I went through, down a passageway that was dark, because there were no electric lights, and the water was dripping through the ceiling—this is the police station! When we came to the corner and turned there was a very darkened room, and all the corpses were lined up, one by one, on the floor.
Some planning committee members had been injured, and some were on leave, but others stepped into the breach.
David Hitchins remembers:
Mr O’Brien being there with a can of beer in his hand. He was definitely not in full possession of his faculties and I do believe he was shocked and I was told that his house—he was married with several youngish children and I do remember being told that his house was torn asunder around his head and that may well account for the fact he was in a shocked condition.
According to Jim Bowditch, O’Brien had not long before been dug out from under his house by Fannie Bay prisoners.
Despite their various difficulties this group of men, including Charles Gurd, David McCann, Tiger Brennan, Alan O’Brien, Jim Gallacher, Grant Tambling and others, came together. One can imagine the unlit room in the police station that had only recently been built on the corner of Mitchell and Bennett streets. The temperature is starting to rise again, which means the humidity is too. There’s filthy water and broken glass on the floor. A shocked and possibly hungover Brennan, his pith hat on as always, is filling the room (as always) with cigar smoke. Poor O’Brien is standing there with a beer in his hand. Beare is reeling from his slalom through the corpses, but he’s hoisted a cheeky grin back onto his face because he’s such a positive man. At forty-two, he wears his greying brown hair in an acceptably minor comb-over. His expressive dark eyes, in contrast to the smile, are sad. Gurd is imposing, tall and balding. Tambling has dark hair, longish by politicians’ standards (it is the seventies after all) and a heavy-set brow. Ray McHenry is forty-one, a handsome man with a dimpled chin and the compulsory sideburns. It’s a crowded, close room for a group of big blokes who have all survived the hardest night of their lives and are about to begin their longest week.
According to McHenry:
The first meeting of the Emergency Services Group took place at 2 pm on Christmas Day. In the meantime those who had roles in the disaster situation as Heads of the various Committees had already swung into action…There was a distinct calm amongst those who had a role, yet I suspect many felt the enormity of the task at hand because, for the first time [we] were able to put together some basic appreciation of what had happened in the various geographic areas of Darwin…The decision to evacuate was canvassed, and subsequently confirmed at a second meeting held at 6 pm that day.
Beare says that the ‘decision to evacuate was made not by show of hands but just by a general awareness amongst that group…It was almost self-evident…[Stretton] says he made the decision, but in fact it was a consensus that just was…was there.’
That evacuation was such a strong impulse says many things. In part it’s just an adrenaline-fuelled reflex: not fight but flight. But it also says something about colonisers’ tenuous connection to the lands of the Larrakia nation on which Darwin was built that the first thought when disaster hit was to bodily lift everyone out of the place. It also speaks to a frontier-town mentality, in which it was the role of working men to protect their women and children from the harsh conditions their jobs had compelled them to live in.
This is not to say there wasn’t a serious basis for concern regarding the survivors’ well-being. The decision was, in part, a response to Charles Gurd’s advice that disease was bound to break out, given the lack of fresh water and the large number of people jammed into evacuation centres. The centres weren’t set up to house people long term and it would be a while before basic services like running water and sewerage would return. McHenry also mentions the widespread concerns that Tracy would double back and send all the debris flying about again. That prediction did not eventuate; nonetheless the possibility of Tracy returning, or a second cyclone hitting the city, needed to be taken into account.
Stretton’s arrival that night unbalanced the delicate ecosystem of power and responsibility that had developed over the traumatic first day. It was Hitchins’ job to meet Stretton at the airport (based next to the RAAF) at 11 pm. That first meeting did not go well:
I was driving him along a dark airfield after I met him at the aeroplane, but he told me, or gave me to understand, that he had the full authority of the Australian Government to take charge of Darwin and everything there and he had total command of the place, including, I believe he told me that he had powers in excess of those held by the Administrator. If he didn’t tell me that then, he certainly did tell me sometime later. I was a little concerned about my own position and I sought an assurance from my own Service that the normal chain of command would apply, and I was very promptly officially told that that was so and that I was certainly not under the command of anyone other than those I would normally be under the command of.
McHenry claims Stretton disputed the decision to evacuate at the first meeting held after his arrival (around midnight) but Stretton denies this:
Although there were varying opinions expressed about the necessity for evacuation and other matters, no positive decisions were taken at these meetings except that they would all meet again at 9 am on Boxing Day. This 9 am conference on Boxing Day therefore provided the forum for me to take firm control and co-ordinate the rehabilitation of the city.
