Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  Other events held back in 1994 were more lighthearted, and sometimes crass. They included cyclone-themed cocktail nights at the Travelodge in 1994 (Menu, with original spelling: Rock Your Socks Off: ⅓ rockmelen, 60 ml coconut liquer, 30 ml rum, 4 strawberries, 100 ml pineapple juice. Christmas Breeze: 2 nips Gin, 1 nip strawberry liquer, 1 nip Pineapple Liquer, ½ cup cream, 1 cup pineapple juice, chopped strawberries, passionfruit juice.) I can’t help thinking that simply chucking a couple of Holdens into the Travelodge pool so it looked the same as it did on Christmas Day 1974 would have made a stronger point.

  In the Northern Territory News twentieth anniversary feature Sherylee Armstrong, whose mother died in the cyclone, was asked to given her account of that night. She replied, ‘I think it’s cruel, really I do. It digs up a lot of feelings a lot of people keep hidden…I don’t know anywhere in the world where they celebrate a bloody tragedy.’ It is significant that the paper reported her response because they deliberated long and hard about how best to approach the entire subject. The choices they made were good ones, I thought, and the result is some thirty pages of powerful journalism.

  And while the reluctance of some to speak must be respected, we also need to acknowledge that people do remember tragedy, all the time, and all around the world. Ten thousand people attended the twenty-first anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, in which close to a hundred people were crushed to death while watching a soccer match at Hillsborough Stadium in 1989. The entire site of the former Twin Towers is now a memorial to 9/11 and there are annual memorial events attended by thousands of people. After Black Saturday, hundreds of blacksmiths donated their time to forge a memorial tree out of copper and stainless steel, in which messages are carved onto the metal gum leaves, such as, ‘In memory of the children who were denied the pleasure of gazing at this tree.’ Many different people sponsored a leaf, dedicating it to communities, classmates, family and friends. The tree was installed in Strathewen in March 2014.

  Katrina Fong Lim believes that people don’t want governments organising their memorials for them and she may be right. The most successful memorials are those that grow out of a community groundswell, one where there is less chance that the event could be hijacked for any particular political purpose.

  When I spoke to Bill Wilson in Beechworth he was concerned that the people he called the elders of Darwin—by which he meant those who’d been through Tracy—were dying. Jim Bowditch has died. Mayor Tiger Brennan died in 1979. Charles Gurd died in 1999. Ray McHenry died in 2000, as did Gwen Cairns. Jim Cairns died in 2003. George Brown died in 2002. Barbara James died of cancer in 2003. Senator Bob Collins was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to the Northern Territory and Indigenous rights in 2004 but he died of a deliberate overdose of prescription drugs three days before he was scheduled to face trial for multiple charges of child sex abuse in 2007. Hedley Beare received an Order of Australia, after an exemplary career as an educator, in 2009. He died a year later at the age of seventy-seven. Major-General Stretton died at the age of ninety in late 2012. Colonel Frank Thorogood continued to make a major contribution and ended up as the executive director of Red Cross in Victoria. He was active during the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983. He died only recently, on 27 December 2013. Gough Whitlam, at the age of ninety-seven, is extremely frail. Ray Wilkie became the weather man for Channel 10 Brisbane, and is still alive. Dawn Lawrie is now a marriage celebrant, and can still be spotted around Nightcliff’s supermarkets wearing her trademark beehive and caftans. Dr Ella Stack is living in Canberra and recently published a book on her own memories of Tracy, Is There Anyone Alive in There?

  Despite this, and despite the fact that about half the population changes every few years, Katrina Fong Lim believes that ‘When it comes to Darwin as a community it still remains in people’s subconscious. Cyclone Tracy is still a part of their consciousness.’

  Two days after I returned to Melbourne, my relatively closed and hunkered down southern city had its own weather event. Winds of up to 150 km/h whipped through the city at around three in the morning. Trampolines were blown out of backyards and sailed through the sky. The noise was loud, too loud to sleep through. A kind of hollow, low whistle reverberated through the streets for an hour or two. I live in a solid brick house, in a built-up street. I suffered no damage to my house and was never in any danger, and still found it pretty scary. I lay there wondering what it would be like to experience winds that were two to three times as strong, and could not. And if the noise had been louder? Well, that was hard to imagine also. Perhaps the only thing I’ve experienced that comes close to it was the Sydney hailstorm of 1999 but that lasted minutes, not hours.

