Tess Lea, writing of our propensity for a shared amnesia, linked it to, among other things, what she describes as ‘the killing times of settlement’.19 That is, our reluctance to acknowledge the warfare and attempted genocide that underpin colonisation. She is right to remind us that forgetting is strategic and that it has, in this country, become a very bad habit. Certainly before we have come to grips with the first factor—that Australia is a sunburnt country, one of droughts and flooding rains, of cyclones and bushfires—a second factor is upon us.
Six of the hottest Australian summers on record have occurred in the last eleven years. The United Kingdom has had its five wettest years and seven warmest years since the year 2000. In 2013 Australia’s weather broke every record since records began. The summer of 2012–13 recorded the warmest September–March on record, the hottest summer on record, the hottest month on record and the hottest day on record. A record was set for the longest national-scale heatwave. It was also the hottest summer on record for Australian sea-surface temperatures, thus increasing the chances of a cyclone. All this in a year that was neither El Nino nor La Nina, the other oscillating weather pattern associated with extreme weather. Records are breaking so fast that no doubt several more will have shattered by the time this book is published. The week before I sent the final version of this manuscript to the publishers, several public figures raised their voices to call for the cutting of carbon emissions. Some of these could be said to be predictable, such as Nicholas Stern, the author of a 2006 report on the economics of climate change. Less predictable was the statement by US Secretary of State John Kerry that man-made climate change was ‘perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction’.20 Christine Lagarde, a conservative and the head of the International Monetary Fund, urged the Australian government not to abandon its role as ‘a pioneer’ in the debate on climate change.21
Justice Stretton may have said, ‘We have not lived long enough.’ But some of us have. The problem is we haven’t been listening.
When, during my research for this book, I was shown around Darwin by Robert Mills, I asked him what his thoughts were on climate change. ‘Is it true that the wet is coming later? And that when it hits the rain is heavier?’ Mills and I were spending the day together so he could give me a sense of what Darwin was like before white settlement, and since. We’d never met before so, in my ignorance, I figured the weather was as good a conversation starter as any. And besides, I was frustrated that I’d been to Darwin several times during the wet season, but it never seemed to rain. Mills sat in silence beside me. I barrelled on. ‘Do you think the climate is changing?’ After a while he turned and looked at me. ‘My people don’t really like to talk about the weather,’ he said. Some time later, I asked him to elaborate on his reluctance and he laughed and quoted Dylan: ‘You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.’
THE SHAPE MEMORY TAKES
I FELL in love with Darwin over the weeks and months I spent there, but, like many who have made this protestation in the past, my life was elsewhere. Whilst the city is bigger than it was back in 1974—the population is now over a hundred and thirty thousand—it continues to have a complex demographic and a population that floats around a small but stable core of people who are there for the long haul. In 2011 about thirty per cent of the population was Aboriginal and the number of overseas residents was as high as fifteen per cent. As well, long-standing Greek, Chinese and Filipino families remain. Chips Mackinolty writes: ‘The Territory is heading towards the non-Anglo demographic structure that so alarmed the good citizens of Palmerston in the 1880s.’ He goes on:
the only periods of population growth from interstate migration have been sharply aligned to developments in the Northern Territory economy: the ‘empire building’ following self-government in the early 1980s, the defence build-up of the mid-1990s, and government-led capital works projects between 2007–09. As those periods of economic growth tapered off, people left in their thousands.1
But now there are new projects underway. In 2011 Prime Minister Gillard signed a deal with President Obama to allow the stationing of up to 2500 US marines by 2017. The troops will be rotated on a six-monthly basis. As well, developments such as the Ichthys gas project continue to attract mining and gas workers, though they tend to be ‘fly-in-fly-out’ workers, put up in a purpose-built village just outside Darwin at Howard Springs.2 The split between those who consider Darwin home and those who just fly in for work and a good time seems wider than ever before. And with all those marines, pilots and miners it’s probably going to keep on feeling like a man’s town.
One of the central theses of Tess Lea’s book Darwin is that the city has never, in fact, stopped being a defence town. She cites the decision to maintain the airport and RAAF base’s position, slap bang in the middle of Darwin, as indicative of that. When Lea flew over the city not so long ago, what she saw was a town in danger of drowning, both in a literal sense, and a cultural one.
A thousand feet up and the tough, delicate topography of Darwin comes into view, a place of military zones, industrial sites and back-to-the-future incarceration compounds. There is the huge chunk of habitable land consumed by the airport; the mangroves as they hold the slow-drowning delta system in fragile check; the inlets of East and West arm, showing how close to inundation Darwin’s harbour has become.
