Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  Studies done after Cyclone Tracy,16 and others on the psychological impact of cyclones in general, show that women often suffer a greater amount of psychological trauma after a disaster. This could be seen to support the belief that women were inherently less able to cope. I would argue, however, that part of the explanation was the way women were denied the right to share in the satisfaction that came from rebuilding their community. Instead they had to deal with ‘Cramped accommodation with distant and sometimes incompatible relatives, constantly changing addresses, doubt about who would pay for dental, optical, physical and emotional care, and loss of contact with other evacuees.’17 Since the 1990s serious work has been done to consider the different experiences of women and men during, and after, a disaster. In the World Health Organization’s Gender and Health Report it was observed that after Hurricane Andrew hit the US in 1992, ‘while men would build roads and houses the role of putting lives back together was the women’s’.

  Women were denied that role in Cyclone Tracy and it’s important to note that men, as well as women, suffered as a result.

  Hedley Beare was one of several senior men who conducted himself with extraordinary commitment and grace, while being exposed to horrendous stress. After his family were evacuated he thought:

  ‘That could be the last time I see those four’, because there was no certainty we would survive the emergency, and we were very conscious of the lack of amenities…You could smell the panic in the northern suburbs—there was a sort of stench which began to rise. We got—I reckon it was about the third day you sense a sort of terror taking people over, because the food was rotting, and somehow their world was rotting, and they felt that they might die.

  It’s quite a shock to realise that Beare thought he might never see his family again: not because they’d come to harm, but because he would. It really did feel like the end of the world for many of the men left behind. Fear of death was just one of the stresses that tended to lead to emotional problems after the cyclone. Beare slept one and a half hours a night for ten days, and was in a state of collapse when he finally got onto the first commercial flight out. He remembers his enormous gratitude towards the men who supported him, men that ‘did the little personal things…That were family like.’ In particular he mentions Doug McKenzie, the man who took over the care of the Beare family’s dog, Muffin. ‘I mean, you’ve got no family there, you sort of put your affection on it.’ Beare’s daughter, who’d had glandular fever at the time of the cyclone and was evacuated to Canberra, had health problems for the rest of her relatively short life. She eventually died of leukaemia. Beare believes the cyclone contributed to that. For all these reasons, for many more still, Beare remained traumatised by the ten days of the emergency. When he was interviewed twenty years after the cyclone he still struggled to talk about what happened. ‘It affects me too deeply. It’s traumatic for me, and it’s still in my system.’

  He wasn’t alone. Vicki Harris’s husband turned yellow a few months after Tracy and the doctors diagnosed shock. There were cases of psychosomatic paralysis. Frank Thorogood recalls that all the skin on his hands peeled off when he got back to Canberra. Men who may already have had drinking problems found their consumption of alcohol escalated. There were early retirements in the years to follow. Cedric Patterson, who was fifty when Tracy hit, went on to have medical problems.

  I was faced with a lot of traumas of rebuilding, as well as working hard at a particular time. And I really think that’s one of the reasons that I was retired out of the department early, because I had reached a point where I think I was sort of going up and down in the one spot.

  Meteorologist Peter Harvey retired from the public service in 1987, at only fifty, having been on sick leave for two years. He had an anxiety condition and high blood pressure, and believed his experiences during the cyclone were partly responsible. Driving a woman in labour to hospital the day after the cyclone was just the start of it. The meteorology bureau where he worked started to run limited services on the Friday after the cyclone; it was up and running by the following Monday and Harvey had to keep things going there for months afterwards. He started getting chest pains in ’75 and ’76 as did several of his friends. ‘In retrospect it is a classical stress symptom.’18

  Anne Petterson, a former administrator with the Red Cross and then a Welfare Rights Officer with the Welfare Council, wrote in the Giese Report that ‘there should have been some assessment as to people’s capability of handling the situation. I don’t know how but it would have been better if very stable women stayed behind to hold things together here.’ Men were deprived of the social support their families could have offered. The refusal of women, and the emotional world they were seen to represent, is directly related to the intense distress many men suffered both at the time and in decades to come.

