It’s not all good news. If events are moving quickly, reading a tweet that is an hour old can mean you’re getting out-of-date information, much like hearing an expired radio warning. But there is no doubt that social media has been a game-changer and, according to the 2013 World Disasters Report, the widespread use of technology,4 particularly mobile phone texting, played a role in preventing a large loss of life when Cyclone Phailin hit the state of Odisha in India. A cyclone in this region in 1999 killed ten thousand. In 2013, after Phailin, only fourteen are reported to have died.
But right up to the present day, laying blame when communications collapse has been a recurring theme in most disasters. Quite apart from any physical damage to the infrastructure, panicked friends and relatives trying to reach each other in the build-up to, as well as during and after, an extreme event quickly jam the phone lines. In the aftermath of Tracy a national registration and inquiry system was set up by the Natural Disasters Organisation and operated by Red Cross, but systems always find a way to crash. In 2009, for example, the Bushfires Royal Commission into Black Saturday interrogated multiple breakdowns in the Country Fire Authority’s emergency warning and telecommunications systems.5
But back to 1974. Hedley Beare describes how it felt to be disconnected so suddenly: ‘When you’re without telephone, post office and all of those things, you’re actually standing alone in the universe.’ Or, as RAAF commander Air Commodore David Hitchins mused thirteen years later, ‘Amazing how we are dependent on a telephone. You want to do something, you put your hands out for the phone and all you get is a hissing noise.’ Hitchins had been out of Darwin at Smith Point in Kakadu (not then a national park) on Christmas Eve, and when he tried to tune in to the radio at first light all he heard was static. ‘We didn’t really know what had gone on and then late in the morning, out of the black clouds, appeared one of my old DC3s from Darwin…That particular aeroplane and that crew had been evacuated from Darwin.’ He went to board the plane with his family but was told that his wife and daughter should stay where they were because there was nothing to go back to. So they stayed, and as he flew back over his own collapsed house he saw there was another DC3 wrecked in his back garden. The RAAF, with the airport next to it, is the largest single piece of real estate in Darwin. It was home to fifty or so light planes, the civilian airport facilities and hundreds of people. When Hitchins got there he found hangars built in World War Two had simply crumpled, aeroplanes were lying on their backs, helicopters were crushed. ‘The whole place was just like one vast rubbish dump.’ The control tower and the communications at the army base were wrecked. The emergency back-up in Berry Springs (shared with the ABC) had also been flattened.
Curly Nixon remembers that at around two on Christmas morning ‘the ABC fellow that was on the air, he said: “Well the roof looks like it’s going and I’m going.” That was the last time we heard from the ABC.’ The ABC fellow was Sally Roberts’ husband. He’d driven in at midnight when it became clear how bad the cyclone was going to be, because he didn’t want things left in the hands of an inexperienced announcer.6 Sally was upset because she thought he should be with her, not worrying about the news. It was seven in the morning before someone who’d been rostered on for 5 am staggered into the studios and said that the northern suburbs were ‘destroyed’. By that stage, there was no way that information could be shared. Don Sanders remembers that the ABC’s communications were ‘all part of a weird setup’ that had been put together ‘at the time of the Indonesian confrontation and put up down at the 32 mile, inland…Responsibility for the transmitter was shared between ABC, Telecom and Defence Department thus it all got a bit messy as to who was responsible for getting it up and running again.’
Don Sanders managed to get a radio message out of Darwin early in the morning by using a ship’s radio, though he doesn’t specify a time. ‘All I said was, “Darwin devastated by cyclone. All transmissions stopped. Anticipated up to 35,000 evacuees.” I wanted to let them know that in my estimation that they should be starting to do something…I just wanted to let them know that something bloody serious had happened up there.’ Charles Gurd remembers finding a policeman—a Sergeant Kettle—who was in charge of communicating with ambulances and asking him to help get a message out. ‘Who to?’ Kettle asked. ‘The outside world,’ was Gurd’s reply. That message, sent out via the Postmaster-General at Mount Isa, from where a message was sent to Canberra, was received just before 11 am. By that time other messages had already made it through.
Major-General Alan Stretton, a military man who’d served in World War Two, Korea, Malaya and Vietnam, was the newly appointed and founding Director-General of the Natural Disasters Organisation. His new job was about to become very interesting, very quickly. It was 6.20 am Canberra time (4.50 am in Darwin) when Stretton got a call from the Cyclone Tropical Warning Centre in Perth saying that a cyclone had hit Darwin. That was around the time his kids were getting out of bed demanding their presents. ‘This call started the longest week of my life.’
