There is a not-so-noble tradition of fudging disaster tolls, too. After San Francisco was ravaged in the 1906 earthquake the official death toll was 375. Steve Fraser writes: ‘For a savage firestorm coursing through the most densely packed of neighbourhoods, that low figure surprised people and left some wondering. The answer turned out to be this: the city fathers were determined to cite a low number so as not to discourage San Francisco’s rebuilding and the outside investments that would require.’ The number of dead in San Francisco was probably ten times higher than the official figure. Ben Wisner has written about the fate of illegal immigrants working in the twin towers on 9/11, whose families could neither register their deaths nor claim any assistance. After Hurricane Katrina the death toll was estimated at 1836 (1464 within New Orleans itself) but hundreds remained unidentified. The organisation charged with contacting relatives and identifying bodies ran out of money in 2006. The death rate for those who had lived through the hurricane continued to rise for some months to come. Anecdotally, that seems to have been the case after Tracy as well.
Certainly the more you read of the devastation Cyclone Tracy wrought, the harder it is to believe that only seventy-one died that night (though there are still a hundred and sixty people listed as missing) so it’s no surprise that the figure is persistently disputed. When I wondered out loud about this figure while visiting the NT archives, Françoise Barr told me that the morgue photos were held there: I could look at them if I wanted. Then she hesitated, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend it’. It was Françoise who first told me that photos had been taken to allow identification because the bodies themselves had to be buried quickly. I eventually had a brief look at the photos—or tried to. I found it easier to focus on the carefully set out exercise books filled out by men like Bullock, detailing who was found dead, what they were wearing and who they were identified by. When interviewed in 1987, coroner and magistrate David McCann explained that police had:
quickly set up a system for identifying all the people who died and had details of description, photographs, what they were wearing, rings and ornaments and all those sorts of things, and then had ticks for whether they’d been identified for relatives or not…If they weren’t identified before they were buried, they’d taken photographs and taken details of things so they had the information.
But the system was inevitably chaotic, as McCann himself acknowledged.
It’s possible that the rumours of mass graves originated in the trenches that were dug as a short-term solution for the bodies that were on the official death list. It was David McCann, acting as coroner, who first called attention to the problem of storing bodies, given that there was no refrigeration. ‘I told them or they asked me, but anyway I said, “Look, there’s no way we can keep the bodies just lying as they are. They have to be buried smartly and there are all sorts of reasons, including public health problems if you don’t.”’ Police Commissioner Bill McLaren says,
I think from recollection I would say it was probably the twenty-eighth of December, twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth…several bodies were taken—were out at the cemetery at the same time, but each and every body was put in a separate grave. It’s marked, recorded, and there’s definitely no chance whatever of there being a mass burial, and every person that was buried had a burial service…10
Later on, a number of those bodies were exhumed for cremation or reburial.
This story differs slightly from truck driver Peter Talbot’s, which, while it supports McLaren’s views that the grave digging was for people on the official death list, suggests the procedures weren’t as respectful as you’d hope.
The Sunday I didn’t go to work, my gang in the council—there’s 3 of us on the truck—go and putting all the street signs up, repairing kerbing and making driveways and all that, doing stone pitching, they were called into the burial party. Because my mate, he was one of them, he was in the burial party. When he went out to the cemetery, there was the police—they just piled them on like sardines, you know, you know them vans, they had them stacked up like that with a tag on their foot, but this is what [name removed] was telling me, the policeman took—standing—having to pull the body out, had big rubber gloves. They were buried in the clothes they wore the night they got killed. Pull them out, just drop them into the grave and there was another policeman there, he took the number of the grave on the headstone. As they kept bringing the bodies in for burial, old [name removed] seen a couple of friends of his, and that upset him; upset him that much; like Billy Muir and a few other blokes. See on that job we was doing we seen a lot of people he knew. So it upset him and made him crook. He told the doctor what happened, he was upset, probably shocked too, I supposed.11
This was on Saturday 28 December and certainly Billy Muir was on the official list of the dead. An Indigenous man, well known around the town, he’d died during the course of the night, having protected his wife Hilda ‘using his big, strong body as a roof,’ as she later put it.12 Talbot is Indigenous, as was the man who broke down. This story overlaps with a statement made by Police Commissioner McLaren that one man who dug trenches for the bodies had a breakdown. Such scenes are shocking for anyone, but possibly more so for Indigenous people, who have strict protocol around treatment of the dead. That aside, it is easy to see how such a traumatic incident might have morphed into a tale of trenches and hidden deaths.