  DARIBAH NUNGALINYA

  ONE JUNE when I was visiting Darwin to work on this book, I drove down to Kakadu. The highway was lined with a willowy and delicate pale lavender bush, and another bush, stark and long-limbed, with large bright yellow flowers. There were lots of little fires spotted alongside the road—an alarming sight for a Victorian—but they were under control. Kakadu is home to one of the oldest continuous living cultures in the world and its rock art chronicles that span of history—including the ice age of fifteen thousand years ago and the time when the thylacine lived in the north, some six thousand years ago. And while I had heard about these paintings, nothing could quite prepare me for what it felt like, after two hours of sweaty walking, to come across an overhang and the two-hundred-year-old painting within it: of a ship with tall white sails. Such depth of history is a stark contrast to white people’s recent arrival in the Top End, which feels like a wound ripped through the land and the culture. This wounding, many Indigenous people believe, was one of the causes of Cyclone Tracy and many disasters before and since.

  The specific factors that Indigenous people believe caused the cyclone vary, depending where people came from. However they all touched on this notion of the desecration of the land, and an associated warning to Aboriginal people to reinvigorate their cultural practices. Cyclone Tracy was believed to have targeted Darwin because it was the centre of European culture up north. Some said Cyclone Tracy was brought on because the Mirrar people were unhappy about exploration taking place for the Jabiluka uranium mine. They didn’t want vehicles getting in there during in the wet, so big storms were sung up. When Echo Cole was asked about this he was circumspect. He didn’t know, he said, but he acknowledged: ‘In past history that I know of, our people do sing up for rain.’ A report on Indigenous experiences of Cyclone Tracy was finally written in 2011. It noted that, while cyclones are viewed as negative events by many,

  Australian Indigenous people positively view cyclones as creative entities that bring renewal but act negatively as a punishment when improper engagement with the natural or supernatural work had taken place. Other extreme climatic events such as flooding and lightning-induced bushfires are similarly viewed as elements of a breathing landscape.1

  History is never just history. Weather is never just weather.

  The Larrakia themselves believed that Tracy was created by the anger of Daribah Nungalinya or ‘Old Man Rock’ who sits in the sea, out from Casuarina Beach. He is the body of a powerful ancestor and as such must not be
damaged in any way. Daribah Nungalinya is responsible for earthquakes, storms and cyclones and the monsoon that comes rolling in from the Timor Sea over the rocks before it reaches land at Darwin’s northern suburbs.

  Principal Keith Cole of Nungalinya College recalls that some Larrakia believed that the sixteen-ton granite boulder that stood in front of his college had been taken from ‘Old Man Rock’ though he insists that it was not. (He said that the rock had come from Mount Bundy mines and this explanation was accepted.) Cole had genuine sympathy with the Larrakia’s way of seeing the world, comparing it with what he called Old Testament thinking.

  The whirlwind, or in our terms, the cyclone, can be a vehicle of God’s judgment or indicative of His sovereign power… The cyclone said to me, and many others have told me that the cyclone said to them, ‘There is a God. He is Almighty, He is all powerful, and His fury is seen in the storm.’

  In the early seventies there was a steady improvement in and recognition of Aboriginal rights. Lionel Murphy, then federal attorney-general, was keen that Indigenous people, particularly elders and their councils, be encouraged to make decisions regarding their own communities. Indigenous justices of the peace were being trained in remote areas. It was also a time when protocols regarding the treatment of Aboriginal people in court were being revised and the right of communities to enforce their own system of law was being given serious consideration. Clem O’Sullivan, the crown law officer for the Northern Territory and its first director of law, remembers that this was a process that ‘accelerated considerably under the Labor government and the change in 1972…It was an interest close to Lionel Murphy’s heart.’2 The Whitlam government had begun drafting the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act though it would not be passed until 1976. This was also the era in which missionaries lost their power, and Indigenous people were allowed to speak their own language again (though of course many had been speaking it, secretly, all along).

  Indigenous people today comment that there was less racism back then than there is today and that Darwin was a friendlier place. But there is no doubt that one of the fault lines that yawned wide after the cyclone was race. General Stretton was alert to problems of racism, though his commitment to evacuation as the way forward offset some of his good intentions: ‘It did not take too long for racial problems to emerge. I was approached by some leading citizens of Darwin with the request that, because of their propensity to spread disease, all Aborigines should immediately be moved out of Darwin irrespective of their wishes in the matter.’ Stretton refused, saying: ‘The Aborigines would enjoy the same priority as every other person in Darwin.’ They were given three options. They could be evacuated south, fly back to ‘reservations’, or could remain in Darwin. ‘Those aboriginals evacuated by air to capital cities were moved in accordance within the overall priorities except the head of the household was allowed to move with his family…Other aboriginals in the city and certain fringe communities were also assisted.’ As it turned out, Indigenous families often were separated, much as white families were, which suggests that Stretton meant that those who lived traditionally were allowed to stay together as a unit but others were to be treated like everyone else. Other than the general pronouncement above, Stretton notes that the community at Delissaville—on the Cox Peninsula near Mandorah—was looked in on. That community was not evacuated, but nor did it want to be.

