there were school excursions to Timor and Indonesia. It was an unselfconscious place. We hung out with Indigenous kids and even the ‘local’ kids came from all over the world, Chinese Australians, Greeks, Dutch. The teachers came from around the world also. It was one of the first open school systems and at school there was a lot of work done on Indigenous issues. We were being shown the bush and introduced to it. I guess I felt more of a sense of belonging rather than being other. Teachers were out there. Well travelled, radical, well read. Lesbians, communists. They wore sarongs. They introduced ideas that were new to us.
In Canberra the kids were nasty to them and accused Julia and her sister of feeling ‘special’ because of what they’d been through. One teacher actually said that to them. ‘You might feel you’re really special but you’re nothing.’ Julia ended up wagging all the time, and in general remembers that she and her siblings were ‘pretty mental’ for quite a while.
The lack of autonomy that evacuees, particularly women and children, experienced meant that for many of them they were, for the first time, treated as Darwin’s Indigenous residents long had been (and as most refugees everywhere are today). ‘Whites complained at being administered by methods refined against Aborigines for decades. Told where they could live, separated from spouse or children, needing permits to enter the city, at the mercy of police, politicians and pen-pushers…’6 Separated from their families and taken from their homes. Told where to go and what to do but given minimal information. Left to sit around and wonder, ‘What happens next?’ People didn’t like it. Of course they didn’t. No one would.
The reality was that nearly half of the population of Darwin ended up scattered around Australia. Despite the fact, as the St Vincent de Paul Association for Darwin evacuees in Brisbane noted, that ‘the majority had very strong feelings about Darwin being their home and returning at the earliest possible time’, fifteen thousand never did return. Some of the anger around the evacuation led to the formation of residential action groups whose aim was to stay abreast of information, such as compensation, that affected evacuees. But there was more to it than that. The key reason that it was so hard for the non-returning evacuees was the loss of community. It’s much easier to recover if you’re with a group of people who have been through the same thing. In Julia’s memory, her parents finally began to feel more settled when they could put money down on a house and set up the Woden Valley Bridge Club as a kind of Darwin away from Darwin.
Harry Giese, who had been working with the evacuation centres in the days after the cyclone, established the Disaster Welfare Council (DDWC) on 4 January 1975.
One of the things that Ella Stack and I did—together with Bishop O’Loughlin and Ian Barker, a local lawyer…we had started to move around the suburbs and town area of Darwin to talk to groups of the people that remained in those areas, to build up something of an esprit de corps among them to give them a bit of hope, to try and inform them as to what was happening both here and elsewhere…Also with the interstate groups, so that we…could act as a liaison between the people here and those members of their family that were interstate.
They also provided an ongoing coordination point for voluntary agencies during the recovery period, including those from other states. The DDWC presented a report in March 1976 which recommended that large-scale evacuation of people only ‘proceed in the most extreme of cases and encouragement be given to the movement of families as a social unit’.7
The Red Cross is just one of several organisations to ask themselves why some communities are more prepared, and more resilient, than others. Why do some just get on with the job while others fracture? Much has been written about the different fates of two superficially similar neighbourhoods in Chicago during the heatwave of 1995, which killed more than seven hundred within a week. The largest cluster of deaths occurred in the locality of North Lawndale, and the smallest in Little Village. Both areas were home to vulnerable people—a number of poor, elderly Hispanic people living alone—but in North Lawndale the fatality rate was ten times higher. The difference? Little Village was a close-knit community and people took to visiting each other when things got tough. In North Lawndale there was a drug problem, which meant there was a lot of violent crime and, as a consequence, people didn’t go out much. Older people living there had no one to look in on them. The lesson generally drawn from this example is that community saves lives. But of course a sense of community is not something that can be built overnight.
After Tracy, the permanently evacuated were more likely to suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), sleeping problems, issues with addiction, anxiety, depression and a range of other disorders. A report published in the Australian Medical Journal in 1975 studied 67 Darwinians who’d been evacuated to Sydney. Five to eight days after the cyclone, when they were tested, 58 per cent were assessed as ‘probable psychiatric cases’. (The likelihood of psychological disturbance increased with age8 and was more pronounced in women.) A report by the same author published in a psychiatric journal in 1977 9 found that the two main risk factors for people experiencing ongoing distress were: having believed they would die, and the stress of relocation. ‘While psychological dysfunction was increased initially (58 per cent) and at ten weeks (41 per cent), it had returned to an Australian general population control level (22 per cent) at fourteen months.’ However psychologist Gordon Milne later found that the rate of disturbance did not drop nearly as quickly among those evacuees who never returned. In 1981, 31 per cent still suffered emotional disorders. The rate for those who returned quickly, or never left at all, was 13 per cent.