Stretton’s control may have been firm but it was repeatedly questioned and always beset by tensions both complex and counter-intuitive. Darwin’s public servants saw—and resented—it as a military incursion, even though Stretton himself was of the view that it was civilians who should manage the relief and rebuilding. He and Ray McHenry were in agreement over this one thing at least: there should be no suggestion that Darwin was under military rule. This was understandable, but it had the effect of cutting out of the relief effort people who were trained to deal with the situation—as Air Commodore Hitchins discovered.
Like Stretton, Hitchins had fought in World War Two and Korea and had flown into Vietnam. His nickname was Crazy Horse, and he was not a man to be messed with. In all his photos the man has sparkling eyes, a jaunty moustache and a warm smile, but the smile would not be so apparent in the days to come. Hitchins believed the military should have coordinated the relief operations. In his view they ‘were probably better placed to cope with it than anyone else and therefore should be given a chance to get on with it.’ He felt particularly strongly on this matter when it came to the evacuation itself. Indeed, he had begun organising it with Qantas when McHenry told him he hadn’t the authority to arrange ‘anything of the kind’. Hitchins says:
I apologised to the gentleman with whom I’d been speaking and said, ‘Well, I’m very sorry. If I haven’t got any authority around here, which apparently I haven’t, if you want to see me I will be back at the Airforce Base where I do have some authority.’ So I packed myself up and left them to it.
He was aware of fears that ‘the military jackboot’ was about to descend ‘upon the population’. But he believed that his ‘relationship and that of the other military commanders in Darwin was such that we would not have a problem’.
‘I really and honestly believe that we knew—we were residents of Darwin in the same way as anyone else was—I am confident that we could have dealt with the problem without that sort of objection arising.’ He thought a more serious concern was the Darwin people reacting badly to orders from down south.
His authority denied, Hitchins began evacuating some of the hundreds of people who lived on the base and for whom he was responsible. He thought it was all he could do, given McHenry’s directive, despite his concern this would look as if he was taking care of his own first. (Much more shamefully, the British High Commission flew its own people out while refusing to help more broadly with any rescue efforts. In retaliation they were advised they could not fly within Australia, and ended up flying their people to Singapore.)
Hitchins remained relatively diplomatic whenever he was interviewed, but a pilot involved in the evacuation of Darwin all those years ago still has a bit to say on the matter. ‘I can assure you Dave (Crazy Horse) Hitchins hated Stretton with a passion…Just why they overlooked Hitchins I have no idea, he was an ideal military man, competent, smart and a great organiser, who never suffered fools wisely.’1 That pilot believes Hitchins never recovered from being sidelined, and also notes that he went on to be a great supporter of pilots during the strike of 1989.
So, that left civilians to deal with the problem. Hedley Beare, a compassionate and constructive man, had been quick to ask himself on Christmas Day, ‘What do you do, when the world has ruptured like this?…How do we rehabilitate it?’ With McHenry’s and Stretton’s permission he went on to coordinate the largest evacuation that has ever taken place in Australia: it’s said that as many as thirty-four thousand were evacuated by air and road over a five-day period. Those figures vary wildly, in part because it was hard to know how many people drove out of town on Christmas Day. That figure was later put at 2500.
Organising the evacuation was particularly difficult when communications were fraught. Hitchins describes the elaborate process: ‘If you wanted to find out what was going on on the tarmac, you had to write a note on a piece of paper, give it to someone, get him to go and find the recipient, write the answer on the back of the thing, and bring it back to you.’ Beare was up against the same problem.
We had to find a way of communicating with the bus drivers…And so our telephone was a group of about ten to twelve men, who could either walk or ride bicycles…I’d say: ‘Look, would you go out to the Casuarina High School and tell Geoff Hodgson such-and-such,’ and give him a list of details. He’d be gone for the day!
Casuarina is eight kilometres out of town. It would have been a hot ride.
For about two days we were getting several hundred people out to the airport. So one day at the co-ordinating meeting I said: ‘What we need is the means to communicate by radio or something, particularly to Casuarina, Nightcliff and Darwin.’ And the Army brought in one of those field stations, so they located one at the MLC building, one at Darwin, Casuarina and whatever. And I think we tripled the number of people we put on the aeroplanes that day, because we could talk to the other centres.
