Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  It wasn’t just the built environment that suffered in the wake of Cyclone Tracy, but the natural one. Robin Bullock remembers that after Tracy he was allocated a place at Union Terrace.

  It was like a desert. There was not a blade of grass, from Lee Point Road down to where Walagi [Sanderson] High School is now…The houses at the bottom used to have dingoes and buffalo wandering around there. I remember that. We were half-way down to there. But they scraped everything clean. It was red-orange dirt all the way from Lee Point Road down to Patterson Street. You could stand in your yard, backyard, and see right up both ends. Just not a blade of grass. A lot of coffee rock, so digging holes was hard. Any decent soil there had been scraped off.

  Keith Cole says something similar. ‘The tragedy of Tracy was also seen in the environment. Darwin had been a lush, tropical city with beautiful gardens and fine eucalypt stands and a wide variety of birds. Tracy smashed the lot.’

  Perhaps this is why, in the years after Tracy, gardens were tended with an enthusiasm the good folk of Darwin had not shown before. Something about living in a town stripped of all plant- and wildlife meant that people were keen to bring plants, birds and animals back into their lives. Green ants took four years to come back, and some people missed them so much they took nests from further inland and put them in their gardens. According to Margaret Muirhead, nurseries sprang up all over the place. ‘I remember one man say[ing], “unless you have a garden or went through Tracy, you really have nothing to contribute to the conversation”.’

  Botanical Gardens director George Brown drove ‘around Darwin streets issuing two plants to every home…“You’d see them hugging the bloody things, you know, and the kids’d come up and say ‘Can I have one too?’ ” ’10 It’s good to know that such a tree-loving man went onto become the lord mayor of Darwin, a position he held up until his sudden death in 2002. The Botanical Gardens are now named the George Brown Darwin Botanic Gardens.

  But despite talk of the damage that Tracy did to Darwin’s greenery, the deforestation of the town had begun long before. Ken Frey recalls battles in the decades before Tracy to get housing-estate engineers to leave some trees when they cleared; in some suburbs there was hardly any topsoil left, let alone a tree. Paula Dos Santos remembers the kind of place Darwin had been, in this description of Nightcliff in the forties and fifties:

  It was thick rainforest. Just across here in Clarke Crescent, there was about eight banyan trees there, and all these ferns and that. They were all bulldozed to build Housing Commission houses…when I first moved in here twenty-seven or twenty-eight years ago, we’d have trouble sleeping at night with the thousands of lorikeets, cockatiels, budgerigars that used to sleep in the trees around here. They’d keep us awake, chattering half the night.

  She also used to see crocs and buffalo at Rapid Creek, as well as black cockatoos and Major Mitchells, and frill-necked lizards. While Nightcliff would change in the years to come, it didn’t suffer the same level of depletion as the northern suburbs. Its trees offered some protection from Tracy; the mangroves that pushed up against Nightcliff’s shoreline also helped.

  The species that withstood the cyclone most effectively was the coastal Calophyllum, also known as beauty leaf. Unfortunately, because they are big and slow-growing, people didn’t tend to plant them. Naturally flexible trees survive much better than those that are brittle and prone to cracking, which is why palms also fared pretty well. However, while Carpentaria palms produced new leaves and flowered after Tracy, another type of palm common to the area, Livistona benthamii disappeared. Milkwood trees, indigenous to the area, did better than some vegetation because they shed their leaves in high wind, which means there is less pressure on the branches. The milkwood trees in front of Brown’s Mart Theatre in Smith Street were planted in the 1890s and have survived at least two cyclones and the bombing of Darwin. There is a milkwood tree on Foelsche Street that predates white settlement. Banyan trees also do okay because even if their crowns are damaged their roots tend to hold. Apparently after the cyclone a spontaneous noticeboard was installed near the Darwin City Council banyan. The banyan in State Square, over two hundred years old, used to be a ceremonial meeting point for the Larrakia. On several afternoons I went and sat under it after spending time in the library, enjoying the views across the park to the water and the respite from heat under the massive canopy. In recent years development has led to the destruction of many of Darwin’s remaining banyans.

  A report on ‘Cyclone damage to natural vegetation in the Darwin area after Cyclone Tracy’,11 carried out seven weeks after Tracy, found that the area of moderate to severe cyclone damage was about 465 square kilometres. Monsoon forests fared badly and were left even more susceptible to bushfire. (These micro-climates are the dinosaur relics of a time when fire was less common. The more recent interaction between cyclones and fires has been responsible for a great, if gradual, reduction in monsoonal forests. Increasing temperatures also make it unlikely these remnant rain forests will last many more decades.)