History has not been kind to our understanding of the evacuation. There is no doubt that it caused far too much distress at the time, and continued to do so for decades to come. There is no way of being certain, of course, that there wouldn’t have been mass fatalities from disease, exposure or shortage of food and water, as those who took charge so obviously feared. What is certain is that what happened after Cyclone Tracy has become—according to John Richardson, a recovery specialist with experience both in government organisations and with the Red Cross—a blueprint on how not to respond to catastrophe. Lives for the survivors were bisected into Before Tracy and After Tracy. This was especially so for those who never found their way back, and many of them feel sadness still.
TRACY, YOU BITCH
THERE IS a photograph, taken soon after the cyclone, of a Holden with the words Tracy, you bitch spray-painted across the bonnet. It seemed to capture the mood of the times.
The trend of naming cyclones and hurricanes began in 1887 with the famed Australian-based meteorologist (and expert on all things spiritual) Clement Wragge. He used the names of anything that appealed to him—from mythological creatures to politicians who annoyed him. When Wragge retired in 1908 the practice was carried on informally and it was at this point that the tradition became gendered: tropical cyclones (or hurricanes) might be named after fishermen’s mothers-in-law or naval officers’ girlfriends and wives. When formal naming resumed in 1963, female names were used exclusively—but Tracy changed that, as she was to change so many things. Not only was Tracy herself such a significant weather system that her name was permanently retired from use for cyclones, she also changed the naming tradition itself. ‘Reeling from the enormity of damage caused to Darwin by the “she-devil” Tracy, the then minister for
science, Mr William Morrison, “suggested that women would not have to bear the odium associated with tropical cyclones”.’1 Since early 1975 cyclones have been named after both men and women. (And recent research seems to indicate that more needs to be done on that front. ‘Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them,’ claimed a Washington Post headline of June 2014, citing a US study that suggested ‘people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions’.2)
Even if one puts aside any wrangling over the hidden—or not-so-hidden—meaning behind calling a cyclone Tracy and Tracy a bitch, most people concede that Darwin has not been a town that was friendly to women. According to one commentator, ‘The dearth of women at Port Essington [an early NT outpost]…Reflects in exaggerated fashion an Australian colonial problem…A new culture [built] from the old, the small, artificial male societies which give rise to the Australian legends of sport, hard drinking and mateship.’3 Indeed almost all the women who went to Darwin in its early colonial history ended up in early graves. By 1871 there were still only twelve adult European women compared with 172 European men. Even in the decade before World War Two, the white women of the Northern Territory were outnumbered three to one by the men. In 1941 all European women and children were compulsorily evacuated (while Aboriginal children who’d been removed from their families into the ‘care’ of the state or the church, were left behind by all but the nuns who stood by them). Ted D’Ambrosio worked as a civilian zone warden during the war, and remembers his biggest problem was ‘coping with irate husbands who didn’t want their wives to go and took it out on us. I had so many bruises by the end of the evacuation it wasn’t funny.’4 Old-timer Tom Baird says that ‘war did break up a lot of families and things like that—friends are scattered everywhere; some went down to Perth, some went to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane; you know, a lot of them went away and never ever came back; some of the real Territorians.’
The Northern Territory News was not a supporter of women, then or now. ‘Girls: You’re Fat!’ a headline from 11 February 1974, captures the general tenor. Things weren’t much better after the cyclone when the paper rose with aplomb to its task of patronising the women, at the same time as providing some nifty disaster-inspired product placement. Articles like ‘Undies for the girls’ claimed that the women left in Darwin got ten thousand dollars’ worth of underwear, cosmetics, sunglasses and hosiery provided by Kotex, Avon and Polaroid. ‘The committee said yesterday that most of the women left behind were working in essential services, including nursing, often outdoors’; they had, apparently, requested these items. On 11 January the paper returned to its tradition of a page-three girl (a tradition which appears to have been dropped for a week or so) by including a bikini-clad girl from Miami. ‘It’s a sobering thought that when this lovely lass was horsing around at Miami Beach, Cyclone Tracy was at work in Darwin.’
Tom Pauling was a sympathetic man. A member of the Arts Council, he was particularly sad that the Cavenagh Theatre blew away in the cyclone. He would go on to become the youngest chief magistrate in Australia, and demonstrate a progressive approach to Indigenous rights. He worked with Dr Yunupingu in setting up the Garma Council. When he was interviewed in 1980, Pauling remembered how grim the Darwin of 1970 was for women:
A place of absolutely dull, bare, grey, fibro imminences called houses that were occupied by government servants who were here for limited tenure of two years so they never took much interest at all in their gardens. The houses were surrounded by aralias and there might be the odd undernourished tree somewhere or other.