On my final visit, in late 2013, I stayed in an elevated house in Jingili. It was the beginning of the build-up, so very humid. I slept at night with all the louvres open and the fans on. It was hard to sleep with orange-footed scrubfowl scuffing around all night and bats shrieking. The moon hung bright in the sky. The experience was both fabulous and exhausting, like sleeping in a tent. But that’s the thing about Darwin: nature is a raucous presence. It crowds in on you. Early most mornings I’d head for the Nightcliff pool, before the heat set in, and swim laps overlooking the Arafura Sea. Nights were spent outdoors, at pubs watching the sun set, and I found myself wondering if it did something to the brain (good? bad?) watching that golden red ball fall into the sea, night after glorious night. Suzanne Spunner’s phrase, ‘you stagger up from yet another sunset’ resonated. I saw fights on the streets, and in the parks between whites and black. Most tellingly, down at East Point under a sign that said ‘No Camping’, I saw a white man emerge from a camper van and squirt a group of long grassers with a hose while shouting at them that they weren’t allowed to be there. They laughed at him. I tried to imagine what it would have been like for those living out in the days, weeks and months after the cyclone and the one word that comes to mind is sweat. Some days you sweat so much it seems a miracle that the fifty per cent of us that’s meant to be water doesn’t end up in a puddle on the floor.
On one of my first trips to Darwin I’d caught the ferry to the Mandorah Hotel to have one of their famed counter teas (among other things, they refused to do chips). I’d sat under a faded striped umbrella looking past a Cyclone Tracy memorial made of twisted metal to the beach, then to Darwin across the harbour. That was when I met the publican, Nick Candilo. I told him what I was working on and he pointed to a navigation light that flashes all night every night and told me that he often looked at it to remind himself of his friend, the skipper of the Mandorah Queen. On my last trip the Mandorah pub closed its doors for the last time. Candilo said its position, right on the water, made the forty-six-
year-old building impossible to maintain. ‘I don’t think it’s repairable and it probably goes way back to the cyclone. The metal is rusting and it’s like an old ship at the end of its days.’3 It’s easy to be nostalgic for a place you barely know, but even I could see that Darwin was changing rapidly and Cyclone Tracy was a story from a long time ago. A story that people new to Darwin, living in reinforced (but untested) apartments felt didn’t affect them.
The morning I left I went for a long walk along Casuarina Beach at low tide. Sea water snaked in channels across the expansive sand like half a dozen glistening serpents. Daribah Nungalinya emerged as the tide dropped, squat and strong. With its sturdy fortress-like air it’s not hard to see why the rock formation was considered a custodian of the lands and the waters in the area.
Issues of memory were on my mind. In a coming-together of my personal and professional life, Darwin was the place that my father received treatment for dementia. The experience endeared me even more to the place because people treated Dad with such care and understanding. Some days I’d dash to and from the archives to where he was staying, or to take him to doctor’s appointments. What people remember, and what they don’t, took on an even greater significance. A friend who writes on such subjects told me that people with dementia often remember the quality of an experience even though they forget the detail. If something makes them sad they feel down without remembering why, and if it was a good experience the converse is true: they feel strangely uplifted. One night I took Dad to the sailing club in Fannie Bay for dinner so we could watch the sunset. I was convinced I’d spotted some crocs circling. Locals told me that couldn’t be right, before standing next to me, looking at the series of tiny tail fins moving through the water and conceding maybe I had a point. Swimming in the sea was never on the agenda for me up there, but even less so after that night. Dad ate some potatoes with his meal and they triggered a memory of a particular meal he had as a child. He was beaming. On other occasions, flickers of moments barely remembered made him flinch as if pained. The body, it seems, remembers longer than the mind. The things that happen to us, they stay with us. Even if they slip from our memory, they live on in our bodies.
When I met with Lord Mayor Katrina Fong Lim in those final few days, I asked her how Darwin planned to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the cyclone in late 2014. ‘It’s a tricky question,’ she acknowledged. ‘It’s certainly not something to celebrate. As a city we still don’t know what to do. We can’t have a party on Christmas Eve because everyone has their own plans. And if you have an event on another day, what are you celebrating?’
In the days and months after the cyclone people wanted to talk about it. A lot. Margaret Muirhead remembers that ‘most people who’d been through the cyclone needed to talk…because Jim and I were not traumatised by the cyclone, we were able to listen and every dinner, every night at dinner, the cyclone, the cyclone, the cyclone…’ In her interview with Richard Fidler in 2013, Wendy James recalled that this need to talk about the cyclone endlessly became almost debilitating, and finally, in an effort to move on, she instituted a system of fines at any dinner parties she held—if you mentioned the cyclone you were fined a bottle of wine or some beer. She also commented that she found the cyclone hard to talk about because it brings things back. Her breath shortens and goosebumps prickle along her skin. ‘After all these years,’ she said, ‘it never leaves.’
Nowadays, in contrast, says Fong Lim, survivors ‘don’t want to talk about it’. She compared this to the commemoration of the World War Two bombings in 2012, when the seventieth anniversary fell. Those who were still alive were keen to talk about what had happened, indeed, memories were flooding back. She believed the survivors of Tracy aren’t at that stage yet, despite the passing of forty years.
