Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  In a later interview he acknowledged that:

  official commandeering…was a form, I suppose, of looting…A policy was made quite quickly that legitimised this, and recorded it for future reparation to the owners of these places…for example, if an evacuation centre needed a generator, and there was one somewhere, then it would get taken and put into use. It wasn’t for people’s personal gain. I think that if it was for community gain it was acceptable; if it was not for community gain then it was unacceptable.

  After reading many hours of interviews with Wilson I decided I had to meet him. I was impressed by his ability to remember emotional detail, among other things, and found I liked the man—despite never having met him. I tried to track him down in Darwin but, like most of the people I ended up interviewing, he no longer lived there. These days he lives in, of all places, Beechworth, a hilly and sometimes cold Victorian town not many hours from where I live. Aged seventy-one when we met—he was thirty-three during Tracy—he was, despite his age, still a big man as coppers often are. He’d long stopped being a policeman and in his fifties became a historian, then a lecturer in history and politics at Charles Darwin University. After that he’d become a senior advisor in Support and Equity, and you can see all these things in his Tracy interviews with Francis Good if you look for them. An eye for historical detail combined with real compassion. I wondered about many things, including the perhaps incidental detail of whether people actually followed up on these reparation slips. He told me that quite a few businesses did. It was an honour system that, to all intents and purposes, worked.

  These issues become more complex when you consider that the city, or what was left of it, became for ten days or so a cash-free economy. Kate Cairns again: ‘It was a cashless society—I mean if you wanted something there was always some way of getting it, you know. It was quite strange really.’ Colleen D’Arcy remembers going shopping on Christmas Day—the only person I’ve come across with such a recollection—at a little shop in Westralia Street. ‘I thought that was rather wonderful to think that—business as usual, after the night before,’ however she soon found that, ‘except for going down to Westralia Street, and the supermarket being open, money was of no use whatsoever.’ Local businesses got into the spirit of the occasion. Antonio Milhinhos, the owner of a small supermarket in Nightcliff, gave away his entire stock to cyclone victims. The owners of W. G. Chin’s in Smith Street gave away most of their goods as well. These were pragmatic gestures, as so much stock was water damaged, but they were also heartfelt. It would be three weeks before shops were operating again. In the meantime food was provided at the still-standing schools, such as Darwin and Casuarina High.

  You could survive on free beer alone until 3 January when local businesses began to object to the lack of opportunity to sell anything. More broadly speaking, some of the people who were evacuated around Australia were provided with free food and board for months afterwards. Not everyone was convinced all this free stuff was a good idea. Keith Cole believed that the time during which people were given things went on for longer than was useful. ‘We were being conditioned into getting things for nothing, and the more we got, the more we expected and wanted.’ Mayor Brennan, ever alert to hippy and communist activity, felt even more strongly on the subject. ‘It was a hippy’s delight, this whole darn thing. They got fed for nothing, they’d go round and get clothing and all of that.’

  This question ‘what is looting’ was not just an abstract one—a man’s life could turn on it. Robin Bullock thought the whole debate had ‘an element of hysteria’ to it and pointed out that ‘there can be a fine line between someone needing something and someone not needing it, but the person needing something being caught up in the accusation is a terrible thing to happen’.

  Malcolm McKenzie, who operated the Rapid Creek betting shop, remembers that his son’s boss was out in Nightcliff out of curfew,

  down at the Seabreeze Hotel, which was a very nice place. For some reason we don’t know, he was moving around when the curfew was supposed to be on, and someone thought he was a looter and allegedly fired a warning shot, but unfortunately the warning shot turned out to be a fatal shot, because they shot [him] dead.

  I haven’t been able to corroborate that statement. Police Commissioner McLaren certainly denies it. ‘No person was ever shot, no looter was shot at…there wasn’t even a shot fired in the direction of a looter.’2 Deputy Mayor Ted D’Ambrosio does, however, remember firing a warning shot at someone.

  The truth can be hard to get to. There were rumours of looters being lined up and shot, then pushed off the pier and, while I found no evidence to suggest that this actually happened, I was struck by the fact that the story is not dissimilar to images that were to emerge out of East Timor a few months later, during the Indonesian invasion: the way, for example, that journalist Roger East would meet his end. East was on the personal staff of the head of the interim Darwin Reconstruction Commission, Sir Leslie Thiess: he came to Darwin shortly after Tracy, then headed further north to Dili, to help Fretilin. He was shot and thrown off the pier at Dili Harbour after the invasion. A few months later the displaced people of East Timor started to land on Darwin’s shores, and it’s interesting to see the way in which stories and memories morph.