Richard Creswick’s wife became intensely frustrated with Darwin when she arrived in the early seventies. ‘The outlets, the social outlets for women were far fewer than they are today, the cultural life was more primitive.’ When Vicki Harris moved there in 1972, she too was unimpressed.
It appeared to me to be very much a man’s town in those days. It was virtually a frontier type of place. There weren’t very many shops; Woolworths was in town; there was no Casuarina at that time. The shopping centre out there only opened just before Christmas of ’74…I found the facilities for women, particularly those that weren’t working, to be very limited.
David McCann, whose marriage broke down shortly before the cyclone, says that the type of housing provided to public servants contributed to the problems many couples were experiencing, and that ‘wives weren’t coping’. Margaret Muirhead, wife of Supreme Court judge James Muirhead and Chairperson of International Women’s Year in the NT, concurs. ‘The northern suburbs had always been a bit notorious about being so remote and women were stuck out [there]. Their husbands went off to work, probably they only had one car…’5
Of course it was not just Darwin where women’s rights were yet to be claimed, and while change was underway there was still the distinct hangover caused by the discriminatory legislation of decades (or centuries) standing. It was only eight years since the ban on married women working in the public service had been lifted. (Bill Wilson’s wife Patricia had had to leave the police force when she married him.) Women in the 1960s were routinely expected to have their husband or a male guarantor sign for a loan, even if they earned a wage. After Cyclone Tracy, when the women started to trickle back under the new permit system, Darwin officials would go and ask a woman’s husband if he wanted her back before she was approved.
Many senior figures, Hedley Beare and Ray McHenry included, insist that women were not forced to evacuate. But the women themselves found that the pressure they were under to get out of Darwin amounted to the same thing. This coercion took different forms. People were offered free fares back to Darwin to encourage them to leave, but this did not guarantee they would be given permission under the permit system that was introduced on 28 December. Dawn Lawrie, who worked with evacuees, recalls mothers asking her if they could return to Darwin soon. Her answer was ‘Of course!’ and Lawrie was devastated when she realised that was not, in fact, true.
McHenry introduced the permit system because ‘the trickle of people wanting to get into Darwin had become a flood’. It didn’t help that at the very point they were trying to empty the city, politicians, journalists and others were being let in, which intensified the pressure on those who actually lived there. People were told, bluntly, that they had no options. Bill Wilson described the general approach thus: ‘We’re closing this place tomorrow, you’ve got nowhere to go, so you better pack your bags and go.’ Kass Hancock claims that a soldier pointed a gun at her for a joke and said, ‘You know I’ll use it.’6 She didn’t laugh. General Stretton, in his regular radio interviews, was encouraging but none the less forceful. ‘I urge you all to do what I said last night. If you want to take advantage of the offer of the Government to come back here at their expense, register and get yourself on an aircraft today or tomorrow.’ He did go on to acknowledge, however, that some people had to stay to clean up, and also that leaving was a personal decision.
Tom Baird’s wife Evelyn told him, ‘Well, I’m going to put my foot down and say I’m not going.’7 She knew that a homeless existence for months on end down south would be distressing, and she didn’t want to be separated from Tom. Like all the men he was working around the clock, but that didn’t mean he wanted his wife gone.
You all worked like hell; there was that much work involved. There was very few women
around at the time—most of them all evacuated, but the few that were left behind, they had a lot of work to do. My wife, they said ‘You’d have to evacuate her’…So I took her into town and I said, ‘Is there any voluntary work that she can do.’ They said, ‘Try the hospital,’ so she got a job at the hospital.
Evelyn worked, like the men, until she literally collapsed.
Having maintained that women were not forced out, Beare goes on to say that some ‘people’ had to be told to leave because they were too traumatised to make up their own mind. ‘Bear in mind all of us have a reality coloured by the experience we’d gone through, so often times you couldn’t have expected rational behaviour out of people…But it was true that some people wanted to stay…and had they stayed it would have put a stress on the infrastructure of the city.’ This sense of pressure contributed to the fact that some people—men and women—refused to go to hospital to get serious injuries treated for fear of being evacuated. On the flip side, others were very keen to leave and there were near riots when people thought they would miss a bus to the airport and have to spend another twenty-four hours in Darwin as a consequence.
Forty years later the rush to get the women out is hard to understand. It was clearly driven by two things: a paternalistic sense of care, and the insulting belief that women were of no use to the clean-up and, unable to cope, would become a burden. McHenry: ‘I can remember [Hedley Beare], the education guy, coming and saying, “If I can get my family out of here I will be able to concentrate in a meaningful way.”’ He talks of wanting his (male) workers to be able to give ‘their 100 per cent effort, without the difficulties of a family sitting around on their backsides somewhere or other getting all agitated with the fact that the husband wasn’t available’.8 The thinking behind the evacuation not only infantilised women; it also put men under intolerable pressures, for months and years to come.
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