Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  The source of this antagonism towards the Greeks is unclear, though Jack Haritos remembers they were always known as the ‘Greasy Greeks’.6 When I spoke to Greek people still living in Darwin they had little interest in dwelling on the racism they (or their parents) had been subjected to.

  There were complaints in police reports about Greek evacuees not sharing. Other accounts phrase it in terms of different cultural responses to disaster. They discuss the fact that those who came from a place where they could not expect government help were more focused on saving themselves. Spiro Papas, on trial for larceny and possessing stolen goods, explained it this way:

  I put my family in the school and I go round and try and find some food because we got the wrong idea, so where we could find the food—just stole some food to live, because the Greeks don’t believe in Salvation Army and Red Cross. We don’t have experience—in our country they’re poor and happen, something like this happen—you know—we don’t get help.

  Curly Nixon remembers,

  the NT News was the judge and jury of a mob of Greeks that [are] supposed to have got caught looting and taking stuff south. But when it got into the court later on—without any apologies—it was proven in course that all the stuff that they’d had in these trailers actually belonged to them, and had belonged to them for ten/twenty years—some of it. Some of it had only been just bought before Christmas, as presents and that…there were signs appearing: ‘Keep Australia Beautiful—Kill a Greek a day’…And when the poor bastards were proven innocent, there was no apologies or any headlines on the front page about how they were proven innocent, and a mistake was made—no way in the world.

  Peter Talbot also defends the Greeks’ reputation. ‘Another thing too, they reckon all the Greek was the biggest looter in Darwin, they wasn’t.’ Meanwhile his daughter, who worked in the court system producing summonses, told him that most of those arrested had been ‘Australians’. McLaren believes the Greek situation was exaggerated. ‘There was a group of Greeks who went to a shopping centre and they were going to help themselves to food and so forth, no doubt I suppose not knowing what the future held for them.’7 Bill Wilson again: ‘You shouldn’t tar the whole community with the actions of a few people, but if the police were winners, reputation-wise, out of the cyclone, the Greek community were the losers.’ Cedric Patterson, who was a supervising architect for the Commonwealth Department of Housing and Construction when Tracy struck, remembers that:

  These two Greek fellows—young chaps, very good workers—they’d finished the contract they were on and they were going south with their families. And the way it was relayed to me, was that they were stopped at a road block, accused of looting and stealing which they certainly had not. And one of the fellows was smashed in the mouth by one of the police, and finished up having his jaw completely shattered and had to come back and have it all wired.

  It’s possible Patterson’s story may be a variant of the arrest and assault of Theo Rigas. Rigas, a postal line worker and bricklayer who’d been arrested for larceny and possessing stolen property, was brought into the watch house at eight at night on Friday 27 December. He was one of seven men (including Spiro Papas) and two teenage boys who’d been questioned after their homes and cars in Rapid Creek were found to contain a large number of clothes, bolts of cloth, furnishings, cassette stereos and the like. The court transcripts quote Constable Ian Doube as saying: ‘I noticed that the vehicles in the yard, apart from the truck, were loaded with what appeared to be new goods in the way of lazy boy chairs [sic], great quantities of food, great quantities of clothing and linen. Some of the clothing and some of the linen was in new wrappers.’8 The men said that these were their own goods and certainly there are many stories of people being arrested for putting their own goods in the back of their car, or, as happened to Patterson, being harassed when they were trying to get back into their own homes. The Greek men were formally arrested and the children sent home—though not till the next morning. ‘Both prisoners fathers still in custody and they were therefore given permission to sleep in one of the cells.’

  On Saturday 28 December a legal aid solicitor came in to see all prisoners. At 11.30 am all thirteen prisoners were released for a court appearance, then returned just after midday. It was some time after 5 pm that ‘Sgt Blake advised that prisoner 4764 Rigas [was] complaining of a toothache.’ From that time on Rigas was described, variously, as suffering: ‘a toothache’, a ‘mouth injury’ then, twenty-four hours later, ‘facial injuries’. Different coloured pens in the watch house journal suggest that these descriptions were added retrospectively, once it became clear that Rigas’ injuries were so serious they could not be covered up. After a visit from the Greek consulate, police were ‘advised that prisoner 4764 Rigas has a mouth injury’. Rigas was eventually taken to hospital under prison officer escort, where he had to have his jaw wired together. On New Year’s Day he was out of hospital and taken to court to arrange bail, before being returned to hospital late in the afternoon.

  QC Ian Barker attempted to get a clear picture of what happened to Theo Rigas when a preliminary hearing was held on 2 January. The Supreme Court of the Northern Territory transcript in which Barker interviews Constable Griffith of NSW, who’d arrived in Darwin on 27 December 1974, reads:

  And if people present said they saw you punch Rigas on the jaw, you would say that they, perhaps were not telling the truth would you?

