Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  Thorogood also saw the brief tour as problematic.

  Did Mr Whitlam’s visit to Darwin, coming from Europe, staying for a day, going back to Europe again—did it achieve the aim? Well, I don’t know what his aim was, but I’m not sure that it contributed much at all. I think the government relationship that had worked, and was continuing to work, was this great relationship that had been forged between Stretton and Cairns.

  Whitlam was one of many cabinet ministers to visit Darwin between 26 and 28 December. Snedden flew in with Cairns at 2.45 pm on Boxing Day. Five ministers flew in on 27 December and attended a conference, chaired by Lionel Murphy, at which it was decided that the Australian government would pay return fares to Darwin for all evacuees. Air Commodore Hitchins attended that meeting. ‘I remember being very impressed with the alacrity with which Justice [sic] Murphy got that act together and declared the government’s intention to provide substantial aid to the people of Darwin.’

  Despite the positive results, it was a lot of elite personnel to manage for a city under such extreme strain, and Stretton wasn’t shy about saying so.

  Politicians and people seemed to think that we were there to act as their secretaries and I, at one stage of the game, had to ask Mr McClelland and a whole lot of them for about the fourth time to please refrain from interfering with what our operations’ staff were doing with limited facilities and possibly one telephone that was trying to serve twenty purposes.

  At one point Stretton asked Doug McClelland to leave the ro so he could take a call and McClelland stormed out, unimpressed.

  A series of photos of Stretton and Whitlam in Darwin shows two men in spectacular shirts, engaged in very intense conversation. I like to think that one of these photos captured the moment when Stretton remonstrated with Whitlam about the ministerial visits. Thorogood tells the story this way:

  General Stretton said: ‘Prime Minister, is there any way that you could keep these ministers out of my hair.’ I’m not sure whether they were the exact words he said, perhaps he said: ‘keep them out of Darwin’. But he certainly made the point that the Ministers were really not appreciated and were not contributing to the relief operation very much. Now Whitlam—because he’s a big fellow, and General Stretton’s a big fellow—so I think Whitlam being slightly bigger looked down, and he said…‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about General, I’ve got to work with the bastards all the time.’

  It’s easy to sympathise with Stretton’s frustration—can you imagine having to play host to minister after minister in the midst of such ruin and deprivation?—but these visits signalled to the people of Darwin that what had happened to them was being taken very seriously. That yes, the rest of Australia did know what had happened to them, and that they cared.

  It has been suggested to me that John Howard was the first Australian prime minister who really understood how to handle a disaster, as his exemplary performances after both the Port Arthur Massacre and the Bali bombings of 2002 testify. Certainly Whitlam did not get it right, and ten months after he was mocked for leaving the ruins of Darwin for those of Crete he was dismissed from office. However Fraser—while he concedes that Whitlam did not seem to understand how important it was that he stay in Australia rather than returning to Europe—believes Whitlam handled the disaster well enough. He certainly didn’t think that Cyclone Tracy contributed significantly to Whitlam’s failing popularity. The government was already in trouble, he argued (and the opinion polls suggested) and those ‘wounds were caused by recession, inflation and the oil shock’. If Fraser’s point is that disaster management was, and was seen as, essentially bipartisan, it is borne out by his own record. The new Fraser government continued with the program that had been put into place for Darwin in the final few months of Whitlam’s term.

  1975

  THE REASONS behind, and details of, Major-General Stretton’s abrupt departure from Darwin are fairly murky. There were some concerns in Canberra about his management of the situation—and his grumpiness towards various ministers and senior Canberra folk wasn’t helping. He certainly seemed to arouse unusual antagonism and jealousy in public servants in both Canberra and Darwin. The unions, in contrast, were supportive of him. The judgment of the man closest to him, Colonel Frank Thorogood, is that Stretton’s authority was accepted. ‘Mr McHenry chaired the first meeting, but I think already the force of Alan Stretton’s personality was starting to become apparent, and I think he was seen as the natural leader to whom they could turn.’

  However it is true that Stretton barely slept for a week after Tracy and by 30 December the strain was starting to show, as he himself acknowledged. ‘After making some notes and compiling some draft signals, I got to bed after 3 am, and with the aid of the sleeping pills prescribed by the good doctor, I went off into my first sound sleep for six days.’ He was woken at 7.30 am by the secretary of the Department of Defence who wanted to discuss Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s visit two days later. The conversation was terse, to say the least.

  It’s been suggested that Stretton became obsessed with the protocol surrounding Kerr’s arrival. While Colonel Thorogood doesn’t dispute the timing of the tension he gives the reason as precisely the opposite: he says that it was Canberra’s obsession with protocol that drove Stretton to distraction. But whatever the reason, and however unfairly, people were becoming nervous about the man. At eleven in the morning on New Year’s Eve Stretton made his charge up the courthouse steps to attack David McCann, an event the media made much of. Some time that afternoon Stretton did something that made him the butt of many a joke: he issued a directive that New Year’s Eve be ‘cancelled’. Air Commodore Hitchins remembers that Stretton:

  directed that all Service messes were to be closed and that there was to be no frivolity on Service establishments on the ground that he felt this would be unfair to the civil population…Fellows had been working pretty hard and by the time we got to New Year’s Eve, a lot of us, rightly or wrongly, had decided that it was time to relax a trifle.

