Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  Indigenous people in general were much more likely to return after evacuation—or try to—and they were likely to return more quickly. Most wanted to be home within two months, whereas non-Indigenous families were often away for six months or more. Around half the general population returned after the evacuation, but most Indigenous families did, with the exception of a few families who stayed on in either Katherine or Alice Springs.

  It seemed that Indigenous people were treated increasingly poorly in the months (rather than weeks) after Tracy. For starters the restoration of Aboriginal settlements dropped lower and lower down the list of priorities. In January a meeting of sixty-five homeless Aboriginal people was held outside the classrooms the One Mile community had moved into, and that meeting expressed concern that no Aboriginal representatives were on the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Reconstruction Commission. There was also a concern that politics were being played with some aspects of the emergency, in particular that the permit system was being used to keep Aboriginal people out of Darwin on a permanent basis. The checkpoint set up on the highway at Noonamah, sixteen kilometres beyond the large camp at Knuckeys Lagoon, was particularly contentious with people being told they could only return when they had decent accommodation—which was farcical given that many Knuckeys Lagoon residents hadn’t ever had adequate housing. The community there had been engaged in a dispute over title for several years, and their tent dwellings were an interim measure indicating the undecided legal status of the land. On 28 January, the Gwalwa Daraniki Association (gwalwa daraniki means ‘our land’ in Larrakia), were reported as encouraging members to drive through the road blocks as a form of protest.9 ‘Blacks to Challenge Road Blocks’ blared the headline in the Northern Territory News.

  In answer to complaints about the living conditions in the camps, the Darwin Reconstruction Commission replied in September 1975: ‘You will appreciate that the construction of permanent works on the site [at One Mile] has to await the deliberations of the judicial body that is examining the title to this portion of land.’10 But, as Bill Day goes on to point out, the system could move fast enough when it came to, say, letting out contracts for 1600 new houses in the suburbs of Darwin. In response to this the Gwalwa Daraniki Association began its own appeal for emergency funds. This did not resolve their problems, however. A donation of forty thousand dollars from the Papua New Guinea government for a shelter for Aborigines at Knuckeys Lagoon ‘joined other funds for fringe dweller reconstruction and emergency relief which were frozen by a bureaucracy worried about a lack of legal title. In addition, there were to be no grants of leases for Aboriginal town camps while the future plans for Darwin were being debated.’ The community is now known as Belyuen, but the housing has not improved. Some thirty years later, the community still lived in the temporary structures built a few months after the cyclone.

  Rover Thomas [Joolama]

  Kukatja/Wangkajunga peoples

  c.1926 Australia – 1998

  Cyclone Tracy 1991

  natural earth pigments on canvas

  168 × 180 cm

  National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

  Purchased 1991

  © THE ARTIST’S ESTATE COURTESY WARMUN ART CENTRE

  Aerial view of damage

  RICK STEVENS / FAIRFAX

  Last can standing

  ALBERT A. DIXON COLLECTION, NORTHERN TERRITORY LIBRARY

  Armed police patrol the streets of Darwin to stop looters

  NEWS LTD / NEWSPIX

  Evacuation via TAA

  FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AUSTRALIA: A6180, 7/1/75/54

  Evacuees aboard a US Air Force Starlifter

  NEWS LTD / NEWSPIX

  There is some validity to the argument that Indigenous people might be less distressed by the aftermath of a cyclone—both because they were less beholden to material things and because what they did have to lose (land) had been taken from them already—but that argument can be taken too far. Indigenous people are no more resilient than anyone else when it comes to corrugated iron flying through the air. Bill Day: ‘The Aboriginal people in the camps who had experienced the cyclone now had a wariness of using loose corrugated iron for self-made humpies and of building under trees.’

  The situation of Aboriginal people during cyclones remains a vulnerable one. One Mile camp has been in operation since the early 1900s and was granted a special lease in 1978. In 2005 the area was described as ‘Darwin’s own little Soweto’ by the camp’s project officer, Mick Lambe. It comprises ‘a crumbling toilet block; and what is literally a wire-netting walled cage, like a zoo cage, that is the women’s refuge from drunks the police dump at the camp during the night’. There were only about twenty people there when Tony Clifton visited in 2004 because Aboriginal people are effectively kept out of town during the dry season so as not to upset the tourists. ‘But there might be 200 or more once the tourists leave in the wet and Aboriginal money becomes good again.’ When I visited the camp during the dry of 2011 there were even fewer people. This pattern of pushing people out in the dry season and allowing them back in the wet means they are more likely to be in residence during the cyclone season. Now, as in 1974, the ruined infrastructure which abounds in these camps can become deadly if whipped up into the air during a cyclone.

