Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  The day Ella Stack was elected, the Sydney Morning Herald ran the story under the headline: ‘After Tracy—Ella gets a louder voice’. Her first task after her election, she told the paper, ‘would be to read up on the thousands of words that had been handled by the Darwin Reconstruction Commission’.5 She was referring to the DRC’s first report, which was delivered mid-year. That report recommended a balance between those who wanted the town rebuilt exactly as it had been, and those who wanted a thorough redesign. Some of the recommendations made real sense—anyone who has spent time in Darwin and experienced the way the airport carves the town in half would understand suggestions to resituate it. The airport was just one matter on which the city was recalcitrant.

  Overall, the response to the report was extremely negative. It was felt that planners overlooked people’s emotional investment in their own blocks of land.6 For example, the entire suburb of Coconut Grove and some of Fannie Bay were to become parklands. That was obviously difficult for residents of those suburbs to take. Some 1200 objections were made to this first plan.

  Discussions about whether rebuilding could take place within surge zones—and how those zones should be designated—became particularly fraught. Storm surges move from two to five metres above a normal tide and are often what kill people after a cyclone. It was the surge after Hurricane Katrina that caused such catastrophic damage, and that killed most of the eight thousand who died in Galveston in 1900.

  The DRC wanted to play it safe and plan for a worst-case scenario but there wasn’t much patience for long-term planning, particularly since the surge hadn’t been a real problem after Tracy. Cedric Patterson, always the pragmatist, pointed out that if you took surge zones seriously ‘it practically wipes out about a quarter of Darwin’. And, as is often the case, the surge zone included some of Darwin’s finest real estate—including Mayor Ella Stack’s house. Stack spoke for many Darwinites when she argued the surge line had not been high for some hundred years. Brave planners argued that there was no way of knowing what was to come. But when they eventually backed off it infuriated people even more. Spike Jones, a technician with the PMG who’d lived in Darwin for some twenty-four years, complained, ‘All that stuff about buffer zones and green belts and the surge line, then they back off anyway. What a waste of time!’7

  Ray McHenry felt strongly that the DRC should have stood its ground on this. ‘It’s only a matter of time—whether it’s five, fifty or a hundred years, there will be a cyclone in Darwin, which will wipe out the people in that surge area; it’s as plain as the nose on your face…’ He’s right. Global sea levels rose by about seventeen centimetres during the twentieth century, which certainly makes storm surges increasingly likely. But while McHenry agreed that issues like the surge zone and cyclone safety standards were relevant, he concurred with critics who believed the planning process was poorly handled and that ‘delayed decisions about rebuilding basic accommodation were a worry to us all’. These delays had obvious consequences: people simply gave up waiting for formal permission and those who could afford it started to build houses on their blocks that did not adhere to any particular standard.

  These days there are surge zones in place in Darwin and Lord Mayor Katrina Fong Lim insists that primary surge zones continue to be taken very seriously. Fong Lim has other concerns, though. She is worried that people still don’t understand what it takes to prepare themselves for a disaster, or realise that if the worst happens they will need to be able to look after themselves for at least three days. The sturdy apartments they now live in pose another risk—that people become complacent. Survival isn’t just about strong walls.

  However in the early days of 1975 strong walls seemed to be the most important thing of all. Kay Brown, whose daughter Geraldine died in the cyclone, remembers being ‘terrified about living in an elevated house again’. Her next house ‘was besser block and filled with concrete’. She wasn’t alone. After Tracy Darwin became a more boring-looking town, full of concrete bunkers that some called ‘Tracy trauma houses’. Peter Dermoudy ended up abandoning his architecture practice in frustration at the trend towards housing like this. Architect and academic David Bridgman has pointed out that, while Tracy caused a radical rethink of building codes, the resulting houses:

  were predominantly of masonry or precast concrete construction, with small cellular spaces and small windows…these buildings were much stronger and more able to resist cyclonic winds, however, the small, poorly ventilated, interiors were often uncomfortable in the tropical climate and air conditioning became a necessity for comfort.8

  Historian David Carment has said it took many Darwin residents less than a decade to realise that, while these houses might withstand a cyclone, they made life between cyclones ‘feel like hell’.9

  The extraordinary architecture firm Troppo responded to the prevalence of these bunkers by designing houses that were elevated, audacious, tropical—and safe. Their first houses were built in the early 1980s and you can see the influence of Burnett in their work. They have gone on to make a mark on both residential housing and public buildings in the decades since. If you wander through the back streets of Coconut Grove you can see them for yourself. They have an audacious quality—modern, on stilts, lots of louvres—that makes them stand out (if you can spy them behind their wild gardens, that is). Tragically two members of the Troppo practice, Greg McNamara and his wife Lena Yali, died in a car accident, alongside friend and landscape architect Kevin Taylor, while this book was being written. Shortly after their death Phil Harris wrote of the loss in the Australian as a blow for a form that was only beginning to express its ‘Australianness’.