There is no doubt that the willingness to mark Cyclone Tracy has ebbed and flowed. My preferred memorial, the twisted iron in the Mandorah pub’s beer garden, had been there since soon after Tracy. In August 1976 the foundation was laid of a new Christ Church to replace that old stone building Bishop O’Loughlin was so worried about. His concern for history rather than the day was given form through light, air and space: it’s a beautiful church. The old stone porch was integrated into the back wall of a modern octagonal building, with massive arched windows. Inside is a Cyclone Tracy memorial window in hues of (mainly) purple and blue. Designed by artist George Chaloupka, it represents fishing nets and waves and is really quite something. The window was financed by a Gollin Kyokuyo Trust fund, and there is also a plaque to remember the seven men that company lost at sea. Almost ten years after the cyclone, another memorial was constructed using twisted girders from the home of Sergeant Kevin Maley, one of the first people flown out after Tracy. The girders had been bent by front-end loaders during the clean-up operations and a teacher from Casuarina High school had them set in concrete. The memorial was unveiled in June 1984. It’s an affecting monument but there have also been criticisms that it was a reconstruction (bent out of shape by human forces) rather than indicative of the power of the storm itself. As well, it was the result of one man’s initiative rather than the expression of a desire to commemorate victims led by any community organisation or form of government. Of course, despite government initiatives or lack thereof, individual survivors develop their own memorials. Bill Wilson and his wife continued their ritual of a scotch for Christmas breakfast for some twenty years.
People’s relationship to the cyclone changed over time. At the time of the tenth anniversary, historian Mickey Dewar noted that there were:
plenty of tangible reminders of the effects of the cyclone. Vacant lots, elevated houses with the upper storey gone and ubiquitous staircases that led to nowhere. Newcomers to Darwin were initiated in the stories of the cyclone in the same way that crocodile and box jellyfish stories are also told; accounts of hospital floors awash with blood, civilian looting, the hundreds of deaths that were concealed by the government. By ten years after the event, the historical event that was cyclone Tracy had become entrenched within the mythic folklore of Darwin.4
When Suzanne Spunner moved to Darwin those signs were still there: ‘housing pylons left over from Tracy. “Cyclone ballrooms” they call them—freestanding polished wooden floors. Over time the wood rots and disappears leaving the steel and concrete bearers to support supple vines, where once they held up whole families, little worlds aloft in the air.’
Nowadays the vacant lots are gone and Ray McHenry’s words from many years ago seem both more pertinent and increasingly remote. ‘The best message, I think, is the visual impact of what happened in Tracy…What I have learned, I think, is that the further you get away from a disastrous experience, the more difficult it is to try and keep people interested in planning and in preparedness…’
In 1994, on Tracy’s twentieth anniversary, Bernard Briec, like many Darwin residents, didn’t want to accept that a cyclone like Tracy could ever hit again. ‘I think one of the reasons that I don’t feel that scared is, I don’t think something like Tracy could happen again. I don’t know if that’s being complacent about it, or what, but I think Tracy was almost a one-off sort of event for Darwin.’
Francis Good asked him, ‘You can’t conceive that something like that could strike twice?’
‘I pray to God it never will, something that bad,’ Briec replied.
Mickey Dewar was responsibl
e for developing the twentieth anniversary commemoration that is now a permanent exhibition at the Northern Territory Gallery and Museum. Visitors to Darwin would know this exhibition, which was designed by Troppo, and includes a sound room that plays the recording made by Bishop Ted Collins in the early hours of Christmas Day 1974. A sign outside the room warns people who actually went through Cyclone Tracy that they may find it distressing to enter. When you step in it is dark except for occasional flashes. For me it was the strobing light representing lightning that was most agitating, but many can’t bear the overwhelming noise of metal scraping the ground or the loud moaning of wind. Little kids who followed me in looked seriously freaked out, and who can blame them? About 300,000 people a year visit the Cyclone Tracy Gallery, which is considered a model for memorials after disaster.
Back then, though, Dewar found the mounting of the memorial a difficult task. Despite the fact that a similar exhibition had been housed at Fannie Bay Gaol for some years there were complaints that such a thing was even being contemplated. ‘A commonly voiced fear concerning the commemorations,’ Dewar wrote, ‘was that by marking the anniversary we would be tempting fate and would bring another cyclone down upon the city.’
I think of Briec’s hope that there will never be another Tracy, of Robert Mills telling me: ‘My people don’t really like to talk about the weather.’ Of course when he said that, he meant the weather wasn’t a subject for casual conversation. It was absolutely, as the Gurirr Gurirr cycle and many other paintings tell us, a powerful basis for ceremony. A Tiwi songman who composed a song about Tracy felt that the twentieth anniversary would be an appropriate occasion to choreograph a dance using men and women from Bathurst Island. This was performed at the exhibition’s opening and I had the chance to listen to this rhythmic, haunting sequence in the National Film and Sound Archive.
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