  Many remote Indigenous communities in Australia are in areas at most risk of a ‘natural’ disaster but the Northern Territory—in fact Australia in general—is a long way away from having developed protocols around the evacuation of Aboriginal people. This is difficult, it must be acknowledged, because every Indigenous community is different, and a ‘one size fits all’ approach would not be much use. What is essential is having emergency services personnel who, if they are not actually from the community, know and work closely with them. A case in point was the evacuation undertaken before Cyclone Monica, a Category 5, hit the northern tip of Arnhem Land in 2005. Elders were invited to play an active role and, importantly, avoidance relationships were respected. These relationships are particularly important because they dictate who can be in close proximity to whom. If these aren’t understood and worked around, people might simply refuse to get onto the transport being offered. In this case the liaison officers were Indigenous, which made a huge difference to the emergency evacuation work.11

  On the other hand there are many examples of evacuations that have caused extreme stress. The Western Desert community of Kiwirrkurra, badly flooded in March 2001, was a dry community but was evacuated to a community where drinking was allowed. There was such ‘severe disruption to the social fabric of the community’12 that they decided to move themselves closer to home and just stayed wherever they could. It was eighteen months before they were able to return to their land.

  Evacuation was also distressingly disruptive to the people of the Warmun community in Turkey Creek, home to the art movement that had been triggered by artistic response to Cyclone Tracy—particularly the Gurirr Gurirr paintings—and Rover Thomas’s extraordinary oeuvre, which includes some of the most iconic visual images of the cyclone. (No other artists have painted the recent history of northern Australia in such an ambitious, or, indeed, historically significant fashion. Thomas’s painting in the late seventies inspired those around him, in
cluding Queenie McKenzie, a Gija elder and stock-camp cook who is now as famous as Thomas. ‘If he can do that so can I,’ she said.13 And so an art movement was born.)

  In July 2010, it rained sixty-seven millimetres in a single day at Fitzroy Crossing, and, locals told me, closer to a hundred millimetres in other areas of Central Kimberley. It typically doesn’t rain a drop in July. Six months later the people of Warmun began to dream that something was amiss. On Sunday 13 March 2011, after days of heavy rainfall caused by a cyclonic depression, floodwaters began swelling Turkey Creek. In the space of a few short hours that afternoon, the creek rose beyond measure and a torrent of water sweeping across the red plains engulfed the remote community, washing away walls and taking a thousand paintings. Nicolas Rothwell reported in the Australian: ‘It was devastation: houses were wrecked, trailers and demountables were smashed and turned upside down, refrigerators lodged high in the branches of trees.’ One local, Leanne Mosquito, later said that the loss of so many paintings was devastating because it meant a loss of knowledge: ‘People paint about their country. They talk about country through painting.’ Art centre manager Maggie Fletcher and her husband Gary were able to save three hundred or so works of the Warmun heritage collection, but the community had to be evacuated to Kununurra, where tension was experienced between the people of Warmun and the people whose country it was. There are many reasons for this but one was that no formal permission was asked of the Indigenous community in Kununurra. Welcome to Country, like other Indigenous protocols, is not just a politeness. It’s essential if two communities are going to live together. The point is illustrated by Maggie Fletcher’s account of what the three hundred people evacuated after the flood experienced:

  This was a traumatic time…In a state of shock, lobbed together in a workers’ ‘village’ in Kununurra, the community members suddenly found themselves homeless evacuees in a foreign land. It was two weeks later that one of the most senior artists managed to ask, ‘Where are we?’…What this man meant was: ‘Whose country are we on? This is not our country—we shouldn’t be here without their permission.’ The people felt they couldn’t paint there. It wasn’t right. They didn’t like the paint. ‘That’s gardiya paint—white fellas paint. It’s no good. It’s not from our country.’

  As soon as she could, Maggie and Gary ‘took Warmun ochres and as many familiar painting materials as we could up to Kununurra.’14

  It was almost a year later that the community got back to Warmun to find there were positives to be taken from the disaster. Mary Thomas, painter and Gija elder, said at the time: ‘The floodwater came and washed all those bad things, you know, problems we had.’

  THE WILD NORTH

  THERE WERE men in uniform and men in civvies. There were Hawaiian shirts and undies, bathers, police caps, and men wearing dresses. What you wore became a contentious question in the crazy days after Cyclone Tracy. Neville Barwick, who headed up the Darwin Reconstruction Study Group, arrived six days after Tracy to find a colleague who’d been left with nothing but his life and his underpants. He was still in his Y-fronts, helping out around the office. Air Commodore Hitchins ran into problems when he was getting about in the old shorts he’d been wearing on Christmas Day. ‘I’d quite forgotten that I’d got into an airforce aeroplane looking like an out of work fisherman which I probably was, and here was this very keen young airforce wing commander, dead keen to get going and he couldn’t understand why this scruffy character kept getting in his way.’

