Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  There was in fact a disaster plan in development; but in light of Darwin’s catastrophe-strewn history the fact that such a thing did not already exist is hard to understand. As the ABC’s Bill Bunbury has written, ‘Darwin has had a long history of destruction and rebirth [that has] given the Top End’s top town a special character.’22 In 1875 about a quarter of the white population of Darwin was drowned, travelling on leave from a tour of duty in a ship sunk by a cyclone off the Queensland coast. The town was hit by destructive storms in 1878 and again in 1881. A massive cyclone that coincided with a high tide hit in January 1897 and destroyed most of the town’s buildings, two-thirds of its pearling fleet and twenty-eight of its inhabitants. In 1915 three boats were sunk; in 1917 a cyclone drowned three people and buildings were extensively damaged; in 1919 two sailing vessels were sunk in the harbour and across the Beagle Gulf the Bathurst Island Catholic mission was wiped out. The cyclone that swept in from the northwest in March 1937 killed one person and caused widespread damage to most of the town’s buildings.23

  However Stretton’s rhetoric did ignore the fact that the Northern Territory had just completed Australia’s first emergency protocol procedures, procedures that were quickly enacted after the cyclone hit. Indeed, Stretton had helped institute them. Les Liddell of Tennant Creek was responsible for emergency services in the area and remembers being handed a disaster plan for Darwin that set out what they envisaged would happen if major storms or a cyclone were to hit the city over Christmas. ‘“Les, you’re the only one left in town, you might need this.” And off they went.’24 Liddell went on to play an important role in assisting evacuees after Tracy.

  A year before Tracy, in the wet season of 1973–4, the roads to Darwin had been cut off for almost three months. There had been major floods around Australia and in some parts of the country rainfalls had been the highest ever recorded. Almost every river in Queensland had been flooded, and in the northwest and the Gulf country, the flooding had been extensive and enduring. On Australia Day 1974 Brisbane flooded and sixteen people died. Ray McHenry knew there were indications that the Territory could expect a difficult wet season and he was attempting to prepare for it. It was during that time that McHenry approached the Natural Disasters Organisation in Canberra and ‘obtained the services of a military officer to familiarise himself with the Territory’s problems and to develop a comprehensive plan for disasters of both a Territory and a Regional nature’. According to McHenry that plan was developed with input from the federal government, local government, the private sector and representatives from all over the Territory. It was approved on 5 December 1974, twenty days before Tracy. Talks about the management of the wet season in Darwin were held in Canberra four days before Tracy struck. McHenry was also in the middle of preparing drafting instructions for the introduction of a disaster management bill to the fledgling Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory. (Disaster plans were not backed by legislation in most states back then. Victoria didn’t get an act until 1986 and Western Australia has only enacted such legislation in the last decade. The lag between planning and legislation continues to this day.)

  Ray McHenry was to become an important and divisive figure in the story of Cyclone Tracy. Long-time Darwin resident Harry Giese, who for twenty years had been Director of Welfare, was one of his many critics. Giese’s job had involved being a long-term member (1954–73) of the Northern Territory Legislative Council, which meant he had to introduce and defend bills on behalf of the federal government, and fight these into legislation. He had to rebut attacks both from those who thought he was too progressive, and from those who wanted a faster pace of change. It was a difficult position to be in. Then, said Giese, ‘I got a call, on the morning after the announcement of the Whitlam victory, from McHenry, advising me that I no longer had a job in the Northern Territory and that he was taking the job as Director.’25 His deputy, Ted Milliken, has commented that Giese’s ‘displacement…was one of the meanest things that I have ever seen done to anybody in my life’. McHenry was unpopular but he was also tough, canny, and extremely competent.

  Malcolm McKenzie, who ran the Rapid Creek betting shop, described the people of Darwin as ‘eternal optimists’26 but it’s not just the people of Darwin who tend to optimism. In his book The Human Side of Disaster, Thomas Drabek emphasises the fact that people, particularly men, often don’t respond to warnings. They go into denial and have a tendency to minimise the risks. Jim McGowan, the deputy chairman of the Queensland State Disaster Management Group from 2007–11 says that despite three days’ warning, Brisbane residents failed to take the appropriate action during floods in 2011. ‘People knew that they were coming for three days and yet at the end of it people said they weren’t warned. I think the new level of warning goes something like, “I want to know that the flood is going to come to the third rise of the back steps of my house.”’27 But some people I spoke to felt that this was inevitable and that uniformed emergency services had an unrealistic sense of what you could expect. Certainly people will only act on warnings when they are expressed in a way that is made meaningful to them. In the archival interviews several mentioned this—that the wording of some of the warnings regarding when and where Tracy might make landfall were technical and slightly incomprehensible. You also have to ask what responding to warnings would have achieved. People who filled up their baths and cleaned up their yards had their houses destroyed as completely as the next person; in fact filling the bath created a problem when they had to hide in the bathroom. The only thing that people really could have done to look after themselves was to leave town.