  —That’s correct Sir.

  I put it to you you did punch him on the jaw?

  —No Sir.

  I suppose you would go on denying that if I asked you for the rest of your life?

  —Yes Sir.

  It was found there was enough evidence for the defendants to stand trial, and the trial date was set for March. The Greek consulate put up the bond for each of the defendants and soon after two of the men, A. Magaulias and G. Fordaulis, were released with only a sixty dollar fine. By 27 March 1975 it was Rigas and Rigas alone who stood before Justice Muirhead, and pleaded guilty to two counts of receiving stolen goods. In his defence of Rigas, Barker argued that ‘it was hard for people like that to see their town virtually disappear overnight’. Muirhead responded:

  I will take into account, as Mr Barker has urged, that your behaviour was in some way an unfortunate unplanned reaction inspired by the destruction you had observed…as I have said previously the courts will not be slow to impose sentences which may serve as a warning and perhaps as a deterrent to those who have in the past been tempted to profit by or may yet be tempted to take advantage of unusually exposed premises and property.

  Rigas was imprisoned with hard labour for fifteen months. Constable Griffith was never charged. As for Guildin Kelly, he appealed his nine-month sentence without success.

  A few days after Selma fizzled out and before Tracy hit, Peter Dermoudy was quoted as saying that many houses in Darwin would not stand up to a big wind. He was right. There was a lot less material damage after the cyclone of 1937. While the storm surge after that cyclone was bad, so bad that everything turned green with algae afterwards, the buildings did okay. In general older buildings were more likely to be standing after Tracy, w
hile only five per cent of buildings built since the mid-fifties had survived. Grant Tambling’s house was one of the few modern houses that made it, but it was architect designed, and tucked behind a hill.

  It’s unsurprising that one of the first questions people asked after they staggered out of their houses and saw the completeness of the town’s destruction—a question they still ask some forty years later—was why the damage caused by Tracy was so extensive.

  So, while it’s been conjectured that the earthquake that hit a few days before Cyclone Tracy—about 400 kilometres out, in the Timor Sea—led to some structural damage, the real problem was the poor standards houses had been built to, particularly in the newer suburbs north of the city. Mayor Tiger Brennan:

  There have been millions spent on developing those bloody suburbs. Right. Now they were the ones that suffered most. The older buildings seemed to stand up, and if you look at the buildings there you’ll see that the housing commission buildings didn’t suffer as much as the blinking administration buildings…Most of them suffered because they blinking built the things on stilts that the whole top went, they landed on top of these blinking low-storey buildings.

  He’s right that housing commission buildings, with their double brick walls, did particularly well. ‘Those early days houses were built on like a tank, you know. They were very heavy timbers and things like that, and most of them lost their roofs, but they stayed actually on their foundations.’ Ken Frey, who joined the Department of Works and Housing in 1946, argued that, regardless of craftsmanship, age strengthens buildings. They settle and as they do so, dust solidifies their joints.

  A Larrakia woman I spoke to told me she felt that the racism Greeks endured after the cyclone was because they were often builders, and it was builders who were in the line of fire as the community cast around for blame. Frey, among others, suggested that poor Greek construction work was the reason that houses broke up. The line was that builders were using green wood, cutting it instead of bending it, not using enough nails, and generally engaging in shonky building practices. Government architect Cedric Patterson does not accept these assessments and talks about the Greeks and Italians as being the original builders of Darwin.

  If it was not for these Greeks and Italians, the cost of building in Darwin would have been a hell of a lot higher and not so satisfactory. They worked extremely hard and they deserve every respect and thanks from the people, for what they did in Darwin over their lifetimes.

  As Patterson points out, while many of the builders of Darwin’s newer northern suburbs were Greek, they’d also been the builders of the older houses which had survived the cyclone of 1937.

  What had changed was the rate of development. When Charles Gurd arrived in 1972 ‘there were houses being built by the hundreds all over the place. They looked pretty flimsy, and I remember my wife saying that if there was a cyclone all these houses would blow away.’ And it’s certainly true that once houses broke up, more debris flew around and that, in turn, damaged more houses. By 1974, Darwin was growing at the extraordinary rate of 13.5 per cent per annum. The rapid expansion meant that it was hard to get workers of a high standard, in the numbers needed. Nor were there enough building inspectors. Len Garton:

  We employed about four or five [of] what we considered competent building supervisors. And we used to meet each night and discuss, along with photos, the various jobs that they completed that day and put a price on what we estimated to be the cost for repairs and so on. And we all felt, along with myself, that many of these houses were very poorly constructed…We’ve seen many instances where the bond beam had lifted and the curtains had blown under the bond beam and the bond beam had come back down and jammed the curtain. Obviously the bond beam wasn’t anchored to the bottom of the wall, or the top of the wall.