  Big Bill Neidjie (‘Kakadu Man’) would say we are yet to hold a real ‘feeling’ for country, one that reverberates with a sense of ecological connection between all creatures, the earth and landscape, and the seasons that check our progress through life.

  The McNamaras were champions of such a connection.10

  It’s a connection that has been resisted by settlers since Darwin’s earliest days. Captain Bloomfield Douglas was sent as government resident to the place then called Palmerston shortly after South Australian surveyor George Goyder had finished his work. Ianto Ware has vividly described what followed next: ‘Douglas went up there, started building and then had a sort of Heart of Darkness experience; staff eaten by crocodiles, termites and ants ate everything, and when the dry season kicked in the heat drove everyone, particularly the resident, mad.’ The land selection process was corrupted and one man, William Henry Gray, snapped up most of the good land. He and his descendants refused to sell it, creating a lag in development that lasted right up until 1960. What sets Darwin apart is that while there is ‘the usual disparity between the environment and land’ the systems used to govern it are still ‘overtly disconnected’. He also comments that ‘looking through the laws it’s not surprising the place didn’t withstand a cyclone; it has a long history of having a legal system that doesn’t adequately ensure the people living there can withstand the environmental extremes they’re likely to be exposed to.’

  Dr Slim Bauer was the first director of the ANU’s North Australia Research Unit, which had been set up by Nugget Coombs to look into the problems of developing in the north. Keith Cole recalls sharing a meal with him not so long after Tracy, during which Bauer made a comment that resonates still. ‘The white man in Darwin has not come to grips with life in the tropic
s and the environment,’ he said. ‘The disaster of Tracy will, sometime in the future, be overtaken by further disaster.’

  Eighteen months after Cyclone Tracy there were forty-four thousand people in the city. This meant the numbers—if not the individuals themselves—were almost back to where they’d been before. Houses were being rebuilt according to new cyclone codes. In this way at least, Mayor Fong Lim can see the ways in which Tracy improved Darwin. ‘It’s a truly modern city.’ Vicki Harris, who left after the cyclone then returned to live in 1980, concurs.

  There was a lot more civic pride than what there had ever been. Darwin had always been a frontier town and it was like a forgotten backwater, really, back in the early seventies. But in 1980 it was almost as if the cyclone had done it a favour by blowing it off the map, and they had to get themselves reorganised and rebuild, and it had really blown out the cobwebs out of the place. And it had shaken the place out of its doldrums, too, I think. I mean, apart from the tragedy of human lives being lost, the fact was that Tracy really did this place a favour.

  I MAKE THIS PLACE AS I GO

  WHEN I began my research I was taken aback to find that one of the most striking images of the cyclone was not a photo but a painting, and that it had been painted not in Darwin, but a thousand kilometres southwest in the remote Kimberley community of Warmun.

  It was 1991 when Rover Thomas painted the iconic Cyclone Tracy, in which a black gulf sweeps across the canvas eradicating everything in its path. The effect is not unlike one of NASA’s images of a black hole collapsing in on itself, eating time and space and light.

  But Thomas had been painting the cyclone for almost twenty years by then. He was still a stockman when, in early 1975, he received a visitation from a Gija woman he called auntie. She’d died as a result of injuries sustained when her car crashed on a flooded Kimberley road in the rains that followed Tracy. She was alive when she was picked up by a medical plane but died in the air above Broome. In Thomas’s vision, the woman’s spirit travelled with him across the Kimberley and across five different language groups. Finally, she showed him the Rainbow Serpent destroying Darwin. Thomas was known for his extraordinary visions but, to quote Wally Caruana, the former curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Australia, it was the number of language groups this dreaming encountered, the breadth of the country it ‘sang’, that ‘really knocked people out’.

  The auntie’s spirit showed Thomas aspects of country and taught him the Gija names for things. She taught him a song and a dance for this journey and showed him designs to paint on boards to be carried on the shoulders of men as they performed. This vision became the basis for the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony, described as ‘synonymous with Rover Thomas and Cyclone Tracy’,1 which is still performed today. The Gurirr Gurirr, according to author Alexis Wright:

  demonstrates the continuing way Indigenous people have retained knowledge through a cultural sense of what the great ancestors in the environment are telling us. This is how the stories tie us to the land as guardians and caretakers, and the land to us as the most powerful source of law.2

  The first Gurirr Gurirr storyboards were painted by Paddy Jaminji, a senior artist related to the woman whose spirit had visited Thomas. Thomas needed Jaminji’s skills, as well as his relationship to the woman and her country, to provide the appropriate knowledge to create the song cycle. Thomas was born on the other side of the Great Sandy Desert at Yalda Soak, almost a thousand kilometres away. While Warmun was not his place of birth, it was his chosen home, and he was painting and singing his way into relationship. All Thomas’s work, including the Gurirr Gurirr paintings, are an expression of the social and cultural dislocation that defined Indigenous experience last century and this. We hear this in auntie’s voice as she passes over Mount Cockburn. That is when she cries out—according to the words of the song that accompanies the painting—‘I’m leaving my country.’ Further along in the cycle, she reaches Tablelands (represented by the distinctive silhouette of boab trees). There she says, ‘This is my country now.’