  Another ongoing meme of the cyclone was that Greek men dressed as women in their desperate bid to be evacuated. This rumour flourished immediately after the cyclone (and was later reinforced by the TV miniseries Cyclone Tracy), though in the hundreds of interviews I read, only one man, Tom Pauling, actually claims to have seen a man dressed as a woman. Everyone else repeats variations, including a version, described as a ‘wild rumour’ by Peter Harvey, that the men dressed as women were Chinese not Greek. Whatever the race of the men it’s a rumour which suggests that women were the lucky ones, and that only the weakest of men thought to emulate them. The humiliation and mockery that’s embedded in such stories says something about the status not just of Greek men but of women in Darwin in 1974.

  There was, however, one particularly persistent story that does seem to have been more than a rumour: that the interstate police weren’t so much a solution as part of the problem. Most contentious of all were thirty-eight policemen who arrived from NSW, particularly a small group who were based in Kings Cross, who many described as heavy handed and inclined to violence. Tom Pauling:

  Some police from New South Wales arrived looking as though they were going into a battle zone in Vietnam. McLaren was the police commissioner up here at the time and he ordered that all interstate police be disarmed except to the extent of one sidearm. They had riot guns and almost bazookas and cannons—that’s what they looked like.

  McLaren, it should be mentioned here, has been described as one of the heroes of Cyclone Tracy. Bishop Ken Mason described him as ‘a quiet, gentle man…whose calm nature gave such a quiet, confident and consistent leadership’.

  Peter Talbot recalls that ‘up at the Travelodge there was a big party every night, booze party, all the coppers…we used to watch the Commonwealth police get around with that big rifle just like the wild west’. Before the cyclone, police had not carried guns in Darwin so this was a real shock. Lorna Fejo: ‘I guess, me, as an Aboriginal person, I was really terrified of the Commonwealth Police because they were walking around with guns on their hips, and it fright
ened me and my children.’

  The Kings Cross policemen were accused of looting and drunkenness by Tiger Brennan, who described incidents in which police ‘stood over several publicans for beer’. By 1 January Brennan was telling the press, ‘It’s time for the southern cops to go home. I have heard complaints about some of the southern police but I am not prepared to give details now.’ Another senior official described them as ‘a gang of cowboys’. NSW Deputy Commissioner Newman defended his force, while McLaren insisted that evidence of police looting was not found and that all complaints were investigated. Wilson: ‘As regards stealing, I’ve heard allegations, but I’ve never seen any evidence, and I’ve never heard of any proved things that some of the interstate police looted.’

  Off the record, though, several people told me that police looting absolutely occurred—and I didn’t have to look far for corroboration. I found the following notes in hand-written police journals in the Territory’s archives:

  Interstate police—obtained 80,000 cigarettes from S.C. Eyles this date—Yesterday 6 NSW police went to camera shops—Coles Casuarina bypassed C’wth police on duty and removed a number of camera & equipment. Same Crew travel about in private car. Armfuls of clothing have been seen carried into Travelodge by interstate police who openly boast of achievements.

  These accusations made it as far as a typed ‘complaints’ book but then appear to peter out.

  When Darwin was burned and looted in wake of the bombings of 1942 much of the destruction was caused not by the Japanese who made it to shore but by Australian and US soldiers. As journalist Mark Day wrote about those fraught days, ‘There was panic, looting, cowardice, desertion and a stampede south to get out of harm’s way.’ Darwin’s Chinese population back then were victimised by looters, as they have been throughout history. Because they weren’t Australian citizens they had less recourse to justice when attacked. Furthermore, as Charles See Kee has commented, those in Darwin, ‘were worse off than in any other parts of Australia because Darwin was isolated away from everywhere and nobody knew what was going on’. After 1956, changes to the law meant that many Chinese people in the Northern Territory became naturalised, but even then they were still banned from a range of sporting and social venues. Nor were they allowed to join the unions. Bill Wong remembers that they weren’t allowed to serve on a jury either, until well into the 1970s. It wasn’t until he mentioned this to Jock Nelson that the situation was quickly sorted out. (And the Chinese community were cranky at him because it was a task they didn’t particularly want to perform.)

  Alec Fong Lim lost his brother Arthur in Tracy, his aunt had both feet amputated and two other relatives were badly crushed by falling walls. His family owned the Vic Hotel in the city centre, and Lim’s Hotel in Rapid Creek, which was famous for its caged bar (‘rage in the cage’). Fong Lim went on to serve on the Cyclone Trust Fund Committee and became mayor of Darwin in 1984. That was all well in the future and quite unimaginable when his family first moved to Darwin, in 1938. At that time the Chinese numbered three hundred out of a population of two thousand. He remembers that the anglos lived in Smith Street, Mitchell Street and The Esplanade. China Town was in Cavenagh Street and Indigenous people lived in compounds and police paddocks. His father bought a shop next to the Star Theatre in what’s now the Smith Street Mall.

  Imagine the consternation amongst the Chinese community, whose businesses were exclusively in Cavenagh Street, when this country bumpkin bought a business in Smith Street—the white man’s domain!! ‘You will never succeed’, they said. ‘The whites will not trade with you and you must operate in Cavenagh Street.’

