Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

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  Captain Cook law—white law—on the other hand, took a while to settle in the Northern Territory. The area was governed by South Australia for its first fifty years but after that it became the responsibility of the Commonwealth, and when Tracy hit Darwin it had been under federal administration since 1911. Tom Pauling says, ‘It wasn’t until about 1975 that we saw party politics as such operating in the Northern Territory. In those days, just about everyone was independent although it was well known that Dick Ward was either a communist or socialist.’ The first fully elected Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory was created by an act of the Commonwealth Parliament in October 1974. That’s only a couple of months before Tracy. However the assembly had few significant powers and, according to Bill Wilson, even those powers were dismissed by Canberra. ‘The federal government hardly recognised them, and they saw this [Tracy] as an opportunity to flex their muscles.’ Wilson was not the only one to argue that Canberra bureaucrats used the cyclone to try and consolidate control over a town that was beginning to slip from their grasp. At the time of the disaster eighteen federal government ministers had special responsibilities in the Northern Territory.

  Harry Giese, like many of Darwin’s senior figures, believes the tensions after the cyclone further motivated the drive for self-government. There was a powerful sense that Territorians:

  should have the same rights and the same privileges, exercise the same powers and responsibilities, as any of the states. That feeling was very, very strong. I think Cyclone Tracy and its aftermath led to a strengthening of that attitude. Certainly, I think it brought forward some of the changes in government, in the powers and responsibilities of the Legislative Council, and of course, led to the ’78 setting up of a Northern Territory Legislative Assembly.

  Margaret Muirhead remembers 1978, and the declaration of self-government, as ‘the highest pinnacle’. She too believed that it was a ‘direct outcome’ of the cyclone.

  Paul Everingham, the Northern Territory’s first chief minister after self-government, said these moves had been underway long before Cyclone Tracy. Malcolm Fraser insists that greater self-determination would have happened regardless of the cyclone—‘the time had come’. He laid claim to being an advocate for statehood during the 1975 federal election campaign, when he announced that the Territory would be granted ‘statehood in five years’. He ‘also promised an immediate transfer of executive responsibilities to the Legislative Assembly if the coalition parties are elected on December 13’.

  When I spoke to him, Fraser said the Territory itself resisted full statehood when it was offered, perhaps out of concern that it would be financially disadvantaged. He made this particular point in response to my suggestion that the granting of statehood for the Territory could be seen as a way of defraying the massive rebuilding costs that the Commonwealth Government (estimated to be between eight hundred million and a billion dollars, when all was done and dusted) undertook after Tracy. While he acknowledged that was a lot of money, he argued that the rebuild generated significant economic activity, so it was wrong to simply see it as a drain. Either way, in 1977 an agreement was reached that self-government would be achieved, through a gradual transfer of responsibilities, by mid-1979.

  It was not just political will that was tempered by the cyclone. Residents’ personal passion for the place had also become more steely. Peter Dermoudy has said that the cyclone made him and others ‘commit themselves to the place or leave forever’.3 Maria Tumarkin writes that in the aftermath of the cyclone ‘people who had little consciousness of land rights and so on, all of a sudden discovered their own attachment to place’.4 Barbara James concurs:

  Individuals made a real choice to come back to Darwin. The city had been destroyed, most people had lost their homes, most of their belongings. So the choice to actually come and stay here or move here was a very deliberate one and a commitment and I think it has stabilised Darwin’s population to a large extent. It’s a lot less transient than it was. But as a nation, I also think it was really important for the country to feel that it was part of rebuilding Darwin.5

  James and others talk about the renewed heritage push that resulted from this increased engagement and ‘sees the “town hall ruins”, the crumbled remains of a former town hall that now stands in the heart of Darwin’s business district, as a reminder of the power and influence the residents’ groups came to yield’.6 There was also a greater valuing of the few Burnett bungalows left on Myilly Point, and a hard-fought battle saved the remaining bungalows (including the Giese house) in 1983.

  This change of heart set Darwin’s newer residents on a direct collision course with its oldest. The parallels between white and black experiences may seem obvious to us now, but Dawn Lawrie appeared unaware of them when she criticised the impact of the permit system, then the DRC, on Darwin’s residents, writing in her contribution to Giese’s DDWC report: ‘After your survival instinct and your need for love the third most basic thing is your territorial imperative, that’s your bit of land. We are not very far removed from our ancestors in caves.’