  To understand more about these paintings and the song cycle that they are a part of, I visited Kevin Kelly, who is both the curator of the Red Rock Art Gallery in Kununurra and the manager of Rover Thomas’s estate. The Gurirr Gurirr storyboards he showed me had been painted by Tiger Moore, who briefly inherited the Gurirr Gurirr cycle during the nineties. The board representing Cyclone Tracy depicted the Rainbow Serpent for the Kimberley area, Wungul (also spelt Wungurr). In Moore’s words: ‘This is the same snake that killed mother [auntie] and caused Tracy. That’s the song of that snake there now.’ Wungul is also the name of the cyclone. A series of boards followed, including one of a truck that the snake grabs and pulls down the embankment—the accident that caused auntie’s death.

  I also travelled to Canberra to see the original storyboards, those used in the mid-eighties. These had been painted, by Paddy Jaminji and Rover Thomas, on masonite. That way dancers could create a wobble-board effect when they held them aloft. The images were slightly sketchy, having been produced in the knowledge that they were not standalone works but would be supplemented by the performance of the ceremony. They were scuffed with use and wear. As with all the Gurirr Gurirr images, animals were also places, weather and events. A serpent was a cyclone. A crocodile was a mountain. A person was a kangaroo. Time operated differently.

  Thomas believed it was important the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony be performed for Europeans, and so it has been. His chronicling of contemporary events for both a black and a white audience continued after the Gurirr Gurirr series and included works on the Ruby Plains and Texas Downs massacres, as well as depictions of the impact on the landscape that occurred after the damming of the Ord River. No other artists have painted the recent history of northern Australia in such an ambitious fashion.

  After the Warmun floods and evacuation of 2011, the source of the water that devastated the community was the subject of much discussion. The insurance company initially attributed the damage to the rise of Turkey Creek, which meant no payout. To provide evidence that water had also washed down directly from the plains, Maggie Fletcher took the question to the people.

  ‘We had lots of conversations about the flood and where the water had come from,’ says Fletcher. There was real concern about why the bad weather had occurred, about what was being communicated, rather than a focus on what might have been lost. ‘This got people thinking and talking and after a while, people started to make paintings about the flood…These flood paintings are history in the making.’ But, of course, these are different kinds of history from the ones white society, and law, rests on.

  The ways in which Indigenous people maintain culture—through storytelling, dancing and painting—are poorly understood in the Australian mainstream. They are important for many reasons, not least to satisfy the laws requiring land rights claimants to show that ancestral customs and traditions have been maintained, that a link to the land has been retained and that the land has cultural significance. But it has not been easy to align these Indigenous forms of history with white law.

  When Tom Pauling moved to Darwin in 1970 he was one of many who recognised that the way in which white and black law were integrating was not working. Some people advocated for a system which did more to involve Indigenous people in the process of the courts, rather than simply subjecting them to a series of experiences that were both incomprehensible and, ultima
tely, often fatal. This led to several innovations, such as elders being present during court cases, both to offer advice and to learn more about the legal process, and the acknowledgment in some courts of customary Law. (Depressingly, despite many attempts over the last few decades to improve the situation it seems to be getting worse, not better, for Indigenous Territorians. Between 2008 and 2012 their rate of incarceration, already disproportionate, rose by 34 per cent. The Territory also has the highest rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody in the nation.)

  Storytelling incorporates contemporary events into the narrative of the Dreamtime, which is one word for the fabric of knowledge, history, culture and law that lies across everything. But the romantic and slightly fairytale connotations of the word Dreamtime are misleading. Culture, knowledge and law are tough. They are a set of intractable understandings and rules that have very real consequences in the day-to-day world. Detail is important. Law is a form of ritualised memory, and memory is knowledge: the kind of knowledge that can help a people survive. To know the Law is to have access to millennia of ecological information, and it informs the day-to-day decisions of elders. Memory of the land, the animals, the plants, the location of water holes: in all this there is power.

  The depth of these memories gives them a resonance that we’d call spiritual, and indeed they are. But they are also real and relevant to the here, the now. Time and time again Dreamtime stories have been shown to be based on what we white people would call historical ‘facts’—now proven through archaeological evidence. For Indigenous people culture is life but perhaps one of the things I am trying to convey, one of the reasons I have written this book, is that it’s not just life for Australia’s oldest inhabitants: it is for us newcomers, also.