Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

An arrest was made at 9.20 pm that night. The captain, Kandinis, reported trouble on the gangway. Two men were ordered to be off the ship by noon the next day. On 24 March jewellery was nicked. On 27 March police had to look for the mother of a baby that was in hospital. She wasn’t found. The search for Elly Jones continued and police were told that she might be found at the house of a man called Ralph. She was later located at a shopping centre and returned to her mother. That day a ‘death message’ also had to be delivered, in which a man was told his father had died. On 29 March there were reports of indecent assault. Police attended and spoke to a woman ‘Who stated unknown person…caught hold of the lower half of her two-piece swimmers and pulled them down over her bottom, she stopped the person and left to seek help.’ The man was later located and ‘claimed he had had a few beers and it was only done as a joke.’ The woman accepted the apology and didn’t press charges then changed her mind soon after saying ‘she had been made a laughing stock of the ship’. On the same night another man reported that two men had attempted to enter his daughter’s cabin and wouldn’t leave. The girl’s mother tried to get them to leave and they still wouldn’t go and only left once the father arrived. ‘Persons believed to be members of visiting football teams. Unable to locate.’ On 9 April a man became upset about the noise outside his cabin and confronted three Greek teenage girls. He ‘obtained no satisfaction’. The brother of one of the girls approached the man, who punched him in the jaw. No charges were laid. In what is, perhaps, my favourite entry, a complaint was received on 16 April ‘from a hippy type “gentleman” that Greeks fishing off wharf had their radio cassette up too loud…advised him that it would be better to retire to his cabin where he wouldn’t be able to hear the noise’.

  At this point the suicide attempts began. On 15 April a man took an overdose of tablets—Thiorodazine—and an ambulance had to be called. His girlfriend confirmed that he was depressed ‘and they had been having domestic problems’. On 24 April there were reports that a woman had overdosed or was about to. Her main complaint was that her children couldn’t sleep at night because of the noise aboard the ship. She was threatening to kill herself with a mixture of Valium, sleeping pills and Diagesics. When her husband was contacted he told them she’d had a breakdown. On 29 April another possible overdose was reported—this time it was a young woman.

  On 26 April a woman who was four months pregnant collapsed on the dance floor. On 27 April a statement was given regarding a man who was drunk and disorderly, describing the man as ‘pissed… Abusive and aggressive…He hates coppers. I don’t blame the police for locking him up. He was in the wrong.’ On 8 May a woman reported a man in her cabin ‘who has her key’. On 9 June a man was spoken to about ‘hitting and intimidating’ an eight-year-old boy who was not his son. On Monday 9 June there was a disturbance when a man who was estranged from his wife became jealous of her alleged boyfriend. He also thought his daughter was having a sexual relationship with a crew member.

  And on it goes, relentlessly, until the Patris left Darwin Harbour on 14 November 1975.

  Thirteen of those on the Patris were refugees from East Timor, which was in the throes of the civil war that preceded the Indonesian invasion. Eric Rolls has described the following scene. After the invasion itself, in early December 1975:

  hundreds of frightened women and children got to Darwin in the clothes they stood up in, by whatever ships they could catch…The women, carrying babies and paper bags, came ashore to the shouts of wharfies telling them to go home. The atmosphere in Darwin was harsh; it was rebuilding…8

  This contradicts many people’s view that Darwin was, and continues to be, very passionate about the East Timorese cause and that many Darwinites were extremely welcoming. Either way, the Timorese had left a nation in ruins, to find a town not doing much better.

  Recovery is a complex process and it takes a long time. The nature of the disaster will change communities forever: members are lost, services are disrupted, landscapes are changed, people’s sense of safety is compromised. Even resilient communities can falter if the recovery period takes years. What happens to people is something akin to war weariness, a condition people in other circumstances have nicknamed ‘bushfire brain’. Chemically speaking it’s been described as the moment when people run ‘out of adrenaline’ and move ‘into cortisole’.9 This is one of the reasons it’s said that the third year after a disaster is often the hardest. This is the case whether you’ve stayed in the place where disaster struck or whether you’ve attempted to get on with your life elsewhere.

  But three years? Even getting that far looked like a long haul at the end of 1975.

  The PM and the major-general:

  Whitlam and Stretton in conversation

  JOHN HART / FAIRFAX

  Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is

  taken on a tour of the wreckage

  NEWS LTD / NEWSPIX

  Police, armed against stray dogs, check houses in the Casuarina area

  RICK STEVENS / FAIRFAX

  Dead horse in a trailer being taken out of town along McMillans Road

  NORTHERN TERRITORY ARCHIVES SERVICE, BARBARA JAMES, NTRS 1683

  Clockwise from top left: Dawn Lawrie, 1977;

  Hedley Beare (date unknown); Ray McHenry (date unknown);

  Tiger Brennan shares the mayoral regalia with Ella Stack, 1975

  ALL PHOTOS THIS PAGE FROM THE NORTHERN TERRITORY LIBRARY

  I WASN’T WORRYING ABOUT BLOODY HISTORY.