  Their shop was looted during a riot with soldiers in 1941. ‘I can still see them, as we all cowered in the back of the shop, ready to defend ourselves…The damages were all blamed on the soldiers, but I remember that a lot of civilians took the opportunity to ransack my beloved tobacconist shelves.’3

  The first person to be sentenced for looting after Cyclone Tracy was Guildin Kelly (newspapers and other records also called him Goldin and Goldie). He was arrested on Sunday 29 December and went to court the next day. Kelly was an Aboriginal man, and he had taken whisky and brandy worth fourteen dollars. But that was not all he was charged with and, in an ironic twist on the problem of policemen wearing civvies, Kelly, who was not a member of the police force, was wearing a police cap, apparently to trick a man into handing over his grog. This meant he was also charged with impersonating a police officer. Magistrate David McCann sentenced Kelly to nine months (though McCann and many others remember Kelly’s sentence as three to six months). McCann described the situation this way: ‘I was rather disappointed that the first person they’d managed to arrest and charge with stealing, which was in the area of looting, was an Aborigine…it would have been a little more representative of what was actually going on had somebody other than an Aborigine been charged.’ McCann’s record shows him being in sympathy with the fair treatment of Indigenous people in the Territory. He was certainly in favour of the shifts in the legal system that were occurring in response to Lionel Murphy’s and Crown Law Officer Clem O’Sullivan’s push for change. This makes his harsh sentencing puzzling. In this case, he argued, it was on the secondary charge that Kelly had to be made an example of. Kelly’s claim to be a police officer may have been malicious, but it was also a bit of a joke since there were no Indigenous members of the police force in the Northern Territory in 1974. For this reason Frank Thorogood questions the legitimacy of the ‘Aboriginal man impersonating a police office charge’. The then-president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Mr K. D. Buckley, described the sentence as ‘unduly harsh…the sentence seemed so severe it almost gave the appearance of discrimination’, though his further claims that Kelly had actually been carrying out valuable work cannot be sustained. Major-General Stretton felt so strongly that the severity of Kelly’s sentence was motivated by racism that he ran up Darwin’s courthouse steps to confront McCann. To onlookers it looked, for all the world, like a military intervention. The ensuing altercation made the front page of newspapers around the country on New Year’s Eve and became the stuff of history books, highlighting the tensions between the Commonwealth and the Territory as much as between black and white.

  McCann: ‘My immediate view was I wasn’t going to take orders from anybody, particularly orders relating in a courthouse situation… Stretton, I think he was in his full regalia, not in his best uniform but, you know, it was quite obviously a military presence…’ This is not quite true. The photo of Stretton charging up the steps that was run in the Northern Territory News is dramatic, but he’s certainly not wearing anything resembling full regalia. However Clem O’Sullivan also describes Stretton’s visit to the magistrate’s courts as an ‘invasion attack’. In hindsight, both sides have a point. Stretton that the racial politics of the Territory were problematic and McCann that Cyclone Tracy, like many disasters since, was becoming the excuse for what felt like a military, and federal, intervention.

  Stretton’s sprint up the courtroom steps on 30 December captured in a symbolic, albeit unintentional, fashion the deep rift between the Territory and the rest of Australia. His radio speeches also captured a certain disconnect between Canberra and Darwin, one that seems relevant here. It predates Tracy and is arguably present today. Thorogood said he had to ask Stretton:

  to be careful of on
e phrase. He kept talking about ‘the people back down in Australia’…I kept on: ‘No, no, down south, but not down in Australia’. But it never seemed to offend anybody so I guess it didn’t matter. I guess people in Darwin often did think that the rest of it was Australia anyway.

  Managing Indigenous people’s relationship to alcohol using the law continues to the present day as the contentious, and recently defunct, Banned Drinkers’ Register shows. Even the term long grasser is, according to Ted Egan, based on the fact that Indigenous people liked to drink outside. ‘The arrangement was that the supplier, quite often a taxi driver, purchased the liquor for them, and left the wine “In the long grass”.’4 A friend, self-described planning reform enthusiast and co-director of the National Live Music Office Dr Ianto Ware, has said to me that the Northern Territory’s Liquor Act has ‘an above average capacity to rule against people’s use of intoxicants’. While this isn’t directed just at Indigenous people, this approach is ‘unusual but also very, very old fashioned. Usually when it comes to alcohol consumption and the social contexts that surround it, we regulate the places people drink, without specifically targeting the drinker.’5

  Some people were upset about Guildin Kelly’s treatment for another reason: they felt the Greeks were the ones who should have been punished. Accusations of looting became a significant flashpoint for the racial tensions that existed in Darwin between Greek families—many of whom had been there since the 1920s—and the rest of the population.