  Hitchins says Stretton’s message got to him too late for him to act, though you’d be forgiven for thinking he simply ignored it. Ken Frey heard talk of ‘banning of New Year’s Eve’ but decided to throw a party at the sailing club anyway. The party ‘actually got a bit hysterical and people went a bit mad’. As Sydney Morning Herald reporters wrote of Stretton: ‘In trying to stop the celebrations he bore a marked resemblance to King Canute. The tide of liquor was irresistible. The order most commonly heard in Darwin on New Year’s Eve was “Roll out the barrel”.’1 Many of the town’s citizens saw out the year as they’d seen in the cyclone: pissed.

  There was concern expressed when Stretton shed tears during one of his regular radio broadcasts, and then again on television. Stretton, to his credit, argued that it was perfectly reasonable for a man in his position to become emotional given the amount of devastation and trauma he dealt with over those few days. It’s hard not to agree with him. However it is indicative of the extremity of what unfolded in Darwin that Stretton, a man who’d played VFL, fought in World War Two and the Korean War and served three tours of Vietnam, found the experience so shattering. Or was it something else? A friend pointed out the obvious—that the devastation of Darwin may have triggered memories of other wars, those he fought in
the forties, the fifties, the sixties. And here he was, in another decade, with yet more ruin all around.

  Channel 7 news footage aired around this time talks of the ‘combat fatigue’ that was descending on the population. A program of examining people, military staff and others, was put in place by Canberra to ensure that the right decisions were being made and that people weren’t becoming ‘too emotionally involved’. Stretton had been one of the first to volunteer for examination and was passed as fit to carry on. This didn’t stop a news reporter prompting one interviewee: ‘[Stretton] crack[ed] up at one stage, didn’t he?’ The man being interviewed paused. Then he said, ‘If you went to Darwin and didn’t shed a tear you really needed psychiatric care.’

  Colonel Thorogood’s account of his and Stretton’s six days in Darwin are perceptive and sometimes amusing, but they also give you a real insight into the antagonism that Major-General Stretton and the blow-ins from Canberra managed to generate in such a short period of time.

  Stretton always sat at the head of the table, and it was my wish and his too, that I sat next to him, because I’m the one that had to be able to write down the points of action and interest and whatever. And on a couple of occasions a rather pleasant little chap, a round little man, kept sitting in my chair, and I had to tell him, politely but firmly, to piss off. And he mostly did piss off, but a couple of times I’d come back and found he was there again, and this became a bit of a standing joke. It wasn’t until New Year’s Eve, when Alan Stretton and I sallied forth to Government House to say we were leaving, and to hand over to his Honour, the Administrator, that I found this gentleman in fact had been his Honour, the Administrator.

  The ‘little’ man Thorogood was referring to was Jock Nelson, a Labor politician who had been in public life since 1949. (The position of administrator—equivalent to the governor of a state—held symbolic power, but in a practical sense there was little he could do in a crisis like this.)

  New Year’s Eve heralded a symbolic end to the emergency. Hedley Beare remembers ‘sitting in our house…when the fleet came up the harbour. It was one of those—almost a transcendental moment. They were just grey silhouettes as they moved up the harbour in the early morning.’ This sense that the navy could save Darwin was one that Major-General Stretton cultivated. ‘I deliberately overplayed the importance of the arrival of the fleet in Darwin…I presented the arrival of the fleet as coinciding with the end of the emergency and the return to normal.’

  The navy’s main job was to help with the clean-up. They brought helicopters, which were useful for moving debris, and dozens of strong young men, who were set to work on the thankless task of cleaning rotting food from the fridges. Curly Nixon:

  They all should have got a medal—the whole lot of them should have got mentioned in dispatches if nothing else because the poor bastards were unacclimatised, they were just sent straight out of there into the street and after about three days, the town—you know, the fridges that they were cleaning out and the places they were cleaning up were just putrid. And those kids—they would spew, have a mouthful of beer—because I was carting beer to them—have a mouthful of beer and then did it again ’til they did another bad one. They’d have another spew and another half a stubby of beer and then do it again. But Jesus they worked, them poor bastards, they really worked.

  (And when they weren’t working, he wondered ‘what they expected the navy boys to do—run around and rape the girls that were left or something like that’?)