  The Larrakia have been fighting for their own land rights since being inspired by the walk-off at Wave Hill of 1966. In October 1972 they’d presented the ‘Larrakia Petition’ to Princess Margaret when she was visiting Darwin. The petition had more than a thousand signatures and was 3.3 metres long. ‘The British Settlers took our land,’ it stated. ‘Today we are REFUGEES. Refugees in the country of our ancestors.’ In the fight that broke out as they attempted to break through police barriers to get to the princess, the petition was torn. Bill Day eventually posted a copy of it to the Queen, who returned it to the Australian Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, in early 1973.7

  Malcolm Fraser believes that, given this momentum, and between Whitlam’s government and his own, land rights would have gone ahead cyclone or no. But despite Fraser’s reservations about reading too much into Tracy, there is no doubt that the cyclone was seen as a call to arms for Larrakia culture. In May 1978 Bunji was explicit on this point:

  The invaders came across the sea to Larrakia land (Port Darwin) in 1869. The invaders built a town on the Larrakia hunting grounds…The town of Darwin was destroyed on Christmas Day 1974, by a wild cyclone…Six months later Judge Ward recommended that Kulaluk and Goondal be returned to the Larrakia.8

  The Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976 was proclaimed in January 1977. The Northern Land Council and Central Land Council were created. In 1978 the Kulaluk Aboriginal land claims over forty-seven acres were officially recognised. Eight years after Tracy, Daribah Nungalinya was registered as sacred with the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority.9 There were seven hundred members of the urban community in 1974. Today the figure is about two thousand. This came about, in part, because definitions of what it means to be Larrakia were challenged.

  The Larrakia tribe has had to make many changes to survive. For example they never make a distinction between those who are initiated and those who are not. It is not even necessary to speak the language to be a Larrakia…It is not land rights to almost wipe out a tribe and then judge them by anthropology books.10

  However those anthropology books, and the laws that extend from them, still have a lot of power. In April 2006 a Larrakia native title claim over areas of me
tropolitan Darwin was rejected by the Federal Court. Justice Mansfield found:

  that the current laws and customs of the Larrakia people were not ‘traditional’…because a combination of historical circumstances interrupted and changed the laws and customs of the present day Larrakia people from those which existed at the time of sovereignty.11

  Ongoing tensions between Larrakia and non-Larrakia are also an issue. One respondent to the Haynes Report said, ‘There’s unrestrained development in our lands; there’s people misrepresenting themselves as Larrakia…I think we need another big one [cyclone] to wake a few people up.’

  Floods and cyclones are a reminder to stay connected to country, kin and spirit. As a senior Larrakia man Robert Mills put it to me, ‘Your people think of cyclones as bad things, but we don’t see it that way.’ Some non-Indigenous people shared this sense that the cyclone could bring good things. There were ways in which Tracy was a liberating experience for many, in which normal rules no longer applied. One white man now in his late fifties described to me the exhilaration of being a young man staying on, alone, after his family were evacuated. There was a kind of freedom and wildness to that experience, a rapid coming into manhood that he found exciting. Peter Dermoudy, who took shelter in the World War Two armament structures down on East Point, says of the cyclone: ‘It cleansed me.’ He wouldn’t have missed it for the world. After the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 and during the thousands of smaller quakes that followed, it was noted that there can be exhilaration in disaster. We’re reminded that we’re ‘temporary inhabitants of a volatile earth…change is the only constant’.12 We ask, ‘How can we mark these places in our mind before they disappear?’

  The stories we tell about ourselves and the manner of the telling are a way of singing ourselves into being. I think again of the Yolngu saying, ‘I make this place as I go.’ And it’s true, we are remaking this place: we are ravaging it, and we are paying the price.

  Climate change science has a long history though the urgency of the message is only a few decades old, as Tom Griffiths illustrates in his essay ‘Prosper or Perish’ when he describes the research of Swiss-born Professor Louis Agassiz.

  In the late 1830s Agassiz proposed not only that glaciers had moved rocks around and later retreated—hence explaining the puzzling presence of isolated boulders in Swiss valleys—but that whole countries had once been covered under miles of ice…His friend and mentor, Alexander von Humboldt, warned him against the ambition of his theory: ‘Your ice frightens me.’13

  And yes, we should be frightened. Climate change scientists have predicted in hundreds of reports over dozens of years that the number of extreme weather events is going to increase, and these events will become more severe. In Australia that means more flooding and cyclones up north, and more drought, extreme storms and bushfires down south. While no particular weather event can be laid neatly at the door of climate change—extreme weather has existed since the dawn of time—there is little doubt that the growing prevalence and severity of these weather events is in line with what scientists have predicted. In the last three decades the number of cyclones and hurricanes has remained constant, but the number of Category 4 and 5 cyclones has increased. We’ve ignored scientists’ findings on climate change for decades but we’ve been ignoring Indigenous knowledge about weather since the moment we set foot on this land. In 2011 Alexis Wright asked:

  Are we not curious to know something about the deeply rooted beliefs of this country and why they were kept in place over many thousands of years? Why are we not hearing about any of these stories and trying to understand what they might mean?