  So why have I tried so hard to imagine these things? There are many reasons, not all of them clear to me. The clearest of all is that while many of us may not like talking about the weather, we have to. We certainly can’t, as was suggested during the Blue Mountains bushfires of October 2013, avoid talking about disaster and climate change for fear of ‘politicising’ pain and suffering. At the time environment minister Greg Hunt said, ‘I think we’ve all got to be very careful, in talking with the senior people at the Bureau of Meteorology, for example, they always emphasise, never trying to link any particular event to climate change.’5 In fact, climate change scientists have been consistent in stating the difference between day-to-day weather, which can’t be pinned on climate change, versus overall shifts in the climate, which can be. (Hunt’s equivocation is almost as wilful as insisting if an extreme weather event is a cold one, it can’t be the result of global warming. Warming of greenhouse gases causes extreme weather, but does not only mean that temperatures will rise.) But our children and grandchildren will judge us. History will judge us. Indeed we’re already being judged by the international community and toyed with by the weather itself, like a mouse being batted around the room by a large cat.

  It’s not just crucial that we remember—it’s important what we remember. The shape memory takes has something to teach us. It doesn’t matter if we can’t remember the exact order of events, or who said what to whom. It does matter what we learn. Memory is not a luxury: it is survival. I think of Slim Bauer’s belief that the white man ‘has not learned to come to grips with life in the tropics’ and that Darwin ‘will, sometime in the future, be overtaken by further disaster’. I think of the people of Sri Lanka who ran towards the tsunami because they did not know better. I think of the people of Darwin building a casino in the surge zone and over a Larrakia burial site. I think of Justice Leonard Stretton saying, after the Victorian bushfires of 1939, ‘They had not lived long enough.’ I think of Nick Candilo as he looked back across the harbour and told me that when he sees a light flickering he thinks of his friend. He does not let the light go out and nor can we.

  But we can’t just remember the strength and power of community spirit after Darwin, though that was beautiful to behold. We must remember all of it: those who were denied community, those who were shipped off in despair never to return. The policemen who had their children blown from their arms, saved them, then went on to find the bodies of other parents’ tiny children in the ruins. Those who drowned at sea. We remember the missing and the elderly who died of heart attacks in the cyclone’s wake. We remember those who panicked and didn’t behave well. We remember the people whose lives were ruined and those who felt, suddenly, as if they’d just begun. We remember the woman Rover Thomas c
alled auntie who died in the air above Broome then showed him the Rainbow Serpent destroying Darwin. We remember her cry: ‘I’m leaving my country.’ We remember the Larrakia who were put onto planes and buses and taken, once again, to lands not their own, we remember the community at Knuckeys Lagoon and those at One Mile. We remember the distress and courage of a general, the teacher who did his best to save the women and children of the city then watched the navy come into harbour and hoped that he too was saved. We remember, as that teacher did, the eruptions of altruism and kindness. We remember a mayor who was forthright and distressed by what had happened to his town. We remember the nurses who worked till they dropped, those who cooked for and fed thousands, the women who protected the dogs, and those who gave birth in the eye of the storm. We remember the kids stuck down south in schools full of the uncomprehending and those who made it home and played in rubbish tips with bits of their old town. And yes, we remember the dogs that were shot, the mangled horses, the crocs turned into handbags, the devastated chooks, the cats that went crazy, the trees that were uprooted, the land flattened for years to come. We remember the palm flower that was about to bloom for the first time in a hundred years.

  Time shifts and twists in difficult times, it expands and contracts. A week can draw out into infinity, a minute can last a century, a century can pass in the blink of an eye, but we need to understand what memory leaves us with: the lessons it has for us. This place, we make it as we go and all of it, the good the bad the ugly the glorious and the wild raging winds, the floods, the fires, the droughts, must be remembered if we are to survive the decades and centuries to come. Tracy was not a bitch, she was a warning. We should listen to her.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK could not have been written without the support—and archives—of the Northern Territory Archives Service. At the archives, I would particularly like to thank Françoise Barr who worked with me closely on this project. She was amazing. Thank you also to the National Film and Sound Archive.

  I would like to thank my readers for spending the time on and supporting the work: Ciannon Cazaly, Saul Cunningham, my agent Jenny Darling, Greg Hunt, Paul Kelly, Virginia Murdoch, Adrienne Nicotra, John Richardson and Sari Wawn.

  To those who were so generous in sharing their knowledge with me and provided tips and contacts: Wally Caruana, Kate Cole-Adams, Mickey Dewar, Denise Goodfellow, Helen Hansen, Alan James, Kevin Kelly, Francis Good, Chips Mackinolty, Sarah Mathers, Shane Maloney, Robert Mills, John Richardson (again!), Suzanne Spunner and Ianto Ware.

