The Northern Territory News, when it returned on 31 December, made light of these private dilemmas, and took to running a series of stories on how the women left in Darwin were pining for sunglasses and cosmetics under headlines like ‘A Lift for the Girls’. The issues were more fundamental and Charles Gurd remembers that ‘things like women’s sanitary things, you know, no one had them, and we didn’t normally stock them, but we had to fly them in’. After Perrin was sorted out she went to the hospital with both her mother and her husband, Warren. ‘Well the hospital was an absolute mess, there was no power of course and there were a million people everywhere.’ She stayed and organised tea for people, Warren got his foot stitched up and it was decided her mother needed to be evacuated.
Bernard Briec remembers that a story went around about a guy who’d booked himself into the Mandorah Hotel across the harbour, slept through the entire event, then woke demanding room service. The lord mayor, Tiger Brennan, was a former miner who’d once lived in a caravan on the Nightcliff foreshore. Aided by a cocktail of rum, antihistamines and painkillers, he’d slept through the entire night and woken to a house that either lost its roof or didn’t, depending on who you believe. Either way it was a heroic sleep. ‘When I woke up at seven in the morning I looked out and saw this house over here had disappeared in which the lady who used to do my laundry used to live. I threw on a singlet, a pair of shorts, and my brothel brogues, and tore round to see what I could do with it, but she was gone from there.’5 After Ted D’Ambrosio had taken his wife to hospital he went to see how Brennan had fared. He found the mayor staggering around asking, ‘What’s happened to my town?’ They broke his fridge open and had a beer. After that Brennan dropped by Harry Giese’s up on Myilly Point with his usual hat on, and:
He was dressed in an old pair of shorts which looked as though they’d been used pretty substantially in removing debris and materials…Tiger had come up to see what the situation at the hospital was…It’s difficult to explain the feeling that you have, that you’re probably among very few people who would have survived this sort of blow. Indeed, before Tiger came along, you had almost the feeling that you might have been alone. There was a euphoria that you felt, that at least you’d been spared the sort of situation where you were beside people who were killed or badly injured…I could feel for those people, many in the northern suburbs… it must have been traumatic in the extreme.
Senator Collins, who was a volunteer for St John Ambulance, grabbed a CSIRO vehicle and drove the fourteen kilometres from Berrimah into Darwin to see what was happening. He was lucky he could drive—most cars weren’t starting and those that did soon had their tyres shredded by debris. And there was this: the task of finding the car keys. Some found them in a few hours, some after a few months, and many never found them at all. The damage Collins saw on that drive was so extensive he claims he wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that ten thousand had died. ‘The closer I got to Darwin, the more bizarre the sights became…I mean huge pieces of H-iron steel were twisted like liquorice.’ Knowing that what lay ahead of him was likely to bring on an asthma attack, he stepped into a chemist and nicked some Ventolin. ‘I walked over to the chemist shop, which was smashed to pieces, and just walked inside.’ Even this, the collapse of normal etiquette, was disorientating. ‘I felt really weird…I actually expected to feel a hand on my shoulder at any stage, saying, “You’re under arrest for stealing Ventolin.”’ Collins arrived at the ambulance station to find it had suffered fairly significant damage. Nonetheless casualties had been quick to turn up. ‘There were thousands of—in today’s terms—quite serious foot injuries from broken glass.’ Collins himself headed out on the road, and was amazed to find that, despite the early hour, earthmoving equipment had already started to clear the streets. ‘They had graded tracks down Bagot Road, through all of this debris.’ He went on to work for three days straight. ‘There were no reserves, we all had to do it…In those three days and nights we would have seen more trauma, physical and mental…than most ambulance officers would have seen in an entire lifetime…’ After that intensive stint many of the ambos were evacuated out due to exhaustion. It was quite a few days later before Collins managed to return home. To his surprise his stereo equipment had survived.
Richard Creswick staggered into work for his 10.30 am shift at the ABC to find that staff were gathering. ‘There’s no doubt we were all shell-shocked although I think at the time we didn’t realise it… We—none of us had any enthusiasm for work, although I think we all realised that we were all in the midst of probably the biggest story of our lives.’ Keith Bushnell knew it was, that’s for sure, and he’d got out of the cupboard that he and his friend Toni were hiding in, found his camera still intact, and headed out to take footage. ‘He and Mike Hayes went out together,’ recalls Creswick, ‘and Mike did a voice piece about the devastation in which I think he used the line that: “It was the end [of] a bloody good town”. Keith convinced a pilot to take that footage south for him and that ended up being the film of the devastation that got out.’ The footage is easily found these days, and it’s still shocking to watch Hayes report from a ruined Darwin, head bowed:
Like a lot of the people who’ve left I’m just wondering about the new Darwin…It wasn’t a very pretty place [but] it was a place of people with a unique way of life. This is Mike Hayes from ABC news, in the wreckage of what was a bloody good place to live.
Hayes became emotional again in 1999 when talking about it on the 7.30 Report.