  Tess Lea reminds us that it wasn’t just the ‘navy boys’ who were sickened by this assault on the senses: ‘Survivors recall the smell of rotting things, dead flesh rotting in wet ground, food putrefying without electricity, sodden materials rotting, sewer pipes dribbling and everywhere the dank clotting of mildew…’

  Richard Creswick chose New Year’s Eve to track down his wife. She’d been in Bali on holidays during the cyclone and then been refused entry back into Darwin. She was waiting for him in Perth but it had taken her some time to establish he was still alive. He’d sent her several telegrams saying he was okay but she hadn’t received them. Creswick’s convoy was one of the last to leave Darwin during the evacuation. ‘We decided that we would drive down to Perth in convoy, three of us in three cars…And I loaded up into the ute what I considered salvageable and we left.’ They each took one of the cats. He, Eric (the friend he’d sat in the bath and sung ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to as the cyclone bore down) and another mate had been drinking for much of the afternoon and evening and it was eleven or so at night when they left. At the Thirteen Mile turnoff there is a ‘nasty’ set of curves. The ute was fully loaded and they had a head-on collision with another car but then ‘we sorted out our little drama and we continued on down the track’. By Katherine, tyres had blown and the cats were suffering heat stress. They got some tranquillisers for the cats at Katherine hospital then kept on driving into Western Australia.

  Every day was a big news day in Darwin at that time, and New Year’s Eve marked the return of the Northern Territory News. Some have commented that it was as if Tracy had blown away the (relatively) reasonable version of the paper—as personified by Jim Bowditch who was the editor from 1954–73—and replaced it with a crazier tabloid determined to throw its weight around. This is not to say that Bowditch had been scared of a stoush. Historian David Carment remembers that Bowditch, ‘was a great crusading editor. He took up particular causes. He was very interested in, for example, pushing for the Northern Territory to have greater powers of self-government.’2 He also intervened when three Malay pearl divers faced deportation, to the extent of actually breaking the law and hiding a man from the authorities.

  But, despite some form, after Tracy the paper leapt into the task of opposing the various government bodies that were vying for control over the town with more vigour than usual. Ben Eltham and Alex Burns, in their essay on disaster journalism, noted that newspapers tend to get bullish after disasters, glorifying the victims and getting stuck into decision makers. Frank Alcorta, a journalist at the Northern Territory News downplayed the extent to which the News did this. ‘The paper took it as one of its causes to be involved in the rebuilding of Darwin, and in the rebuilding of a new society there as we saw it.’3

  Suzanne Spunner’s riff on Northern Territory News headlines from the late eighties rang as true in the mid-seventies as it does today. ‘Minister Resigns/Feds Interfere/Croc Attack/Black Land Grab/Boom Around the Corner/ Wild Dog Attack/Travel Claims Rort/Journalist Attacked/Croc Sighted/Miners Clash/Mangrove Protest/Territory Tops/Sex Disease Survey/Railway Link Coming/Croc Caught/Cavalry Coming/Hotel Deals above Board/Feds Intervene/Boom Still Coming/ Sex Not the Issue.’ All I’d add to that is: tits. The paper has always had, and always will have, a sense of sheer cheek that can be redeeming.

  The Northern Territory News’s headline on 1 January was ‘Stretton Calls it Quits’. This was a fair summary of the situation. Stretton, who’d been due to leave after Sir John Kerr’s arrival on 2 January, left abruptly at 3 pm on New Year’s Day. He did so on the grounds that he did not want to make a fuss or risk large crowds and endless farewells at the airport, a concern that Stretton himself later acknowledged was ‘vain’. Before he left he made a final warm and jovial radio broadcast—‘Thank you all. God bless you all. Good luck to you… When I come back I want to make sure that bloody garbage is cle
aned up…otherwise I’ll be saying a few words to you people.’ Paternalistic, of course, but you can see why the general population warmed to him.

  There weren’t large crowds but Stretton was met at the airport by a journalist who asked him how it felt to hand back more power than any individual had held in the country since Governor Phillip. Slightly obscurely Stretton replied, ‘Son, when you study the Darwin disaster, you will find that you have had just as much power as I have.’ Nonetheless his public position remained consistent. He’d left, he wrote, because he had done all that had been required of him and it was time to leave the running of the place to locals.

  The water and power was back on. The streets were clear of debris, traffic was flowing freely, some shops were starting to open and the first unit of the first fleet had arrived…Darwin was again functioning as a city. It seemed unbelievable that all this had been achieved within six days and without any further loss of life. I realised that the crisis was over and that my task was complete.

  Stretton got to Melbourne around midnight, spent the night at Jim Cairns’s home, and returned to Canberra the next day.

  On the Queen’s Birthday 1975 Stretton would be presented with an Order of Australia for eminent services in duties during the days following Cyclone Tracy, but this is not to suggest that his battles were over. Indeed they escalated in 1976 when his book about the emergency, The Furious Days, was published. In that book Stretton was deeply critical both of particular individuals and of Darwin’s response to Tracy in general. Stretton accused the army—in contrast to the navy and the airforce—of lack of initiative after the cyclone and said that those at the barracks had looked after themselves rather than supporting the community. At the time, defence minister Jim Killen and prime minister Malcolm Fraser accused Stretton of ‘great impropriety’ for speaking out. When I spoke to Fraser he said he was sorry he’d chastised Stretton publicly and that he wished he’d taken the time to get to know him better. He no longer stood by his criticisms and believed Stretton had done a difficult job well. While aware of Stretton’s ability to rub people up the wrong way, Fraser noted somewhat wryly that these qualities are sometimes to a person’s credit.