Stretton then called the Darwin police station to see what was going on and spoke to a sergeant on duty named Taylor. The cyclone was still going, it was dark, and Taylor couldn’t judge, as yet, how bad things were. Ever the optimist, he told Stretton that the hospital had not reported any casualties. Of course at that time people were still battling the winds and couldn’t have made it to the hospital if they wanted to. Stretton’s call to Taylor was one of the last to get through for many hours. From that point there was no direct official communication with Darwin until about ten, when the Western Australian ship M.V. Nyanda entered Darwin Harbour, and managed to establish a tenuous Morse link. At 10.30 am a weather officer in Darwin spoke to a weather officer in Perth and reported that it looked as if the place had been bombed. A message was sent by the secretary of the Northern Territory at around the same time, via Adelaide. That message was addressed to both Jim Cairns and Stretton. ‘Darwin completely devastated by cyclone last night…’
There was the issue of communicating with the outside world, but there was also the issue of communicating within Darwin itself. How do you make a series of practical decisions when the people on the ground have no way of speaking to each other unless they are standing face to face? Your first impulse would be to get in your car and drive but, on that first day at least, the rubble was so thick on the roads that cars couldn’t make it through and the people driving them couldn’t keep up with the number of flat tyres. Those who got anywhere generally did so on their rims. Cedric Patterson remembers:
One of the other little things that occurred was that, as you went about your business during the day or such like, you would see somebody. For instance, I can remember seeing Babe Damaso and I waved to him and he waved back. Now when I saw somebody, I’d say: ‘Well I saw Babe Damaso today, he’s all right.’ And Babe would say: ‘I saw Cedric Patterson today, he’s all right,’ and that was the way the information got around.
In the hours and days after Cyclone Tracy this organic unfolding of events that took place as a series of autonomous actions led to what Bill Wilson called ‘independent fiefdoms’. There was a lot of this happening: senior figures taking direct action without consultation, because consultation was not possible. It was necessary to make clear decisions at top speed but some decisions inevitably caused later controversy. The relationships, hierarchical and otherwise, between these senior men were to become
increasingly tricky over the next few days because of the lack of clarity around areas of authority. Who had it and who didn’t? Who cared?
David McCann’s position as magistrate meant he was thrown into the thick of it. He describes the scene at Darwin police station: ‘Officers said, “Look we’ve got a lot of prisoners here and Fannie Bay has been virtually destroyed.”’ Arrangements were made to send longer-term prisoners to Alice Springs, which meant that twenty-nine prisoners were put on a bus at around 4 pm that day. But there were other prisoners serving short sentences, or who had only been picked up the night before. Like most of the people of Darwin, they no longer had a roof over their heads whether they were in prison or out of it. McCann couldn’t track down Jock Nelson, the Territory’s administrator, to get permission for his preferred solution, so he took it upon himself to write ‘released’ against the names of prisoners who had less than three or six months left of their term (he can’t remember which) and ‘they all raced out of the police cells’ at around three in the afternoon. Eight prisoners remained at Fannie Bay Gaol, and another four were picked up over the course of the day. Bill Wilson recalls seeing one prisoner, a man he’d arrested a few months before, wandering down the Stuart Highway. He gave him a lift. Quite a few prisoners ended helping out with the general clean-up, or on cooking duty at the various relief centres which were being set up in high schools around the town.
Over at the RAAF, Hitchins decided to spray the pesticide malathion as a protection against disease. He had ‘spoken to the Department of Health and got nowhere. Bugger them all,’ he thought, ‘we’ll do it ourselves.’ His planes spent ‘the next three or four days beating up and down the main streets of Darwin at about 100 feet and I think they used to possibly drink a little bit of beer in the evenings and Darwin got sprayed and we didn’t have a health hazard. I do believe that the action I took was possibly a little high-handed.’ High-handed it was, but no one objected and crop dusters fogged on and off over the next few weeks. While there are still questions asked about using chemicals like this, Darwin mists against mosquitos using malathion to this day.
There was no shortage of leaders, though they were not always the most obvious or most senior men around. As Ray McHenry put it:
Born leaders came out of the rubble…Nobody really needed to tell Ben Hammond to have a look at what had happened with a power break-down…but he was at the power station at about 6.30 on Christmas morning assessing the damage. Bob Prickett, the man in charge of the Darwin water supply arrangement was in fact down at Darwin River Dam at 7 o’clock…Harold Bradford was at the bus depot about 7 o’clock assessing the situation of buses…Tom Abbot, the then town clerk, was another man who had council machinery and trucks with drivers available very early on Christmas morning, starting on a street-clearing operation.
McHenry himself had the seniority and the temperament to emerge as one such leader. This inevitably set him against the leader that the Commonwealth were flying in: Major-General Stretton. Stretton’s understanding was that he was in ‘supreme command’ of Darwin during the days of the emergency and indeed, that is the authority Jim Cairns had given him. However, men like McHenry had already taken charge and remained unconvinced of the legitimacy of Stretton’s certainty that he was in complete charge. Questions abound, one of which was whether a military figure should have such power, another being whether locals were in any shape to sort out the situation. Not surprisingly, the two men give conflicting accounts of what decisions were made in the hours after the cyclone, and who was responsible for making them, a situation which makes the truth hard to get to.