I was much more frightened after the cyclone than I was during. And I think a large part of that is, you know, shooting news…I might have exposed myself to some pretty frightening scenes and I was also well aware that this was Darwin, a couple thousand miles from the cavalry, and the wet season could well have cut some roads between here and there and I feared for what might develop in the next weeks.
Danny Thomas, the assistant general manager at Northern Research, had gone down to the wharf to find that only one boat of twelve was left, though some began to arrive home over the next few hours. Ida Bishop had gone into work as soon as she could to see what had happened to her colleagues.
I went in and saw the men all standing around the corner, all very quietly not saying anything. So I went up, and I said, ‘Is everything okay?’ And Danny Thomas said: ‘No.’ And I said: ‘Who?’ And he just said names, and I said: ‘Oh’ and I walked away.
Bishop coped by going home and holding onto familiar things. ‘Barbara had won a turkey on the chocolate wheel in town earlier in the afternoon of Christmas Eve. And so, as I said, there’s nothing else to do but to continue in routine…’
Thomas, as it turned out, had spent the morning searching the beaches. He’d found the drowned body of Koji Yoshanda, Bishop’s former boss and the operations manager of Northern as well as Don Hoff who had been on the NR Kendall with Yoshanda. An engineer who’d managed to escape from that boat scaled the cliffs at Larrakeyah and got himself home. Thomas also found the bodies of people who weren’t colleagues. In all, Northern Research lost two boats with six badly damaged, from a total of eighteen. The Gollin Kyokuyo company suffered even worse material losses, losing seven men and three of six steel-hulled trawlers. The official number of deaths at sea now sits at twenty-two.
The families of the Japanese men who worked on these trawlers oft
en didn’t speak English so their experience of the cyclone was particularly extreme. It’s hard to imagine the isolation of the women and children after they found out their husbands and fathers were dead. Ella Stack remembers taking in one woman whose husband had died. ‘There was nothing the Japanese company could do to take them anywhere. They were living in cars themselves. They had nowhere, no accommodation, so they just stayed in one room with us. And we managed with our little bit of English.’ The barge Alanna Fay returned to harbour to find ‘all the boats floating upside down’. Five boats from around fifty were left in Darwin Harbour and only one patrol boat, the Assail, was in good enough shape to conduct search and rescue duties on Boxing Day.
People familiar with Darwin will know the glorious Nightcliff pool, which sits on a cliff overlooking the usually calm seas, its lawns spotted with a few palm trees. I go there most mornings I’m in Darwin and swim laps before the water heats up beyond reason. The pool was there in ’74, but come Christmas morning there was a body in it. Nonetheless, it served as drinking water over the next few days. When the health department were told about the body, they suggested boiling any water taken from the pool for twenty minutes. So that’s what people did.
Half-prepared Christmas food was salvaged before the heat ruined it, and camp stoves were used to finish the job. People sorted through freezers trying to figure out what would go off the quickest. All manner of things were eaten over the next few days, from tins with the labels washed off. A meal might be a salad fashioned from beetroot and marmalade.
Over the course of the night the entire Church family had got banged and knocked about. The worst injury was a deep cut to Julia’s dad’s foot, which soon enough developed into an ulcer. That morning Julia found a small towel, which she wrapped around herself as a gesture to modesty before the family headed for Casuarina High. It was on that walk that they realised that it hadn’t just been them. ‘The entire suburb had been reduced to a series of platforms—the “dance floors”—all that was left after the walls and roofs had gone. They looked like oil rigs in the sea. Usually around there was frangipani and bougainvillea, a riot of colour—but the colour had blown away.’
Julia witnessed several pretty crazy scenes at relief centres and remembers it now as a kind of microcosm of a society under stress. Some people were good organisers—guys with army reserve experience took over—while others were good at taking instructions. Some people sought out injured people and Julia’s mum was one who used her windowless car to drive people around. Julia helped dig deep trenches for latrines. But other folks went feral. People built strange fortresses out of cushions and rugs. Agreements were made to pool the food and share buckets of water—but then some women would drop used nappies into the buckets. Fridges were set on their sides with doors open to form a vessel for water, but someone broke glass into that to ruin the water supply. The basest human reactions were on display. Forty-eight-year-old Irene Cormick, who’d run a tourist park that had been destroyed overnight, headed into town to help and saw something similar at the centre set up at the Wagaman School.