  She exhorted us to listen to ‘the ancient stories of this country—that knowledge that goes back thousands of years. This is where you will find the weather charts, the records about the climate and how Indigenous people learnt to survive on this continent.’14

  An increasing number of western scientific partnership projects documenting indigenous observations of environmental change have been initiated around the world.15 There is a range of traditional signs Indigenous people used to read these things, which differ slightly from area to area. Aboriginal elders interviewed at New Mapoon in Cape York know, for example, that a period of continuous hot and still conditions can be the prelude to monsoonal rains or a cyclone. If the Manahawk, a large black ocean-going bird, is seen in large numbers about the coast, there is a ‘big blow coming’ within two to three days. Crocodiles building their nests higher than usual above the high-tide mark and long stalks on the mango fruit indicate that a ‘big Wet’ is expected.16 However these same elders were concerned that their knowledge of seasonal weather patterns, passed on from generation to generation, is becoming less reliable for season predictions. They, too, see that Australian weather patterns are changing.

  In 1988 Len Garton, the man who first saw Tracy hanging from the sky like a black velvet curtain, said:

  I do feel some concern for the weather pattern that seems to have changed…I find that the dry seasons are not the dry seasons I used to recall where you had a blanket at night. We’ve never had a blanket at night for the last two or three or four years…I don’t know whether it’s the greenhouse effect or these alleged currents that are floating around creating problems. I know, in flying, the weather patterns are completely different. One time, going back five, six, perhaps seven years, I never used to mind flying in the wet season. You did see a weather front in front of you, a rainstorm, and it would be ten [or] fifteen miles wide and not very severe. And you could invariably see the tops at about twelve or fourteen thousand feet or something. But now, when you see them they’re a hundred and fifty, two hundred miles wide and they seem to go up out of sight in twenty, thirty—thousand feet. And very dense. I have flown in them a couple of times and frightened myself. The old ones you’d get a bit of buffeting, but nowadays there seems to [be] a lot of turmoil in them. I’ve never seen any records that substantiate this or otherwise but talking to private pilots like myself they all say: ‘Oh yes, it’s different, we won’t fly through a storm anymore.’

  There have been countless disasters since Cyclone Tracy. In 2005 it was estimated that tropical cyclones have caused an estimated 1.9 million deaths worldwide in the last two hundred years. In 2012 there were 552 disasters costing just under 158 billion dollars. The most expensive of these was Hurricane Sandy, which cost fifty billion dollars. The deadliest was Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines, which killed 1901 people.

  Closer to home one could cite Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009, or Queensland’s Big Wet of 2011, which led to three-quarters of the state being declared a disaster zone. After those floods Germaine Greer wrote in the Guardian:

  Six months ago the meteorologists thought it was worthwhile to warn people to ‘get ready for a wet, late winter and a soaked spring and summer’. So what did the people do? Nothing. They said, ‘She’ll be right, mate.’ She wasn’t.17

  Brisbane was built on a flood plain, as many cities are. The Indigenous people knew this and when Surveyor-General John Oxley entered the Brisbane River to found Moreton Bay in 1824, elders ‘told these white explorers of floods that submerged today’s West End’.18 Brisbane flooded severely in 1893 but few people with memories of that flood were alive in 1974, and not many from
1974 were in Brisbane in 2011 when the whole thing happened again. Matthew Condon: ‘We forget, especially in this restless place where history finds it hard to take root. And here, in the young city, we are at least two generations from 1974, and all of the city’s new inhabitants, squinting into tomorrow, just wouldn’t know about the floods of 1974.’

  The disasters of 1974—the Brisbane Floods, Cyclone Tracy—and those of 2011—Cyclone Yasi, more floods in Brisbane—were both born of the same weather pattern, La Nina. 2011’s La Nina was the strongest we’ve seen since 1917. You would have thought that the lessons of 1974 would have prepared people for 2011, but generations of knowledge and memory keep slipping away. At times the reluctance to tackle these issues head on is more wilful, as suggested by recent reports that Victoria’s power companies did not act on promises regarding the management of power lines after the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983. A Four Corners report in late 2013 pointed out that yes, it would cost 750 million dollars or more to put power lines underground in parts of southeastern Australia that are at high risk of fires. But the fires themselves? They’re costing us billions of dollars—and hundreds of lives. Similarly, doing nothing about climate change will cost the planet much more in economic terms than the cost of addressing it.

  In ‘Prosper or Perish’ Tom Griffiths writes:

  a place of escalating fatal bushfire, and with a small and embattled agricultural economy, Australians might have been expected to rush to sign Kyoto a decade ago…for two hundred years, the European colonisers of Australia have struggled to come to terms with the extreme climatic variability of the continent. Australia has a boom-and-bust ecology. Settlers have had to learn, slowly and reluctantly, that ‘drought’ is not aberrant but natural; they have struggled to understand seasonal and non-annual climatic variation; they have had to accept a wilful nature that they cannot control or change. They are still learning. And now, suddenly, Australians are confronted by long-term, one-way climatic change for which they, in part, are held responsible.