There was difficulty in keeping up the number of voluntary evacuees to the airfield. Communication issues were one reason that it was a struggle to evacuate people. Another was the sheer numbers that had been committed to. There was a mad rush to get the population down from the official figure of forty-seven thousand (in fact there were a few thousand fewer in town over Christmas) to ten thousand, in ten days. It seems almost compulsive, and Bill Wilson and others have commented that the figure seems to have been plucked out of the air. Why ten thousand rather than fifteen thousand? Or eight, or twenty? Stretton claimed that he:
had already doubled their recommended figure and proposed to double it again on succeeding days…It was unacceptable to have aircraft waiting with no evacuees at the airport; it was equally unacceptable to have large numbers of evacuees waiting for long periods at the airport with no aircraft.
Two days in, on 27 December: ‘Dr Hedley Beare, the chairman, looked incredibly drawn as I informed him I was proposing to fly out over 4000 today and there would be considerable increase tomorrow.’ Stretton had still not arrived at a final figure for evacuation but thought ‘another 20,000 had to be got out’. By 28 December it’s estimated that five thousand had gone by road, and twelve thousand by air. And Stretton had settled on his final figure.
Jim Cairns reassured me that I had the full support of the Government. He stressed that the relief operation was fully in my hands. He accepted my decision to reduce the population to 10,500 and agreed that at his conference he would emphasise that I was acting in a civil capacity and there was no suggestion of martial law.
That last point might well have been a reaction to people’s feeling that they were being forced out of the city. By 29 December Stretton spoke of getting eight thousand out in a single day, ‘which, of course, is another record’.
By this point it starts to sound like a competition. Hitchins later commented: ‘If General Stretton says the evacuation was completed in five days, I think he’s probably right but I don’t think it would have mattered a damn if it had been done over ten or twelve days and done in a much more organised fashion.’
Beare was helped by schoolteacher Jim Gallacher and six volunteers, and they filled as many planes as they could. Priority was given to the sick, injured and pregnant. Second priority was women and children only (unless the father was deemed to be essential to the well-being of the group). Third was elderly couples, then married couples, and lastly single people. They were allowed fifty pounds of luggage each. A powerful force at work in this prioritisation was the recurring, seldom-challenged suggestion that women had less to offer the rebuilding process. Only five to ten per cent of Darwin’s female population was left in the town come 31 December. Many women had been shipped out when they didn’t want to go.
Sergeant Kevin Maley and his family were on the first plane out at four on Boxing Day morning. When their home disintegrated around them, both parents and the children had been thrown fifteen metres to the ground. Maley required two hundred stitches, his wife broke her back and his daughter, Fiona, had severe leg injuries. They were among the hundreds put on planes, often in the clothes (what was left of them) in which they’d weathered the cyclone and not much else. They had identification tags tied to them if they were injured. Some were still covered in dried blood. A baby was born during a stopover in Brisbane, while the passengers waited in the Ansett terminal. In Adelaide that Boxing Day, according to the Advertiser, ‘more than 400 haggard survivors of the Darwin cyclone poured into the airport terminal…The evacuees were nearly all women and small children. Many of the women were pregnant…bare-footed and shivering and clutching plastic bags and small boxes holding their entire belongings.’ One man I spoke to was fourteen during Tracy. He remembers he was separated from his family and flown out alone. When he got onto the plane he was given a newborn to nurse for several hours. He’d never held a baby before and had no idea what to do. He is more disturbed by that memory—the responsibility and his helplessness—than much of what went before.
Quite often the planes used were military planes that were not intended for passengers. They were uncomfortable, they had no catering and no toilets. People ended up urinating in their seats—if they h
ad seats. Julia Church remembers being strapped to the floor of a Hercules with her legs stuck out in front of her. It was incredibly crowded and there were babies crying everywhere. Once they were tied in, the army blokes stood and threw fruit to them for the flight, as if, Julia said to me, they were monkeys. Some crews fell asleep while flying; in those days there was no such thing as fatigue management.
Pilot Terese Green provides a vivid description of landing in, then leaving, Darwin. She went:
with the sole purpose of picking up the Ladies about to give birth from the DRW Hospital…We left at 13.24 with 40 last stage pregnant ladies (much to our horror) 2CC, 2 Nursing Sisters and one doctor, 2 cats in cages (they belonged to the hospital) and my memories are the total carnage, a DC3 firmly implanted in the Base Commander’s house, and the fridge in the water tower (30MTRS up). It was all downhill from there. Two ladies were in labour, so we went straight to Isa, no joy there, they were already packed from those who went by car, so running out of hours and ideas, I called up Mackay, and pleaded (no, threatened) that we needed help, and finally got in there vastly relieved, as the noises up the back were becoming terrifying to say the least.
In the short term Green ended up at a pub in Mackay to recover. In the longer term she ended up with the cats that had been on the flight that ‘both lived to a great age and cost a fortune in Vet bills’.2
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