  Major-General Stretton tended to dress down in what he thought was Darwin style. According to Frank Thorogood:

  [Stretton] took the view, that had he turned up in his major-general’s suit, that would not have created the image that he really wanted to have. So, I believe that the shorts, the Florida shirt and the floppy hat was entirely consistent with the role, because everybody else in Darwin was dressed pretty much the same. On the other hand, I was dressed in shoes, long socks, shorts, khaki shirt, badges of rank—medal ribbon—as a uniformed Army officer. And I really gave him, by that appearance, the prestige and the status that he needed…he always wanted to represent himself as the Civilian Director-General of the Natural Disasters Organisation. Now that’s the term that he used often—the Civilian Director. He kept saying, ‘it’s under civilian control’.

  Uniforms were tied up with authority, in a town that resented it—especially if it came from outsiders.

  When the interstate cops began to arrive—232 police came from the Commonwealth and another 151 were provided by states around Australia—Bill Wilson remembers that: ‘They had clean uniforms, pale blue uniforms…We were filthy, didn’t have proper uniforms.’ The interstaters’ uniforms didn’t stay clean for long, though, and some took to wearing shorts and singlets while keeping a gun on their hips. The local police were also casually dressed, though they had more excuse since in many cases their uniforms had literally blown away. Whatever the reasons, this all made it increasingly difficult to figure out who was a policeman and who was not.

  One compelling reason for bringing in reinforcements, uniform or no, was a fear that the local police wouldn’t cope given what they’d all gone through. Wilson has some sympathy for this view, having recognised the great shock that he and others were attempting to manage as they went about their business. As well, many had been trying to survive on little or no sleep for three or four days at a stretch. More than one man slept for close to twenty-four hours straight when finally given the chance to rest. There was also the concern that Darwin was going to become a looters’ paradise. Wilson elaborates: ‘There was some suggestion that there was a fear of lack of control in town; they needed more police than there were to keep order if things got out of hand.’

  Cedric Patterson remembers a certain edginess: ‘People with shotguns sitting in their shop windows and doorways.’ There is a photo taken at the end of 1974 that illustrates his point: a man sitting outside the remains of his shop on the Stuart Highway in Darwin, holding a shotgun. This sense that their town was being descended upon was in part a response to the fact that people had lost almost everything they owned and feared for their few remaining belongings. The man with the gun was, in a sense, warding off his sense of devastation.

  A journalist who joined police on looting patrol one night described the atmosphere, ‘A man, smelling strongly of alcohol, staggered past in the lights. He clutched a high velocity .22 rifle…“I’ve shot four dogs tonight,” he slurred. “I got thirty or forty of the bastards yesterday.”’ It’s impossible to know of course whether this is true or just the ravings of a drunk, but it gives you a sense of the madness that had descended on some quarters of the city. Shortly after this the man waved his rifle at police and had to be disarmed.1

  But many believed, like Colonel Thorogood, that the entire issue was exaggerated. ‘There wasn’t a lot of looting in Darwin and I don’t think there was ever a law and order problem of any consequence.’ It would seem he was right: two weeks after the cyclone only fifteen people had actually been arrested for larceny and possession of stolen property. Richard Creswick didn’t ‘think there was any concept of looting as such because everything became a shared facility’. Kate Cairns also talks of sharing rather than looting, of ‘using something that worked’. But she continues, ‘when the person whom it belonged to returned to Darwin…it was given back—perhaps not in all
cases—but in lots of cases it was. So what’s looting?—I don’t know.’ She was, however, nervous that not everyone would share her relaxed definition. She remembers that although her neighbours told her she could grab stuff from their place after they’d gone, she didn’t do so because she was scared she might be arrested.

  To be clear, it is absolutely the case that goods were stolen for resale. Lists presented to the Supreme Court in the wake of various arrests include multiple TV sets, cartons of pantihose and what now seems like an amusing surfeit of banana lounges. But definitions can blur. Is it looting if you break into a pharmacy in the centre of a ruined city, and take the asthma medication you need or some nappies for your child? Is it looting if you take food, which will perish anyway, from a grocery store? What if it isn’t medication or food but beer that you are desperate for? What if you take furniture to put under the remaining floorboards of your house? At what point do you draw the line? As Bill Wilson asked, ‘Where does looting start and finish, and survival start and finish? If you’re walking along and you’re cold and wet the morning after the cyclone, and you see a raincoat draped over a fence, do you take it, and is that looting?’

  Police commandeering was considered legitimate. Wilson has vividly described his attempts to drive around the town to try and help, the morning after the cyclone, only to have tyre after tyre shred.

  We had four flat tyres because of the debris on the road. I think it took us fifteen or twenty minutes to drive from Mitchell Street to Daly Street…At that point, there was a garage on the corner…We broke into the service station there, and got whatever wheels and tyres we could find, and managed to replace all the tyres…In fact we left a note and said: The police have requisitioned…whatever number of tyres it was and left it on the counter in there, which we thought made it okay…Later on we were told in fact that this was quite legitimate; that you could do what you want, provided it was recorded.