There were also those who were never a part of the official death toll but whose deaths could be traced back to the cyclone. Echo Cole remembers that a lot of people died in the years following Tracy and suggests that they should have been included in various fatality figures because there were so many heart attacks after the event. On 8 January the Northern Territory News reported that twelve people had died ‘natural deaths’ since the cyclone—which seems like quite a few given that only two weeks had passed. It was suggested by McLaren that these deaths were ‘probably the reason for rumours of many more cyclone deaths than the actual confirmed figure’.13 Edna Harmer’s husband, Bill, was dead within six months. ‘He fretted himself to death…I reckon the cyclone more or less finished him off.’14
Among the uncounted, the hippies loom large, though the definition of ‘hippy’ was a free for all. In the seventies, Darwin was on the counter-culture trail that linked Australia with Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East. Lameroo Beach, near the centre of town, was nicknamed ‘Twelve Star Hotel’ when it became a commune of sorts for those passing through. ‘To get a feel for ancient Darwin,’ writes Tony Clifton,
you need to go back to Lameroo Beach. When I paid it a nostalgic visit the trees still swept down to the water’s edge, the sun still set blood red, the trees were clean of human habitation and a handful of Aboriginal people were sitting and talking on the sand under the branches. The smoke of their fires drifted through the thick leaves as I walked back up to the neat park at the top.15
That was in 2005. When I visited in 2013 I was struck both by the place’s beauty, and by how little actual beach there was. I assumed the beach had eroded but when I asked a friend who camped out there in the seventies he remembered that it had always been precarious, and that he’d had to sleep back from the beach on a narrow ledge. It’s hard to imagine where any number of people could have slept, though tree houses are one answer to that question. Back in the late sixties and early seve
nties, ‘the hippies smoked the local weed and played guitars in their tree-houses, perched in the overhanging branches of the casuarinas, which ran down a steep slope to the shoreline behind what is now the main tourist drag of Mitchell Street’.
What happened to these people when the cyclone hit? It’s known that the beach itself was ravaged beyond recognition, but both Mayor Tiger Brennan and soon-to-be-Mayor Ella Stack have said that the area had been ‘cleaned up’ a month or so before the cyclone. Where, then, did everyone go? Did they simply move to another beach, and if so, how safe was that?
After the cyclone Paula Dos Santos was concerned for the fate of ‘about two hundred men, women and children who were living across the creek at Casuarina Beach. They were in tents and makeshift shelters, mostly backpackers and drifters who had been removed from Lameroo Beach.’ The day before the cyclone, she gave four of them a lift from town.
I was shocked to see so many living like that, I said: ‘Don’t you know we are expecting a cyclone? You people will be blown away. You should go to a school or somewhere until it’s over.’ But they all said: ‘We’ll be right! Don’t worry about us.’ But I did worry, and the next afternoon I drove down to the beach and looked across the creek and it was bare—not a soul there. I still wonder how they coped or what happened to them.
Similar questions surround the long grassers, the Indigenous people who camped in the parks in and around Darwin. A 2011 report on Indigenous people and Cyclone Tracy quotes one respondent as saying:
I mean we know a lot of people that lived in the bush and surrounding areas as they do today and we reckon there was a lot more people out there unaccounted for that they just didn’t. They weren’t able to count them. And so when you saw the devastation, and those 60 odd people, there’s no way that only 60 odd people would have died in that. I mean there would have been a couple of hundred people living in the long grass, you know.16
It was often said that the Aboriginal people got out of town because they noticed that the green ants had disappeared along with the birds. Echo Cole: ‘Because of my Aboriginal identity [I knew]—that something was going to happen to Darwin city at the time…Everything just went dead. There was no bird life; no movement; even the trees were still.’17 A creature known as the Mandorah Monster (thought to be a giant manta ray) was spotted in Darwin Harbour in the build-up to the cyclone. This happened on the Rainbow Serpent dreaming track that stretched from Casuarina Beach to Mandorah and was seen, in retrospect, as a warning.
But Cole himself didn’t leave town and I found no particular evidence that Indigenous people responded very differently from non-Indigenous people. That is, some were concerned and did their best to be prepared, and others ignored the whole thing. Some—Indigenous people included—make the distinction in the knowledge held by those living traditional lives, who did know something was up and got out of town, and those who were more urbanised.
