Colleen D’Arcy was evacuated with her seven children and, like many others, she struggled with a lack of information. She eventually found herself in Alice Springs after travelling to both Sydney and Brisbane. Bernard Briec was sent out after three days, with his siblings and some family friends. His mother and father stayed behind for a bit longer. ‘You had to wait in alphabetical order, till your names were called, and all this sort of stuff. The men who worked at the airport said: “Forget about that, it’s not working like that, it’s chaos, it’s mayhem. It’s basically whoever’s there gets on the planes.”’ But he was cheerful once he was on the plane and was well looked after by the friends he was travelling with. His memories of that time are not painful. His family planned to stay in Adelaide permanently, though after a few months their love of Darwin compelled them to move north again.
Katrina Fong Lim, the daughter of Darwin legend Alec Fong Lim, is the current lord mayor. She was in Sydney during the cyclone and her father, concerned the Darwin schools wouldn’t open within the year, enrolled her and one of her sisters into a high school in Sydney for 1975. They were called ‘Darwin refugees’. She remembers the shock of having to wear school uniforms, as well as the fact that she and her sister were the only two Chinese girls enrolled in the school. It was here she experienced racism for the first time—in Darwin she was unaware of such matters. She also remembers that an older sister went to Adelaide to complete her education and never really returned home at all. Many families were fractured in this way.
With a teenager’s keen eye for bullshit, Julia Church recognised the patronising attitude of people who came out to greet them when they landed. They talked slowly, explaining obvious things like how escalators worked. On the plus side, she remembers the Salvation Army gave them seventy dollars each—and there were trestle tables of free clothes to riffle through, which was fun.
After Janice Perrin’s mother got to the hospital she was told she could be treated there, or evacuated. She chose evacuation. After that, Perrin remembers, ‘We didn’t see her again. None of us saw her again.’ A few days later Perrin and her children were also evacuated. ‘Warren drove to Nightcliff High and then we listed our names and they had just a big sign and wherever you wanted to go, you went to that sign. So if you wanted to go to Sydney you went to the sign that said: “Sydney”.’ The airport was crowded and Perrin ended up in a fight.
I moved my feet, which upset the case and upset the bag on top and I bent down to pick up the bag that I’d upset and they all attacked me. They just all flew at me. And I had very long hair which was plaited and they pulled my hair and they kicked me—it was really quite frightening.
Things got so out of hand that some Commonwealth police came over. It turned out that the family thought that Perrin was trying to steal their bag.
From then on it was very nice because the Commonwealth policeman then took me and the two children into a little room at the—behind the airport desks and he gave me a brandy and patted my arm and [laughs] I had a whole seat to myself and then when the plane came in, he took me out to the plane with the kids and put me on.
Getting a seat to herself was no mean feat—Perrin was on the jumbo that broke the world record for the number of people on board—715 people on a jet configured for 365. She’d wanted to go to Canberra because she had relatives there but ended up in Sydney. When she arrived she was greeted by a man from Rotary, given some money (eighty-four dollars) and taken to a room with clothes piled up on tables so she could dress herself and her children properly. The man then invited her family to stay. Soon after that Perrin called Adelaide Red Cross to see if they could help her trace her mother. By this stage she was becoming concerned that her mother’s punctured lung had killed her. She was eventually found in hospital in Perth: alive but not well.
This happened time and time again. So frantic was the rush to get people out that they didn’t necessarily end up in a state or town where they had relatives. And then it was hard to get messages back to family to let them know where they’d ended up. Those in Darwin who had access to phones were uncertain whom to call; those evacuated could only get through to Darwin on a few lines, and they would have to leave a message and hope it would be passed on. People hung out at the various interstate airports for days on end in the hope of spotting friends or relatives on incoming flights. There was no other way of knowing if someone you loved had made it out.
When Howard Truran was interviewed about his experience fourteen years after the event he still remembers that, although he wanted his wife and kids evacuated because he was so worried for them, the experience was extremely traumatic.
I wanted to get ’em out because everything was new to us; we didn’t know what was happening. And then there was rumours that there was typhoid around, and [there was] no power, no sewerage, no nothing…[Getting them on the bus] was very heart wrenching. Therese was very upset and I was upset, and the kids. You just piled them on the bus; you didn’t know when you were going to see them again: [there was] all this devastation around, and women crying and people on the bus and everybody [was] upset, and then just see the bus disappear.
He remembers that:
the evacuation points were shocking: there was all the toilets of the school—you can imagine—(they) were all backed up; the stink and the stench; screaming kids; people sitting around in shock; people injured, in bandages; no clothes, except what they could find or get from their houses. It was a shocking state.
Bill Wilson says, ‘the evacuation of people from Darwin was handled extremely well’ but then goes on to describe traumatic scenes such as the one that Truran endured.