I saw things in humans that I would never ever wish to see again. I saw the panic. The people that you thought were strong, were weak; and the ones you thought were weak were strong. It was the grabbing…But you would not believe that people could change, from people into such horrible creatures.6
Some people simply got in their car and drove out of town. People started arriving in Alice Springs from Darwin around four-thirty or five on Christmas afternoon, which means they’d headed out through the rubble and ruined streets first thing in the morning. Their cars were pretty battered. Alan Hawkins, head of Alice Springs Apex, said, ‘I think it was just instinct that they got in the car and got out as quickly as they could.’ People were shell-shocked and:
basically arrived in the clothes they had on their backs. They had no money, no food. Some of them had the presence of mind to take water, or bring water with them, but they just arrived. They were worn out physically, and I think just mentally they didn’t know what was going on. They had no idea what was going on.7
The wife of one such couple, he recalls, had cradled her dead baby all the way down from Darwin. One thousand battered cars arrived in Alice Springs over the next three days, then were stranded because of the need to get a roadworthy before going further south. At Tennant Creek, where food was scarce because the wet season had cut supplies, Indigenous people went and harvested watermelons and rockmelons and brought them into town to give to people who were driving through. ‘There you are,’ they said, ‘you need food for the people, here it is.’8
Without any landmarks to orientate them people could not find their way to their houses, or the houses of friends and family. According to Ray Wilkie, ‘The whole geography of the area had completely changed—the topography nearly had changed—so you got lost.’ People talk of this time and time again, their intense disorientation when their town was no longer recognisable to them. ‘Everything looked so different, there wasn’t a bloody leaf on a tree. You know, there was absolutely nothing, which meant you could see for miles and miles and miles, something you could never do before.’ There wasn’t much of anything else, either: no sewerage, water, electricity or phones.
It wasn’t just buildings that fell to pieces, it was people. As journalist Gay Alcorn put it, ‘The cyclone destroyed not only lives, houses, furniture, photographs and pets but a way of living and thinking.’9 A friend of mine expressed it to me more bluntly. ‘The cyclone made people psychotic. Not the night itself, but the fact it destroyed everything.’ Teacher Ruary Bucknall, who was in Alice Springs when the cyclone hit, returned to Darwin on Boxing Day, on the same flight as the acting prime minister, Jim Cairns. When he got to Wagaman and saw the damage to his home he sat down at the house and ‘bawled my eyes out for about—I don’t know—ten minutes or so. Just couldn’t get over the shock of the whole thing…the complete state of devastation. I don’t think it’s anything that a normal person can comprehend.’10 When Alan Hawkins got himself to Darwin an entire ten days later he decided to walk from the airport. ‘I got halfway into town, and I just stopped and looked at the devastation. I reckon I just sat there and cried for about twenty minutes; I just couldn’t take it all in, it was just too much for me.’
When Dr Slim Bauer, the first director of the ANU’s North Australia Research Unit, heard news of Tracy he went to Brisbane, bought a caravan, loaded it with food, tools and materials, then drove north to Darwin. He got there four days after the cyclone and, despite having been warned how bad things were, was extremely shocked. ‘The thing which struck us—the first thing which struck us really forcibly was that when we topped the rise at Yarrawonga, we could look straight across to Darwin town, to the downtown area and the Stokes Hill, and of course you never had been able to do that before.’11
In this strange new world, everyone’s sense of time began to shift. Chronology frayed. People remember the devastation they awoke to, but after that things blur. Ella Stack wrote: ‘The days had lost their names: it was no longer Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.’ Beth Harvey describes that first day, and many thereafter, as like ‘a dream’. Harry Giese was concerned that age was getting to him though his memory was no worse than many much younger than him. ‘I’ve got, I must admit a very confused memory, whether this is a result of the shock at that time, or whether it’s a case of old age a
ffecting memory, I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess.’ Liz Foster can’t remember how many days after Tracy it was that she thought she saw a ruby sparkling in the rubble and went to pick it up—only to find that yes, it was a ruby ring, but there was still a finger in it. The way in which people spoke of what they endured had a liturgical quality. Elizabeth Carroll: ‘I honestly don’t remember what we did, how we did it. I remember just these specific things: the rubbish bins, washing my hair. I remember the fear.’12 Colleen D’Arcy described it as ‘strange—a time out of your life that you can’t really explain’. Several men interviewed struggled to remember when their family was evacuated, and when they got to see them again. Often they ended up confessing to Francis Good, or whoever interviewed them, that they simply had no idea. Even General Stretton, who didn’t arrive until late that first night, wrote that he quickly ‘lost all track of time’. By 27 December, ‘It seemed months ago since I had left my family sitting down to Christmas dinner at home in Canberra.’
When Law is sung in Indigenous songs it becomes a way of structuring and interpreting knowledge as well as communicating it. Boundaries between the past and the present are fluid and while references will be made to establish a rough time period—‘That horse and buggy time’13—chronology is less relevant than remembering events in a way that emphasises their meaning. An extension of this is what Deborah Rose has described as ‘Year Zero’:14 the moment that something irrevocable shifts in a culture. For Indigenous people, ‘Year Zero’ is white settlement.
A version of this approach to story seems to have been taken up by survivors to Tracy. Those interviewed about the cyclone, white and black, talk about pre- and post-Cyclone Tracy. Neroli Withnall described it to the 7.30 Report this way: ‘It was such a cataclysmic event that everything was dated according to whether it was “before” or “after”. It was like BC and AD.’ Her now-former husband, John Withnall added, ‘My own feeling is it’s as if a line was drawn across our previous life. It’s a strange feeling.’ He said, ‘I felt just a little while back talking to you as if we were almost talking about some other family, some other place, some other time.’
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