  I WAS WORRYING ABOUT THE DAY

  MONEY, AFTER those cashless days and weeks following Tracy, was beginning to dominate people’s lives again: who got it, who deserved it, how it was spent.

  In an address to the Melbourne Press Club on 9 November 1976, Major-General Stretton waxed sentimental for a moment: ‘For a few glorious days the nation came together. We became one country with one purpose. If only we could recapture that unity, keep that spirit of Darwin going at all times.’ Then he went on to express his concern about the ways in which millions of dollars in relief funds were being spent and call for a Royal Commission into the Cyclone Tracy Relief Trust Fund. ‘I do not question the honesty of the trustees. However I do question the priorities.’ Stretton felt that money should be spent on people, not on rebuilding churches, schools, cultural centres and the like. His point was that almost half of those evacuated never returned, ‘So the cultural centre is not going to do them much good, is it?’

  These days rebuilding such infrastructure would be seen as unequivocally essential to rebuilding a community after a disaster. But Stretton was not alone in his view and Ray McHenry expressed similar concerns about the uses the funds were put to. It’s no surprise. These questions arise again and again after all disasters: the misallocation of funding, changes in land use that favour the rich, and the politics of exclusion of the poor and ordinary people from policy-making and decision-making.

  The Cyclone Tracy Relief Trust Fund had been established at the beginning of 1975, when the federal cabinet decided that donations and offers of overseas assistance from the South Pacific, Europe and Africa needed to be formalised. As well, there were nationwide appeals encouraging Australians to donate money and goods. Minister Rex Patterson was the chairman of the fund, and its members included Jock N
elson, Mayor Tiger Brennan, Paul Everingham, Ella Stack and Alec Fong Lim. They received and distributed more than eight million dollars before being formally wound up in October 1976. As well as paying for various aspects of the rebuild, the fund gave out benefits that were allotted with blunt directness: women who had lost their husbands got a payout of ten thousand dollars, whereas a lost wife was only worth five thousand.

  Regardless of the crassness of this kind of assessment, money was obviously extremely important at this time. While Les Garton remembers that some people tried to rip off the insurance companies after Tracy, in the great scheme of things this was not nearly as big a problem for the community as the opposite situation: people being woefully underinsured or not insured at all. In early 1975 the Department of Repatriation and Compensation surveyed 10,419 persons and 1830 businesses to try to assess damage. It was estimated that losses amounted to 187 million dollars, and of this amount 89 million was uninsured. Julia Church remembers that her parents weren’t insured and the ramifications of that were enormous for them—as they were for many older people. Jim Bowditch, who was in his fifties, lost everything. Ken Frey, who had been about to retire, is just one of thousands who acknowledges ‘financially of course, it was a bit of a disaster’. He, like many others who’d survived the cyclone, would struggle to get another mortgage. Certainly the cost—financial, emotional and physical—was simply too much for some people.

  The reasons people weren’t properly insured were various: lack of money, lack of care, lack of organisation, and a general reluctance to accept that a disaster might affect them directly. Not much has changed on that front. After Black Saturday insurance claims totalled more than a billion dollars but it was estimated that as many as thirteen per cent of the residential properties destroyed were not insured at all. And of course, as insurance premiums go up in response to the increasing number of disasters, it’s likely that the percentage of people that remain uninsured will increase. Certainly the magnitude of claims that arose from the Brisbane floods in early ’74 followed by Tracy at the end of that year led some insurance companies to ‘withdraw from high-risk areas’. The insurance payout for Tracy was, at the time, the largest in Australian history at 200 million AUD (equivalent to 1.25 billion dollars today). Following Cyclone Tracy, the Insurance Council of Australia established the Insurance Emergency Service which developed into today’s Insurance Disaster Response Organisation. More than fifty per cent of weather-related insurance payments in the last thirty years have been for tropical cyclone damage.1

  On 31 May the federal government passed the Darwin Cyclone Damage Compensation Act 1975 which was designed to compensate people for loss and damage on property up to fifty per cent of its value at the time of the cyclone, with an upper limit of twenty-five thousand dollars for houses and business premises and five thousand for personal belongings. Claims had to be lodged by 30 September 1975. More than twelve thousand household claims and almost six hundred business claims were processed. Just under twenty-six million dollars was paid in compensation and most claims were settled by June 1976.

  The length of time it takes insurers to settle, or for compensation to come through, is always contentious. Two years after the series of earthquakes in Christchurch, most notably the big one of 22 February 2011, commentators were describing the insurance problems people were facing as ‘a second earthquake’. Ninety per cent of people affected by the earthquake had made claims but two years later a massive sixty-nine per cent of them were waiting for a resolution. Some simply gave up and moved on, with no idea of whether they would ever receive any compensation.