Certainly the police families that I took out, we had two twenty-one-seater buses full of people from the police barracks that we put on, took out. A lot of them, tears were streaming down their face, not knowing when they were coming back to Darwin, not knowing when they’d see their husbands again. It was really traumatic stuff, leaving everything they knew…It had an impact on those of us left behind because (a) you threw yourself into your work, which was a good thing, but (b) people were lonely. It was a very lonely existence…it was probably a week before I managed to get onto Pat.
Air Commodore Hitchins remembers that no proper records were kept on how many planes left each day or where they went. He was ‘incensed at the pell mell, disorganised, chaotic manner in which it was evolving’. Hedley Beare takes responsibility for the fact that people were flown all over Australia, and often didn’t end up in the city they hoped to land in.
I was sitting with the chief of the Red Cross unit who had come up, and we had people typing out—we’d found a few typewriters by then—typing up the list of people who were going on the planes. I was getting very agitated, because I was saying: ‘We can’t do this, we’re holding up loading people. If they’re sitting for four hours in an aeroplane, why can’t they make a list once they’re in flight?…’ We sort of unilaterally said: ‘No more lists. If they’re out at the airport we put them on a plane, and if a person wants to go to Sydney but they happen to be on a plane to Perth, the infrastructure of organisation in the south will arrange for that.’ We just needed to have every seat filled.
Beare is being generous in taking the blame: his situati
on was impossible. Hitchins is just one of dozens to state that Beare was a ‘hell of a nice bloke’ and that, with Ray McHenry, he did ‘a mighty job and a very difficult job’. Despite his admiration for Beare, however, Hitchins took it upon himself to intervene, telling Stretton he ‘thought it was high time that somebody, some suitably qualified person, was placed in charge of this activity because it was becoming quite chaotic.’
Stretton’s first response was, once again, that civilians should be left to sort it out; however by 27 December (or 28 December—accounts vary) Hitchins was asked to take ‘immediate control of the destinations of outbound aircraft’. Things improved rapidly. People were flown to the right places. Injured people had medicos to look out for them, rather than being left in the care of other traumatised passengers.
The decision to evacuate is the single most controversial decision taken in the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy. Charles See Kee, the first man of Chinese descent to be employed in Darwin’s public service and a survivor of the World War Two bombings, has commented that ‘all the mistakes that they made during the bombing of Darwin they made them again after Cyclone Tracy…They panicked during the bombing of Darwin, they panicked during Cyclone Tracy. I know that people were evacuated but I think a lot of it was unnecessary.’3 He found himself wondering, ‘If we have another thing in Darwin will we do it again?’ Beare, in contrast, suggests that the panic was a healthy thing. ‘In fact, the adrenaline of getting the city going again was the thing actually that saved a lot of us.’ But See Kee is right to draw a parallel with the evacuation of Darwin in 1942; certainly the way women were treated after Cyclone Tracy created a real sense of déjà vu for those who’d been forced out before.
In her book No Man’s Land Barbara James describes the method of the wartime evacuation, in ramshackle boats without proper provisions, as ‘crude and cruel in the extreme…women and children were the ones who suffered most and were least considered’. Her mother-in-law, Wendy James, was a child at that time and her stories are devastating: she remembers the rage of her own mother, Pearl, that women were being forced out of the town, and the threats that were used to get them to go. It was terrible to experience a version of the same thing all over again thirty years later. Nellie Flynn, one of longest-lived Territorians, a venerable old woman of pioneer and Aboriginal descent, defied the evacuation orders in World War Two and defied them again after Tracy. ‘For three days after the cyclone the indomitable Nellie, then aged ninety-three, hid under scraps of canvas in her roofless Rapid Creek home to escape being forced to evacuate.’4 She was finally discovered, and allowed to stay.
Ray McHenry remains a strong defender of the decision to evacuate. ‘Beware of academics and the grandstand critics who want to ram the planning jargon down your throat and criticise the decisions such as evacuation. See the problems of the evacuation system through the eyes of those affected…’ He argued that those critics, often academics, came from outside the Territory.
Their judgments were ill-informed. It would have been better without true knowledge of the situation not to have ventured an opinion at all…it’s been said that it’s contributed to trauma and break-down and so on; well, to me that’s a bit like counting the chickens after they’re hatched. None of it would have occurred had there not been a cyclone. What one had to measure is whether the effect would have been worse if all those people had stayed in Darwin.
He did, however, believe that counsellors should have been provided and regrets that they weren’t.
McHenry was certainly right to suggest that most people who lived through the cyclone supported the evacuation, even if they had reservations about how it was carried out. Ken Frey says, ‘I can’t understand anybody, whether they be sociologists or psychologists or what, saying that it was wrong that this was done in Darwin.’ Even Senator Bob Collins, despite his own reservations, told the 7.30 Report:
I’ve seen a lot of crap delivered about how it shouldn’t have happened, it was a panic reaction. It’s bloody nonsense. The city had no clean water, had no sewerage supplies. There was no other decision that could have been taken, other than to evacuate the women and kids.