  Members of the Bagot community stayed put like everybody else, despite being aware that something was coming. Aboriginal activist and welfare worker Vai Stanton told Kevin Gilbert that she had been ‘very involved at that time [of Tracy] with the fringe-dwellers because we were trying to get them tarpaulins for the wet season because we were expecting a very wet “Wet”, you know’.28 And there were ‘claims that a prominent Larrakea [sic] leader, Bobby Secretary, told “quite a few people” in Melbourne in September 1974 that “the spirit who watched over their land, had said that a very big cyclone was to come”.’29

  Beth Harvey expressed a fatalism that both black and white residents shared: ‘There is no point panicking. If it’s coming it’s coming. You just have to be prepared.’ Liz Foster, a thirty-four-year-old woman who’d lived in Darwin for two years, remembered that the wildness of the weather that Christmas Eve evoked ‘a fear, but not really believing that you’re going to get killed or anything. It’s just this awe that you have about nature—this thing that is so much bigger than you and that nobody has any control over—wouldn’t matter what you had—nothing could control that.’30

  DISAPPEARED

  DARWIN OLD-TIMER Edna Harmer was worried about the cyclone, but what can you do? She spent the evening repairing crochet that fringed a tablecloth so it would look nice for Christmas Day. Charles Gurd stayed back from work for the hospital’s Christmas party but drove home relatively early in the evening because the weather was making him nervous. Richard Creswick spent much of Christmas Eve at a long lunch. He went back to the ABC to oversee the evening’s television news before driving home through the pounding rain. Down at Humpty Doo, a few miles inland, Bob Collins—only twenty-eight but already a senator for the Northern Territory—spent most of the evening trying to save his stereo. Hedley Beare, who for the last two years had been the Northern
Territory’s Director of Education and who lived in a house on the Esplanade in the centre of town, became quite agitated. At about ten that night he put the kids’ Christmas presents back in a cupboard and got the children out of bed to shelter in the hallway near the bathroom. He and his wife Lyn wheeled a steel-framed bed from one of their sons’ rooms into the hall as an extra source of protection. They sat there for the next nine hours. Julia Church remembers: ‘We started to open our presents then decided to wait till the morning—so we’d have a few presents left. It was a longstanding family tradition, not being able to wait till Christmas morning.’ They all went to bed, but then rain started coming in through the louvres and the house became like a ‘bowl filling up with water’.

  Maria Donatelli, born in Italy, had quickly become a Darwin institution and in 1974 she owned the Capri, an Italian restaurant in Knuckey Street. Becoming concerned about the wild winds, she called her staff and told them to go home. They couldn’t leave because the customers were refusing to go; soon after, though, they left the customers to it. Cypriot Savvas Christodoulou, owner of Savvas Motors and a Darwin resident since 1948, was holding his annual Christmas party at the garage. The winds were so strong by the end of the night that many of his guests didn’t want to leave, but he managed to get rid of them by 11.30 pm. This was around the time that Toni Joyce, who was visiting Darwin to spend time with the ABC cameraman, Keith Bushnell, saw Bushnell’s roof lift—then drop back into place. Bushnell looked at her and said, ‘It’s OK, kitten,’ promising her she’d be ‘safe as houses’. An unfortunate simile.

  Janice Perrin had lived in Darwin her whole life and wasn’t too fussed at all. She was trying out a new recipe—glazed and steamed ginger chicken—and watching a thriller on the telly when the power went. A little later some tendons in her husband’s foot were sliced by flying glass; her memories after that become vague. She remembers that she was menstruating, and was dressed only in underpants and a nightie. As the night wore on this worried her, but there was no way she was going to be able to change. ‘I remember being in the kitchen, I remember the colours of the kitchen, I remember putting a mattress on the floor…’1

  Over at the Fannie Bay Watch House the police on duty were dealing with a man who had ‘turned himself in’. ‘He was in a very drunken condition and continued to rave about his missing wife…He continually stated that he thought she had been murdered and said, “I don’t think I would have done her any harm—but you never know after a bottle of whisky.”’2 Policeman Bill Wilson was not on duty that night. He was with his wife Patricia, a former policewoman—he’d met her on his first day on the job—and she ‘spent a large part of the time with the cat tied in a towel and strapped to her’.3 Dr Ella Stack was at the Darwin hospital when a nurse, Sister Anne Arthur, told Stack to go home to her family. In a spectacular case of bad timing, Sister Arthur happened to be going into labour at the time so Stack left, but somewhat reluctantly. When she got home she was seized by an ‘intuition’. She dragged her sleeping husband out of their bed and a few minutes later a wooden beam speared it. Many people describe these moments of insight; moments that, in hindsight, saved lives.