  To my friends and colleagues in Darwin: thank you most particularly to Megan Nevett for accommodating, feeding, listening to me and giving me beer; Kay Aldenhoven, Angus and Rose Cameron, Panos Couros, Robyn McLean, Sandra Thibodeaux and Rohan Wightman.

  I am grateful to the editors and journals who published articles that went on to become chapters of this book, and their input into a work in progress: Julianne Schultz at Griffith Review, Jeff Sparrow at Overland and John Van Tiggelen at the Monthly. For allowing me to quote from their work, I thank Kevin Brophy, Paul Kelly and Adrian Hyland.

  To my colleagues at Text: Mandy Brett, as ever, for terrifyingly forthright and excellent editing, Jane Novak both for organising publicity and her personal enthusiasm for the project, and my dear friend Chong Weng-Ho for the cover. I hope you all know how much I value you and the team at Text Publishing.

  Words can’t fully express my gratitude to those who, forty years ago, went through a wild storm and all that followed. I thank all those I interviewed (listed in sources), most particularly Bill Wilson. To all those who made their transcripts available to the general public through the archive service, please know what an invaluable gift that is.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1 This inflation-adjusted cost of Cyclone Tracy in 2013 dollars is based on the national Consumer Price Index published on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website.

  2 ‘Flood devastation as bad as Cyclone Tracy’, Paul Lockyer, AM, ABC Radio, 11 January 2011.

  3 Northern Territory Archives Service (NTAS), Commissioner of Police, NTRS 2999, reports by police officers of personal experiences relating to Cyclone Tracy 1974–5, Report by BAKER, Detective Sergeant Thomas.

  4 Kinglake-350, Adrian Hyland, Text Publishing, 2011.

  5 Dr Ella Stack also references this quote in her book Is There Anyone Alive in There?, Historical Society of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 2013. All quotes from Dr Stack from this source unless otherwise noted.

  WARNING

  1 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, WILKIE, W. R. (Ray), TS 675. All further quotes from Ray Wilkie come from this interview.

  2 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, BRIEC, Bernard TS 830. All further quotes from Bernard Briec come from this interview.

  3 Personal interview with Julia Church, Canberra, 20 June 2013. All further quotes from Julia Church come from this interview.

  4 ‘Tracy—facing the storm’, Genevieve Hussey, 7.30 Report, 24 December 1999.

  5 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, MCHENRY, Ray, TS 270. Attached to this transcript, at McHenry’s request, was a paper he wrote called ‘The role of a senior administrator in a disaster situation’, for a welfare administrators seminar in 1980. All quotes come from one of these two archival sources unless otherwise indicated.

  6 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, CRESWICK, Richard, TS 536. All further quotes from Richard Creswick come from this interview.

  7 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, FREY, Ken, TS 630. All further quotes from Ken Frey come from this interview.

  8 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, BAIRD, Tom, TS 155. All further quotes from Tom Baird come from this interview.

  9 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, AH TOY, Lily, TS 1.

  10 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, NIXON, Curly, TS 654. All further quotes from Curly Nixon come from this interview.

  11 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1988–ct, TRURAN, Howard, TS 511. All further quotes from Howard Truran come from this interview.

  12 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, BISHOP, Ida, TS 773. All further quotes from Ida Bishop come from this interview.

  13 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, HARRIS, Vicki, TS 585. All further quotes from Vicki Harris come from this interview.

  14 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1988–ct, GARTON, Len, TS 535. All further quotes from Len Garton come from this interview.

  15 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, CAIRNS, Kate, TS 549. All further quotes from Kate Cairns come from this interview.

  16 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, HARVEY, Beth, TS 490. All further quotes from
Beth Harvey come from this interview.

  17 ‘The experience of Cyclone Tracy’, Chamberlain E. R., Doube L., Milne G., Rolls M. & Western J. S. Australian Government Publishing Service, 1981.

  18 ‘In Praise of Characters’, Erroll Simper, Australian, 30 September 2013.

  19 NTAS, Steedman, Pete, NTRS 2366, transcripts of interviews relating to Cyclone Tracy, 1975–1975, BOWDITCH, Jim, TS 7902. All further quotes from Jim Bowditch come from this interview.

  20 The Furious Days, Alan Stretton, William Collins, Sydney, 1976, p. 1. All further quotes from Stretton come from this source, unless otherwise stated.

  21 NTAS, NTRS 226, typed transcripts of oral history interviews with ‘TS’ prefix, 1979–ct, HITCHINS, Air Commodore David, TS 458. All further quotes from Air Commodore David Hitchins come from this interview.

  22 Bill Bunbury, Cyclone Tracy: Picking Up the Pieces, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994, p. 116.

  23 ‘Picking up the pieces after a big blow’, by Chips Mackinolty, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 December 1994.