(It should be mentioned here that Collins’ concern for ‘kids’ is fraught. He was a witty and articulate narrator of the story of Cyclone Tracy, and I found much to like in his archival interviews. He was also, in 2004, charged with multiple child sex offences and three years later committed suicide just before the cases went to court.)
Many of those who claim to support the evacuation go on to describe a situation they clearly feel ambivalent about. Even Hitchins acknowledges that ‘with the benefit of hindsight one could say that some of the evacuation was unnecessary but I do believe that it was the right decision at the time.’ Bill Wilson, over the years, became more critical of the evacuation and decided that it hadn’t been necessary. While he acknowledged that reducing the population in this way did leave men free to work extreme hours, he believes concerns about disease and starvation were exaggerated.
At the time I think I was supportive of the view that we should evacuate…I’m less convinced now that the idea for the rest of the population was good…I think it was bad for the morale of the city, as it turns out, and it’s taken a lot longer for people to recover.
Concerns about typhoid and cholera outbreaks were understandable, but in the event these diseases were managed effectively by a prompt vaccination program. Tetanus shots were given as well. Charles Gurd, the first man to raise concerns about an epidemic, acknowledged that none eventuated. Even gastro was held at bay. It was due, in part, to Gurd’s effective management of the situation that Darwin remained relatively disease free.
Twenty years after Tracy, Elizabeth Carroll describes landing in Sydney with nothing but a man’s shirt on and ‘feeling like a refugee’.
This is nothing against the people. I mean, it was wonderful to get us all out and all that, but it was what made us feel like that. I mean, we hadn’t bathed, we hadn’t showered; I can’t remember what our hair must have looked like; no make-up: we had nothing like that. We didn’t have shoes. Did we have shoes by then? I can’t remember.
Wendy James suggests something similar when she talks of experiencing ‘the indignity and disruption of refugees’.5 Carroll believes that she was given no choice but to leave. ‘I really wish that we could have stayed because we would have got there, we would have made it. We would have rebuilt…It was so traumatic and so hard, splitting the families, and starting a new life again.’ Her kids were traumatised for years. ‘Leesa used to vomit if you talked about the cyclone; she never, ever mentioned the cyclone, ever, and she would get physically sick if you mentioned the cyclone.’ Carroll herself has never felt able to return to Darwin and when you read her interview, the pain and distress she still felt years afterwards are palpable.
Janice Perrin ended up staying in Canberra for two years after she was evacuated there. Like many evacuees, she never returned to Darwin, and, like many evacuees, she saw her marriage end. ‘Warren had a lot of trouble settling and a lot of trouble sticking with a decision. He would decide that he’d come back to Darwin and he actually came back and sort of got to Alice Springs, then decided he didn’t want to come back and drove to Canberra.’ The injury to his foot from flying glass never properly healed. Carroll ackno
wledges that there were many separations, divorces after the cyclone but says,
It didn’t affect John and I as a couple for a few years. John was absolutely wonderful for the first few years; not that he wasn’t wonderful all the way through…Then I remember two years in John started to really sort of crack and feel it. It did affect our relationship because it was not an easy [time for] many years, really, and I really do wish we could have stayed.
Julia Church’s experience is typical in some ways. The evacuation was a second, unwanted, emigration hot on the heels of the family’s initial move from England. Moving to Canberra was incredibly hard, particularly for her parents. ‘It was like going back right to the beginning, immigrating all over again, but they were middle aged, not young.’ Now in her early fifties, Julia is a renowned printmaker who lived in Italy for many years. She still feels the loss of Darwin as a home. We meet in a cafe in Canberra that feels as far away from Darwin as it’s possible to be, and we are both struck by how hard she’s finding it to talk about Tracy and what happened after. Every detail seems significant and painful, each represents the moment her life changed irrevocably. Julia keeps apologising for this, and seems to have a sense she’s making too much of how difficult things were. ‘But you’re not,’ I tell her. ‘The archives and newspapers are full of people with stories like yours. Everyone talks of a pain they find hard to define.’
People had different reasons for the sense of loss they experienced when they were forced to leave. For some, it was being evicted from a place they’d always lived in and felt connected to; for others it was having finally found a place that they could call home, a place that they had fallen in love with. The Churches’ lives had blossomed in Darwin—Julia at fourteen was loving school and discovering boys—and Canberra was a backward step. Darwin, caught up in the political tumult of the seventies, had been changing rapidly. Then suddenly Julia found herself back to old-fashioned when-the-bell-goes assemblies. At her school in Darwin:
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