  On 31 December 1974 the federal government set up an interim Darwin Reconstruction Commission (DRC). According to the NT News, ‘The commission will be asked to decide on the best use of Darwin’s lands and remaining buildings. It will also be called on to make recommendations about the type of building that should go up in place of those torn down by Cyclone Tracy.’ People assumed the worst when they read this, and by 3 January there were rumours that the Northern Territory’s administrative capital was to be moved to Alice Springs. Such paranoia wasn’t totally unreasonable—there were conversations taking place questioning whether Darwin should be rebuilt at all. Similar debate flares up after many a natural disaster. But as Dr Greg Holland, a meteorologist, a survivor of Cyclone Tracy and now an atmospheric scientist in the US, said on Lateline soon after the Black Saturday bushfires: ‘Let’s be honest: it’s very hard to build in any area that’s not dangerous to some extent.’2 It is certainly unrealistic to expect that we won’t build in areas where extreme weather occurs, in part because the population is growing exponentially, and in part because there is more extreme weather occurring all over the planet. More people live on flood plains and in surge zones, more people live in caravan parks in Tornado Alley, more people live in semi-rural areas bound to be affected by bushfire.

  The DRC proper got going on 28 February 1975 when the Darwin Reconstruction Act was passed. It comprised eight members: Anthony Powell (chairman), Alan O’Brien (deputy chairman), Goff Letts, Ella Stack, Carl Allridge, Alan Reiher, P. L. Till and Martyn Finge. Their brief was to plan, coordinate and undertake the rebuild, with the CSIRO being called upon to advise new standards. Between 1975 and 1978 the DRC coordinated many construction projects including the building or repair of more than 2500 homes.

  First up, though, they worked with the Cities Commission, a small Commonwealth agency established in 1973, to produce a town plan. There were many who felt, like Harry Giese, that the Cities Commission had made a mess of Canberra and now they planned to make a mess of Darwin. And it’s true that when the DRC was established Darwin was compared to ‘Canberra, Albury/Wodonga and other areas selected by the Whitlam government for “regional growth”.’3 Ten years later Suzanne Spunner would write that she ‘was not prepared for the northern suburbs, flattened by the cyclone and rebuilt with miles and miles of kerbing, landscaped in wider and wider circles, courts, crescents and cul-de-sacs. Canberra with palms.’ There was a strong feeling that people couldn’t just come in from the outside, without understanding the psyche of Darwin, and tell them how to live. And there are clear echoes between Darwin residents’ objections to having their land and autonomy taken from them, and the objections made by the area’s original inhabitants, the Larrakia, to the same process.

  Not long after the cyclone Jack Meaney was on his way to the council offices to see what needed doing (he ended up working as a cook at an evacuation centre), when he bumped into Bishop O’Loughlin. At the time Meaney was bemused by O’Loughlin’s distress about Christ Church, which had been destroyed within an hour of midnight mass. The church had been built in 1917 and, ‘He was really concerned about that old building, being a part of the history I suppose. I wasn’t worrying about bloody history. I was worrying about the day.’

  This fairly succinctly sums up the tensions in Darwin during the months and years of the rebuild. The cyclone made some residents more mindful of the importance of the city’s heritage, while others just wanted to get their lives back on track as quickly as possible. So which side were those responsible for the rebuild on? Moving forward as quickly as possible, or hanging on to the bits of Darwin’s history that could be salvaged from the wreckage? More contentiously still, should the rebuild take into account the possibility of future environmental traumas: more cyclones, higher storm surges?

  Neville Barwick, who led the Da
rwin Reconstruction Study Group, arrived in town a few days after the cyclone and, among other work, began his survey of historical ruins with a view to assessing whether they could be saved. This was important work. But Meaney was right that in the immediate aftermath of Tracy, just surviving was as much as most people were up for.

  At this time, when Darwin was often described as a giant rubbish tip, the fact there was no recycling of building materials became a cause of contention. Ken Frey remembers that so much timber was going to the tip he was worried there would be a termite problem, but he also believed it wasn’t realistic to reuse the material under those conditions—it was too hard for the front-end loaders to clear the wreckage if you were also trying to sort as you went. Government architect Cedric Patterson concurs. ‘There was a lot of good materials dumped but where do you stop?’ The desire to do things quickly became, as so often before, the decisive factor. The Indigenous publication Bunji stated: ‘The settlers are rushing about like ants, rebuilding. They are filling our land with their rotting garbage.’

  Hip Strider’s heart was broken by the authorities’ refusal to recycle debris as building material. All these ‘you-beaut building materials that would have been perfectly satisfactory to house the population were taken down to the dump’.4 Bernard Briec and his family, who had planned to stay in Adelaide after their evacuation, missed Darwin so much they were back there by April. He remembers hanging out at Lee Point dump, which became a favourite scavenging spot—so at least the old building materials got to be reused by some.