Stretton’s version of events reads as self-aggrandising (which doesn’t mean it is untrue, simply that he was immodest). He did not arrive in Darwin until eleven on Christmas night by which stage, according to the key players anyway, some major decisions such as the evacuation of Darwin had already been made. Certainly the first thing Stretton did when he arrived was to ask for the immediate establishment of a communications net ‘between the police, army, RAAF and the MV Nyanda’. This became the responsibility of his chief of staff, Colonel Frank E. Thorogood, who worked closely with (and for) Stretton over the next six days.
It was forty hours before the radio returned, around lunchtime on Boxing Day. The song that accompanied this momentous event was the theme song to Rush, a historical TV drama set on the Ballarat gold diggings. People commented on the lightness of that moment; how the jaunty tune lifted their spirits. Twenty-nine-year-old Kate Cairns was interviewed thirteen years after the cyclone and she vividly remembered:
the best thing of all that happened was when the wireless came back—well, the radio was back on…I could have cried…See, we didn’t know. There was no communication. We didn’t know what was happening, and then all of a sudden someone said…‘Have you got a wireless that works, or a tranny?’…Anyhow we pulled it out and sure as eggs it—‘Hello Darwin, we hope you’re okay.’…Oh it was just wonderful. It was sort of a real communication thing, you know, it was fantastic.
Richard Creswick remembers that the ABC’s return to air was accompanied by an ‘influx of southern journalists’. As the first planeload of journalists—there were some twenty of them—flew over Roma in western Queensland they were told to put their watches back an hour and a half—and twenty years. (Although given the state Darwin was in they probably should have suggested thirty years—back to 1944.) Those journalists played a crucial role in letting people around Australia know just how bad things were, but some locals were shocked by the media’s insensitivity. You get a visceral sense of this watching some of the old news footage in which evacuees are doorstopped in a surprisingly blunt fashion. I watched as one badly injured man was asked what had happened to his wife. The man gulped and looked very distressed before saying, ‘My wife was killed.’ And I realised with a terrible start that this was Colin Clough and that I’d heard an interview his daughter Kim did for the 7.30 Report twenty-five years later.
You could hear this piece of tin, you could hear it coming, crashing and rolling over with the wind and the next minute Dad went ‘Ahh!’ and he screamed out really loud and I thought, ‘Oh, God, no’. It had dug right into his back and he passed out on me and I’m lying there and I’m just thinking, ‘Oh, God, what’s going on?’…I screamed at [Dad], I said, ‘Let’s go to the car, let’s go to the car.’ He said ‘We can’t take Mummy.’ And I said, ‘I know.’…I remember looking at her and she only had one tiny little cut on her leg and I kept thinking, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re not hurt.’ And she was dead.
Stretton understood the power of communication and as soon as the radio was up he took to making regular broadcasts. Frank Thorogood believed that it was his way with radio that was ‘one of the success stories. He has a natural ability to talk to people, an engaging personality that comes so easily. He was able to give the people the confidence that, you know things were actually happening.’7 After Stretton died in late October 2012, his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald described his time in Darwin as ‘a refreshing change to the obsessive secrecy of governments in crisis long endured by Australians. Disarmingly open, he held two daily press conferences, [and] was honest.’8
Howard Truran remembers both his sense of isolation before the radio was restored and relief when Stretton took to the airwaves. Ten years after the event, in fac
t, he wrote to Stretton and thanked him. ‘There was no radio; you had no contact with anybody outside your street. You never saw any of your friends, ’cause you couldn’t get around, so you never contacted anybody. You just started to clean up yourself and then different words started to get around.’
Truran is referring here to the rumours that were ricocheting around the place, including the one about the numbers of the dead. Another was that the cyclone was going to double back and hit Darwin for a second time. Later there were the stories of the apocryphal Greek men who dressed up as women so they could be evacuated on the first planes out. Anxieties about looters spread like wildfire. Police were rumoured to be shooting people’s dogs out of car windows, as they drove around town. Some of these events, of course, turned out to be verifiable. But, Truran says, Stretton:
came on the air, at night, and that was the best thing that he ever did with people, was that he talked to people at night, in his quiet voice. We used to lay in bed at night in the dark, with just the hurricane lamp, and he used to tell the people of Darwin—speaking to the people of Darwin—what had happened during the day, and what he was doing. And he says: ‘Don’t worry. Don’t panic.’ He said: ‘We will get you all out.’
WE WILL GET YOU ALL OUT
THE DISASTER plan that was still in development when the cyclone struck had decreed a meeting point in the event of such an emergency. First thing on Christmas morning that point was six feet under water. Not a promising beginning. People then gravitated towards the Darwin police station and Hedley Beare recalls stumbling into a makeshift morgue along the way to the first informal meeting that took place.
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