  That report recommended that areas near the coast should not be built up, in case of storm surges, and that trees that could withstand cyclones better should be planted, in part because they provided protection for buildings. These findings were ignored. George Brown recommended African mahoganies be planted after the cyclone because they’re fast growing, but he specified that the holes dug to plant the seedlings needed to be particularly deep. That was the kind of technical detail that, inevitably, got lost as people replanted their gardens in the years that followed Tracy. In 2011, Cyclone Yasi ripped African mahoganies out of the waterlogged earth by the dozens because of their shallow root structure. Once a tree is pulled up by the roots it becomes just another deadly piece of debris. In her play Dragged Kicking and Screaming to Paradise Suzanne Spunner wrote:

  After Cyclone Tracy, common native and exotic trees in the Darwin area were assessed in terms of stability—numbers of trees standing, leaning and fallen—and the mahoganies and tulips were downgraded to Category C ‘Unstable’, hence their dubious reputation. Also in the same category are evergreen frangipanis…and mangoes…12

  My interest in environmental matters led me to visit field naturalist Hip Strider, now over seventy. He lives on a platform shelter out at Humpty Doo. A keen observer of local conditions for some fifty years, he’s been keeping notes on a range of the major effects of practices such as grazing and burning off, as well as storms. Strider attends to the city, its outskirts and the edge of the cyclone damage zone. He has a long beard, wears old shorts and not much else, and his dog moves with him, constant as a shadow.

  We sat under a slow-moving but noisy fan (so noisy I couldn’t tape the interview). A couple of times, to illustrate a point, he got up to take a book from his shelves, only for silverfish to scatter as the book disintegrated in his hands. Conditions were harsh to say the least, but they also meant that Strider was alert to minor changes in wind speed and temperature and to all the shifts in the seasons. (A chronicler of most things, he took a photo of me sitting there in the heat and dust and I was, as I was most of the time I spent in Darwin, sweaty and red-faced, a fish out of water, a southerner come north.) He told me how to pick a tree that had survived the cyclone by looking for its scars.

  On his advice, I went to visit one not far from where he lived. O
lder than the rest of the trees, it towered above the other gums and had the tell-tale knots where limbs had been torn from the trunk. Strider knew of only half a dozen such gum trees. Given the ravages of cyclones, fires and development, older trees are increasingly rare. Trees that date back to the time before white settlement, or those that grew soon after, provide mute witness to several hundred years of history. They are memorials, of a sort. Yet there is no legislation to protect significant or historic trees in the Territory, and no plans to change that any time soon.

  THE SHOOTING OF THE DOGS

  KUNBARLANJNJA IN west Arnhem Land is Dog Dreaming country. An elder described his people’s relationships to the animals this way:

  We can only say this—dogs are our friends. The belief of the people here is that a dog is just like a child and no one can hit the dog. People used to give each other dogs. The pup and the child would grow up together. Puppies would be promised to each other. This created for both groups what you say in English, ‘family’.1

  Pets suffered alongside their owners during Tracy and, as with humans, there were stories of miraculous survival too. People describe the trauma of finding their beloved cats or dogs crushed under rubble, or the hilarity of their cockatoos surviving—but being stripped of feathers. The day after the cyclone, journalist Barbara James found her cat—alive—in the washing machine where it had taken refuge. Beth Harvey spent much of the cyclone worrying about her cockatoo and cat, both of whom had dashed out of her car at the height of the storm. She found them when she got back to her house, although the cat wasn’t in great shape, having been rolled in iron and jammed into a letterbox. It ‘was a very paranoid cat after that’.

  In general, animals that lived through the cyclone tended to be scared of the wind after that experience—as, indeed, their owners usually were. Bernard Briec remembers a family friend’s Afghan hound that couldn’t eat or drink for several days. ‘Dad said: “It’s not going to survive, better put it out of its misery,” so Dad took him round the back somewhere and killed him…I mean, the owners were a bit upset at it, at Dad putting the dog down. But it was the only thing he could do really, when I think back on it now.’

  As well as companion animals, countless farm and wild animals died. In the opening sequence of her book Darwin, Tess Lea speaks of her experiences of the cyclone and writes vividly of the stench of rotting marine animals ‘swept in by the stormy waters and crushed against rocks’. There were stories of devastated chook sheds and dozens of birds being found in a terrible state days after the cyclone. One of the compensation cases that followed Tracy, and dragged out until 1982, was a chicken farmer complaining that his birds had been put down. Colonel Thorogood tells the story of one man, a crocodile farmer, concerned for the lives of his reptiles: ‘And I told him that the quicker he could turn them into effing handbags the better—and that was the end of that call.’ I laughed when I first read that, then remembered that back then crocs had only been a protected species for three years, having been hunted close to extinction.

  There are haunting photos taken by Barbara James of dead livestock draped over the backs of utes, dead donkeys and, in one surreal shot, of camels and horses trotting through the ruins and rubble—escapees, it turns out, from a circus that was camped somewhere in town. In The Furious Days, Major-General Stretton wrote of a conversation he had with a garbo who cornered him at a press conference. ‘No bastard will help me,’ the garbo said. ‘Me truck’s broken down up the road with a load of stinkin’ animal corpses. No bastard will git it going.’ It’s not clear if the animals had died during the cyclone or after it.