  Despite teasing Ida Bishop for her ‘intuition’, her boss had sent his prawn trawlers to sea to ride out the cyclone. During Cyclone Selma they’d moored them in the harbour but the moorings had snapped, so they were trying a different approach. Getting the ships out of the harbour with a Christmas skeleton staff was trickier than usual, but nonetheless they headed out around 7.30 pm. Soon the trawlers were battling ferocious seas and a wind velocity estimated at over 170 knots. Bob Hedditch of Northern Research’s Anson said that by midnight things were really bad. ‘The wind blew in our windows on the bridge and tore the back off.’ By that stage he was measuring the winds as reaching 280 km/h.4 Another trawler, the Frigate Bird, was taken out of the harbour at 11.30 pm in an attempt to stop it smashing into the wharf. At some point her engine failed and she capsized, then grounded on a reef. Captain Odawara of the Gollin Kyokuyo Fishing Company took the Flood Bird to sea around the same time. As the HMAS Arrow rode out, ‘one of the ship’s company remembers counting some seventeen vessels—prawn boats, two ferries and a schooner—anchored behind them in Darwin’s inner harbour before the tropical cyclone struck.’ Meanwhile, back at home in her house at Parap, Ida Bishop put on her nightie, then put the kids’ Christmas bikes by the bed. She didn’t want the cyclone to ruin Christmas.

  Presents—the giving of them, the loss of them, the finding of them in the wreckage—would soon take on enormous symbolic power. By the next morning undelivered Christmas presents would sit among bodies at the Nightcliff post office; unopened ones would litter the ruins.

  Charles Gurd sat in an armchair in his bungalow on Myilly Point with his dog on his lap and watched water stream down walls, thinking these were his final hours. Ken Frey and his wife had moved to the bathroom when the winds first got bad, but ended up going down to the storeroom because of concerns the bathroom wasn’t safe. Pat Wright, who lived in Smith Street in the centre of town, found her husband, Arthur, being lifted up by the roof as he tried to stop it pulling free from the house. His shoulder was being badly wrenched. Pat convinced him to give up on the roof and hide in a downstairs toilet in the dark. They sat there and listened to the house being destroyed around them and became increasingly concerned that a nearby water tower would come down on top of them. ‘You could hear the nails coming out of the timber and everything else.’5 At Savvas Motors the garage began to break up so Christodoulou ran around bracing it with timber. ‘I couldn’t find the hammer that night, to nail the nails, and the only thing we found—the chopper. I hit the nails with the opposite end of the chopper. I never even hit my fingers once. We nailed about two thousand nails.’6 A nun at the East Arm Leprosarium describes ‘a rush of wind, a sudden crashing noise, and the whole panel of glass louvres above my bed splintered…[there was a] terrible grind as the entire roof was lifted off.’7 At Bagot community some people broke into the shop because it was safer in there. Eight-year-old Stephanie Nganjmirra Thompson hid under the kitchen table with her mother and three siblings. It was very noisy, particularly once the roof soared into the sky. Her mother was a big woman and she protected her children with her body. She promised them that she’d stop drinking if they survived. (Stephanie’s mother went on to become a president of Bagot Reserve.)

  By one in the morning the winds had really got going. Ida Bishop, who had a great eye for an image, said ‘it was like a giant running his hands down the side of the house going vvrrrrrrrrr like this, and you could feel the shudder of the wind going along’. Ray Wilkie spent the night under his office desk, on the phone while he still had a line, trying to keep track of the situation. His last call before the phones went was to Don Sanders. ‘Well, if I sound a bit panicky, Don,’ he said, ‘it’s because I am.’8 People hid under their beds, often finding that their animals had beaten them to it. A woman saw her dogs flung through the sky on their chains but by some kind of miracle, they made it back to the house. The Church family ran for their lives. Julia was totally naked, her sister was in a nightie, her dad was in his shorts and her mum wasn’t wearing much either. As the roof began lifting off a vacuum was created. ‘We ran down the corridor toward the lounge. The door was buckling inward; my father grabbed it instinctively and we formed a chain down the corridor.’ The door went and they ran into the bathroom. The walls went there as well and they made a dash for it, downstairs t
o the unlocked car. Julia was desperate for a wee and at some point used an ice cream container she found in the car. The piano blew out of the house, narrowly missing them. Julia wasn’t actually frightened. None of them were. ‘The human spirit,’ she tells me, ‘is amazing.’ Plaster flew around them, white and flaking. Julia imagined they were in a snow dome.

  It was about now that some people were whisked out of their houses. Ken Frey describes a colleague’s experience:

  One of our architects, who had three children, went into the bathroom, and the two youngest they put into the bath itself, thinking that it was fairly safe. And the mother, I think, was against one wall with the husband. And one of the children was hanging onto the hand basin when the wall went out; the bath went with the wall, and so did the hand basin. So all three children went out and the two parents were left in there…

  Shirley Gwynne was sucked out of the house in Wagaman that she’d lived in for six years, then flung on the ground and hit by flying chunks of concrete. She described it as like being caught in a giant washing machine. She then managed to crawl towards their storeroom with her baby Damian in her arms, but as she was doing this the family pool collapsed, releasing forty thousand litres of water and washing her son from her arms. ‘I thought I had lost him forever…’ Gwynne crawled around in the dark, searching for him. Miraculously, she found him caught under the tyre of her Mazda. The car lurched and threatened to crush them both but she somehow found the strength, in winds of more than two hundred kilometres an hour, to lift the car off herself and her child. Her husband was screaming at her to crawl into a car trailer.9