In emphasising some kind of innate knowledge, there’s a danger of slipping into a romantic myth, one that conveniently covers up the lack of attention paid to some Aboriginal communities around Darwin before and after the cyclone. There were around twenty-three Aboriginal camps around Darwin—five of them had had permanent residents for decades. Many of these communities had no radio and wouldn’t have been in a position to hear the ABC’s hourly warnings. Anthropologist Bill Day has recalled that during previous emergencies he’d had to relay warnings to various camps, otherwise messages were unlikely to reach them. He was not around to do that when Tracy hit. ‘I know that a lot of the traditional mob they actually left because they were reading the weather signs and the warnings from the animals and things like that. But I do know a lot of people died because they were never given the warning. Or they couldn’t understand.’18
In the wake of the cyclone it was also hard to get exact figures on the number of deaths at sea. According to harbourmaster Carl Allridge’s report dated 4 January 1975, ‘At least 29 vessels were sunk or wrecked, several were driven ashore and later refloated and at least twenty persons were lost.’ On 7 January thirteen ships were still missing and twenty people still unaccounted for in Darwin Harbour. William Woodyatt, engineer, and Robert Wade, cadet fisherman on the Frigate Bird, both died. But the skipper of the Bird, Bob Joss, and cadet fisherman Bob Dowman were rescued a day and a half after the cyclone from an air pocket in a life raft in which they’d been trapped for nearly thirty hours. The skipper of the Arrow, Bob Dagworthy, was found alive, floating in his life raft, some thirteen hours after he took to sea in it. Two lives were lost on the Mandorah Queen. That ferry was found in 1981. A second ferry, the Darwin Princess, was not located until 2004.
As the fate of these ferries suggests, it was years, and in some cases decades, before all the boats were salvaged. The Flood Bird was located in May 1975 but it wasn’t dragged ashore until 1977. Human bones were found in the wreck. The body of one crew member, Dennis Holten, was found soon after the cyclone, but three of the other four—Captain Odawara, George Roewer and David Fealy—were listed as missing until the vessel was recovered. A fourth crewman, Robert Swann, was not positively identified until 1989. Those wrecks still remaining in the harbour have joined those from World War Two, and several Vietnamese refugee boats, to become scuba diving sites.
Those not known to be dead were ‘missing’: by its very nature a category that’s hard to pin down. Initially, to avoid vagueness, a ruling went out by telex on 13 January 1975. ‘The only persons who are considered to be missing persons in the true sense of the word are the persons believed to be missing from the various boats sunk in the Darwin harbour and whose bodies have not been found.’ At some point this must have been revised: the current official missing list is a hundred and sixty people. Seven years after the cyclone those still missing at sea were declared dead, but of course they were no less ‘missing’ after that.
When the Booya was discovered in 22 October 2003, intact and lying on its side, the bodies of the five people who’d been known to be on board were not found. ‘It is not so much a grave but a living memorial,’ said Rick Weisse, one of the divers who found the Booya. ‘You look inside and it is crystal clear water and you can see inside the steering compartment.’ One of the five was Ruth Vincent, a twenty-four-year-old barmaid and mother of three. She’d gone to the wharf for a party after her Christmas Eve shift at the Victoria Hotel. When the Booya was finally found Ruth’s sister, Naomi Senge, was still hoping police divers would find her sister’s remains. ‘You have thoughts,’ she said. ‘Maybe, just maybe, she’s still alive.’
Instead, following the 1975 coronial inquest that formally declared Ruth dead, she had to make do with some small items salvaged from the wreck. ‘Cos you can see her with the ring on, you know, see her with the purse. Cos they were definitely Ruth’s.’19
DOES ANYBODY KNOW THIS HAS HAPPENED TO US?
WHEN ELIZABETH Carroll stepped outside her house on Christmas morning she saw a plane flying overhead. ‘The feeling I do remember having was: “Does anybody know this has happened to us?”’ It was a good question and Carroll wasn’t alone in her fears. A Northern Territory News feature, published twenty years after the cyclone, quotes one woman: ‘We thought no one knew. Here we were in the catastrophe and they didn’t know,’ she said. ‘There was this incredible sense of isolation…That we had been abandoned.’1
The extremity of the isolation the people of Darwin experienced is hard to imagine today. In early February 2011 I got up at three in the morning to read the tweets of one Carl Butcher, known as ‘Cyclones Update’, to see how Cairns was weathering Tropical Cyclone Yasi. After the Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 people managed to use their phones to let rescuers know they were still alive and where they were. (This was still no guarantee of survival, though it may well have made those in peril feel less alone.) During the Brisbane floods of 2011 Twitter and Facebook helped spread information about where floodwaters were expected to be at their worst, and were also crucial in the coordination of the clean-up. At the time, writer and journalist John Birmingham described how, as ‘an intense low-pressure system appeared over the city as a multi-coloured pixel swarm on thousands of smartphones and desktop computers, the #qldfloods tag on Twitter started to spike.’2 According to Associate Professor Axel Bruns and Dr Jean Burgess from the Queensland University of Technology, ‘In the first place people were passing on the raw footage, the images, the videos from Toowoomba, and the Lockyer Valley when the flash flooding happened there.’ Professor Bruns says, ‘But the focus shifts to Brisbane and preparing for and responding to the floods as they were happening. It was no longer a news event that people were passing on but they were providing practical information on how to flood-proof your house or after the flood had happened how to clean up.’3
Warning Page 8