  Birds stayed away from Darwin for close to a year, with the strange exception of thousands of kites. ‘Before Cyclone Tracy you’d spot maybe a dozen a dry season. Around 1500 turned up in May 1975 and no one really knows why. Might be because the trees were knocked down.’2 It was (kites excepted) a terrible absence. Donna Quong described the eeriness. ‘I mean, you don’t appreciate the noise of the wind through the leaves until you don’t have leaves. And you don’t appreciate the sound of birds until you don’t have birds.’ Tom Pauling was delighted when someone brought a canary in a cage to his house, one that ‘busily sung from time to time’. Cedric Patterson became very fond of the lorikeet that moved into his house, ‘a straggler’ that had lost its flock. It stayed with Patterson for quite a while, seeming to need the company.

  A gulf emerged between people who treated their pets as an extension of the family and those that came to fear them in this new, chaotic world. Certainly many an animal lover had been injured, even risked death, in an attempt to protect their animals. Richard Creswick was unusual only in that he was a cat lover rather than a dog man. ‘We had three cats…And they were our surrogate children so I went to some considerable lengths to protect them and ensure that they survived.’ It was a shock, then, for people to realise they weren’t allowed to bring their pets to the accommodation and evacuation centres that had sprung up in high schools, fire stations and police stations. Of course some ignored the rules and took their pets along. Ken Frey was one of many who were concerned about this. ‘People, although they’d been asked not to, brought their pets and wouldn’t let them go, and all this sort of thing.’ Senator Collins—who acknowledges that roaming dogs were a health risk—took quite a few dogs down to the CSIRO labs so they could be cared for there.

  Not only were pets not allowed at evacuation centres, they were difficult to evacuate. Once Thorogood realised that ‘a lot of people didn’t want to leave Darwin because they didn’t want to abandon their pets’, he changed the rules to allow them to take the animals on the aircraft when they were evacuated. This has led to many a story of people on already overloaded aircraft finding themselves with birds flying around the cabins and puppies stowed in baskets. This didn’t necessarily lead to a happy ending for either the pets or the owners. One pilot recalls a 747 with:

  kittens, puppies, goldfish, rabbits, guinea pigs, and whatever else you could hide. The crew…turned a blind eye, the customs and officials did not…most of these pets somehow disappeared. How anyone could take a beloved pet from a traumatised child is beyond me, but as you know there are always the officious arseholes in every exercise.3

  Another pilot got as many animals out as he could, flying them to safety. Les Liddell recalls seeing them out at Tennant Creek airport, row upon row of cats and dogs wearing labels and destination tags. ‘And it was the greatest thing—a humane thing—I’ve ever seen, to see all these animals sitting quietly there in this aircraft.’4 Dawn Lawrie did manage to get her puppy safely evacuated—it was flown out on the flight deck—and hid her female boxer. Pets, she reasoned, along with children, were important to rebuilding a society. Other people gave in to the inevitable and, before they evacuated, took their pets to the local police station to have them shot. Elizabeth Carroll was traumatised for years afterwards by the fact she put her cat down. ‘It was just so terrible to think that he had actually survived the cyclone, and he’d come home, and we had him, and we had to leave him…’

  One recent survey suggests that forty-nine per cent of people say they would not leave their home if they could not take their animals with them. The real numbers would probably be lower than that;5 however, as the number of disasters—cyclone, floods, fire and earthquakes—increases, the issue of what happens to the animals that are also affected does become more
pressing. World Society for the Protection of Animals Australia CEO Carmel Molloy has noted that ‘Lives were lost during the Victorian bushfires because people wouldn’t leave their premises as their animals weren’t being catered for at evacuation points.’6 In response to criticisms of the way these issues were handled on Black Saturday, the Victorian Emergency Animal Welfare Plan set out arrangements for emergency animal welfare management. It should also be noted that it’s estimated that more than a million animals—including livestock, wild animals and pets—died in the fire.

  When the people of Turkey Creek were evacuated from Warmun to Kununurra after the floods in March 2011, they couldn’t take their dogs. This was a source of real grief. One woman interviewed just before evacuation commented, ‘Some of us also leave our dogs. We’re going to leave man’s best friend. They never left us but we’re going to leave them.’ Wayne Mulga, also about to be evacuated, made a similar comment: ‘…our animals and that back there. No good you know. Sad.’7 During Hurricane Katrina many people refused to leave their home if they couldn’t take their animals with them. Around six hundred thousand pets are believed to have died or been left without shelter as a result of that event. As a result of the mismanagement of that disaster, the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act was passed by the House of Representatives in May 2006. This legislation requires that state and local authorities seeking funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency must take into account pet owners, household pets and service animals when drawing up evacuation plans.