was the end of the world had come, or that you were the only remaining inhabitants.
Architect Peter Dermoudy, who was hunkered down in the gun battlements of East Point, watched the strange green glow of this otherworldly sky as the eye moved over the town. Lightning flashed, brilliant and bright: so bright he could read the newspaper by it. Wilkie had glimpses of a ruined Smith Street as if under a strobe light, and began to get a sense of the damage that was being done.
The eye took about thirty minutes to pass if it was directly overhead, less if you were on the edge of it. At the Harveys’ place in Nightcliff there was a lull, and an eerie feeling, but they were two streets away from the edge of the eye itself. At the Tamblings’ house in Larrakeyah there was no eye at all, just a bit of a lull before the wind changed direction. This was a dangerous moment in that long night, because people didn’t know how long they had. People stepped outside their houses trying to figure out if it was safe to move. Voices inaudible only moments before carried through the streets. Chemist Roy Barden was one of many who walked over to check on his neighbours. They were okay and said to each other, ‘Oh well it won’t be any worse going out.’16 Shirley Gwynne’s husband Laurie heard a neighbour call and, despite the fact that their suburb didn’t get a proper lull, he managed to get to the house, where he found a man and his child half-crushed under their bed. He freed them but as he ran back to his family he was cleaned up by a piece of corrugated iron that knocked him over, swept him up and flung him forty metres. His feet were badly smashed up. A friend of Beth Harvey’s was found dead alongside her daughter under their storeroom wall. The husband tried to resuscitate his daughter, to no avail. He couldn’t find his wife and had lost his glasses. It was neighbours who finally came to his aid and found his wife’s body. Bishop Ted Collins knew a bloke who was lying in his house after his louvres had blown in thinking he had some spares and could fix them in the morning. ‘The rain’s coming in on top of him and he’s covering himself up and then the eye of the cyclone came and a man came and shone a torch on him. And he said, “What are you doing in my house?” and the fella said, “What house, mate?”’ It was Bishop Collins who had the foresight to make a tape recording of the cyclone—a recording you can hear if you stand in the sound room at the now-permanent Cyclone Tracy exhibition at the Northern Territory Gallery and Museum.
Janice Perrin and her husband tried to drive away from the ruins of their house, only to find themselves jammed up against a fence with water up around the car doors and starting to come in. Janice was vomiting with fear. The Jameses had managed to escape their toxic shed and were huddled under their landing when the eye arrived. Concerned that Pearl and their older two sons were dead, they headed for their car intending to drive the three kilometres to Rapid Creek to find them. Before they got there, flexing power poles heralded the cyclone’s return. They stopped the car then ran to a building that turned out to be an empty school and sheltered there for the rest of the night. Bob Collins’ roof had blown off so he gave up on his stereo, and he and his wife headed for the CSIRO labs at Berrimah. There was so much debris being hurled around that ‘bits of Berrimah were basically passing over our heads’.17 The amount of rubbish that got caught under their car had Collins worried they weren’t going to make it. ‘We got there by the skin of our teeth, when it was basically back to full fury.’ He found some seventy-odd people sheltering at the labs, including a few who’d been so drunk when the cyclone hit that family members had had to carry them there. ‘They had gone to sleep in a lounge chair in their house, and woke up jammed in with seventy or eighty other people, in a laboratory in Berrimah. Their complete disorientation was, even at that stage, I have to say, fairly amusing to the rest of us.’
Roy Barden returned from his neighbour’s just in time.
As soon as the eye was over well then we came back and we said alright everybody button up. Now we’ve got to wait and find out where the wind comes from and instead of the wind coming from the north-east it suddenly came from the south and so well it was blowing pretty hard for a while and it was gradually getting a bit worse and so another chap [Con] and myself we both put our backs up against the door to hold the door which was in two parts and then all of a sudden we heard a roar that was like about twenty planes taking off, all at the same time, about twenty jets roaring away and then all of a sudden it hit us and within a matter of seconds well he [Con] was blown across the room and I’d been pushing hard against my door and it collapsed and I fell out onto the verandah and by the time that I’d—I got onto my hands and knees to look round over my shoulder, the roof, the ceiling and everything was just disappearing up into the sky.
Barden grabbed hold of the railing to try and right himself, but every time he tried to get up he could feel himself being lifted up again so he gave up and lay on his verandah. He was there for three hours but can’t remember much more because he ‘kept getting knocked out’. Kim Clough, who was a child at the time, remembers that her entire family was out in the open, being pelted with debris. Her mother was killed. Her brother, Perry, was badly injured. She remembers her father, Colin, screaming as he was hit by flying tin and the metal sank deep into his back.
When it came to the details, many of which slipped into a vague blur over the days, indeed years, after Tracy hit, there was one thing the survivors never forgot. The noise. The sound of the cyclone returning after the eye had passed was described variously as hundreds of petrol tankers heading up the street, the scream of a banshee, a jet plane in your garden, forty thousand trains, and ‘rather like an express train going through a tunnel’ but one that went on for hours and hours. Beth Harvey used an analogy people also use with bushfires: ‘I’ve never been hit by a steam train, but that was the sense of power it had.’ Ted D’Ambrosio, the deputy lord mayor, said, ‘The noise was so great and the wind was so devastating, and there was the screaming of people and so forth, that it was just something out of a horror movie.’18 Government architect Cedric Patterson comments, ‘The thing about the noises that you could hear, and I couldn’t—you can’t really identify what was making these noises. There was screeching, ripping, tearing sound but the important thing was, that there were no echoes. There were no after-sounds. Whatever sound there was, it was sharp, defined and that was it—bang! Nothing else—no reverberation or that sort of business.’19 Kate Cairns put it this way: ‘When I first heard the roar of the cyclone coming back [after the eye had passed]—and it was a roar—I remember thinking: “Why are there jets taking off? It’s too dangerous.”’ Kate Cairns remained terrified of the noise of wind for years to come. A friend of hers had a tape of the noise, and brought it around some time after the cyclone.
We didn’t have a tape [player]. It was one of the things that we hadn’t replaced at that time. And he said: ‘Well I can play it on my recorder in the car.’ So we went out onto the street and he put it in, and played the noise of Cyclone Tracy, and there was no way I could listen to it. I just couldn’t—I went cold all over.
The sound of a Category 4 cyclone can, and did in the case of Tracy, lead to psychologi
cal damage, much as the massive roar of a bushfire can, or shells on a battlefield, or bombs over a city. Thirty years later Bill Wilson returned to this memory, the memory of the sounds of the cyclone, several times during his extensive interviews with the Northern Territory Archives.
The noise stays with me. The noise is in the back of my mind all the time when there’s a cyclone. It comes back to me and I remember that squealing, screeching, howling noise…You wanted to scream because of this noise. The wind howling, the tin screeching as it’s dragging along the road, the branches cracking and whipping off, the rain pounding. You put all of that together, and that noise is, to me, a cyclone, and that sticks in my memory loud and clear.
No one was—nor perhaps could they be—prepared for the ferocity of the returning winds. Winds that hadn’t built up over several hours as the first half of the cyclone had, but hit, bang, at over two hundred kilometres an hour. The wind measure at the airport blew away as the wind speed reached 217 km/h. Peter Spillett, who had survived the bombing of London and the Burma campaign, described Tracy as ‘the most traumatic experience’ he’d ever had. Paula Dos Santos, who’d lived through the bombing of Darwin in 1942, found the experience comparable. It was perhaps even worse for those who had nothing to compare it to.
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