  He was also concerned that galvanised iron roofs were not fixed properly to the rafters.

  In the course of cleaning up—you know, you were just wandering around and see there’s a stack of iron and you just go and look at it out of interest. And you find it’s got half a dozen nails in the bottom and half a dozen nails in the top and nothing in the centre, which to me was a bit frightening, particularly as you look at the number of nails in the iron as of today—every second flute’s nailed.

  A lot of the damage caused by the cyclone was caused by the way the roofs behaved—blowing off the top of houses, and ploughing into, or landing on, neighbours. And of course once a house lost its roof, it was much more likely to collapse.

  Cedric Patterson, on the other hand, suggests the buildings were of reasonable standard—they simply weren’t tough enough to stand up to a ‘freak’ like Cyclone Tracy. And he certainly didn’t think the fact that the houses lifted up, then dropped down again, indicated anything other than normal construction.

  As well as the rate at which houses went up, there was the issue of building codes. As a result of Cyclone Althea, which hit Townsville in 1971, James Cook University developed cyclone-proofing guidelines in 1973. However, George Redmond, director of construction for the Department of Works at the time of Tracy, has said those guidelines didn’t help much in Tracy because nobody ‘realised the vulnerability of the high-tensile steel roofing, and the holding down of the roof’.9

  Either way there was a limit to the difference a few more nails would have made. Ken Frey:

  Roofs before—metal roofs, galvanised iron—had been nailed. But even where they’d been screwed these failed, because tests done by manufacturers—and by universities—all relied on what they call static tests. In other words, they’d put a static load on the thing. But of course, in a cyclone it’s not static, you know, you’ve got flutter in your wind, you’ve got little vortices coming off, and there’s a whole lot of flapping going on. And even where the screws held, the sheet material of the roof would fatigue over the screw, and just split across it, and the whole roof then would peel off.

  After Cyclone Tracy new screws and washers were developed to better withstand horizontal pressures and the constant jigging they had to bear during a cyclone. I remember Neville Barwick’s evocative word, his description of the way in which buildings rattled and rattled until they simply ‘unzipped’.

  By 1974 houses were deliberately of a lighter construction. This was as much to do with modern aesthetics as changes in mass manufacturing. The CSIRO had developed a light timber code for houses, which was generally very successful but not good in areas where there could be a lot of wind. This extended to the furniture. During Tracy some people scrambled under standard-issue kitchen tables only to find they were too flimsy to provide adequate protection. According to Frey some of these issues, such as the CSIRO’s building codes, were especially problematic in Darwin because it was a territory, not a state, capital. This meant that designs were reviewed in offices in Canberra and Melbourne where, Frey claimed, changes would be made without an understanding of the implications for those who lived in Darwin.

  These days national planning codes still compel architects to reduce the number of glazed windows in buildings they design for the tropics so as to make them more energy efficient. This makes sense if you are designing a building that is to be heated or cooled with air conditioners, but not otherwise. It is plentiful ventilation that makes some tr
opical houses, particularly the early Burnett houses, such a joy to behold and inhabit. And, despite the lightness of their appearance, Burnett houses did better than many buildings during Tracy.

  Beni Burnett was the principal government architect in the Northern Territory in the late thirties and early forties. The child of Scottish missionaries, he grew up in Asia then, as a young architect, worked in China and Singapore, and you see the influence of Asian architecture in his work. His first projects were residential accommodation for the huge influx of public servants coming to Darwin as part of the defence build-up in the pre-war years. One of the last buildings Burnett designed in Darwin, in 1941, was a new post office but, because of the bombing of Darwin, that building was never completed. Burnett was evacuated to Alice Springs just before the air raids and never returned to Darwin; but the mark he’d made in his brief time there was permanent.

  His buildings were simple and maximised airflow. They stood on stilts, had high ceilings, banks of louvres above partial external walls and few internal walls. You only have to stand in one and you yearn for a plantation chair and a gin and tonic. When I spent time in Darwin one of my friends lived in a Burnett house, one of the last still standing. The owner of the house loves it but is not overly romantic on the subject. Louvres and mosquito netting don’t block the increasing noise of the city. There is little privacy. The boundary between outside and inside is blurred. However it is a cool and beautiful space to sit in, filled with the whirr of fans and the click of geckos. It’s these ambient qualities that make Darwin such a delight to be in, and, of course, so vulnerable when the weather turns.