  It was the job of people like welfare officer Michael Ivory to work with local Aboriginal people. He remembers that the day after the cyclone many of them had got themselves to the shelter at Ludmilla and from there he organised for some to go to Melbourne and some to Sydney, even though: ‘They were blackfellas who’d never been out of the Territory in their life.’3 Serious efforts were made to house Indigenous people within the Territory rather than interstate, so as to avoid extreme dislocation. Ivory again: ‘There was a lot of Aboriginal people that had to be catered for, who wanted to go home, so we had to organise transport for them, such as it was. Normally it was by road.’ Clem O’Sullivan remembers that he flew in to Darwin on 29 December on a chartered DC3 that had been used earlier in the day to move people to a community on Elcho Island. In the very fine twentieth anniversary feature run by the Northern Territory News, Barry Medley remembers that his employer, Perkins Shipping, delivered essential supplies to coastal Aboriginal communities and Mr Medley said it was crucial the job was done. ‘We had to feed all the people on the islands so I stayed to give people a hand.’ Bill Wilson also remembers evacuating Indigenous people out a day or two after Tracy.

  All the people interviewed for the Haynes Report on Indigenous experiences of Cyclone Tracy felt they were treated well in the days immediately following the cyclone and during evacuation. They were given food for free, and were not expected to pay for things and were generally treated as well as any non-Indigenous people.

  I remember standing up in the line [for a $200 payment]… And the guy that was standing in front of me was a well-known and quite wealthy businessman…I remember then thinking to myself, ‘We’re all equal. Everybody’s equal, you know, we’ve all been hit with the same thing.’

  In Returning to Nothing, Peter Read notes that:

  the Bagot and Kulaluk Aborigines seem temporarily to have benefited. They had few material possessions. They belonged to the Darwin region as did few others; most of the land precious to them was already inaccessible because of buildings and fences…The barracks which the army had built on the most sacred site of the Larrakia people was in ruins.

  Which is not to say that things were good—they weren’t for anyone, black or white. Severe dislocation was caused in the camps which, according to Bill Day, ‘were bare and the people scattered’. People from One Mile, the camp closest to the centre of Darwin ‘had moved into two old classrooms behind the Cavenagh Street Woolworths store. The bare concrete rooms were unserviced but drier than any of the precyclone shelters in the camps.’

  There are claims that, once they were evacuated south, Aboriginal people didn’t tend to be offered the level of support that white evacuees were given, and sometimes encountered a kind of prejudice. Bonds of community are strong in Darwin and at times like this that could offset problems caused by racism. Chips Mackinolty reported that one Aboriginal family flown to Far North Queensland was separated from non-Aboriginal evacuees and put on the back of a cattle truck to be sent to Yarrabah Reserve, after Queensland authorities refused them permission to stay with relatives.4 According to Maria Tumarkin, Mr Doug Scott, then the director of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, ‘had so far only been able to house two families out of sixty stuck in Sydney. “Some real estate agents have been sending Aboriginal evacuees to uninhabitable houses. Most of the seven to eight hundred Darwin Aborigines originally evacuated to Sydney have already escaped the city.”’5

  However not everyone reports having a rough time. Stephanie Nganjmirra Thompson remembers that she and her siblings were sent to Melbourne and put in a hostel down there, before being flown up to Oenpelli in Arnhem Land where she stayed with her uncle. She has no memories of being treated badly. One couple expecting racism were happily surprised. They’d driven to Katherine and when they got to the relief centre and explained they were half-caste and quarter-caste (so that a white person didn’t accidentally take in someone of colour) were treated with nothing but respect. While the populati
on of Bagot Reserve dropped from 518 to 63, demountables arrived quite quickly to replace the homes that had been destroyed, and they were connected to electricity before many other homes in Darwin.

  How Indigenous people felt about being taken, once again, from their land was a different matter. Many of them had been displaced several times over, and to be removed once again was deeply traumatic. This was especially the case if they were Larrakia, and they were being removed from their traditional lands. ‘This is our coast. And you’ve got to be back home on your home ground.’6 Bunji, a land rights newsletter edited by Bill Day, stated in January: ‘The people of the dreaming cannot be chased from their land by a cyclone…We need them back in Larrakia country as soon as possible.’7

  Lorna Fejo found being evacuated very painful. ‘Oh it was really devastating…We had no home; we had nothing, but we still was determined we wanted to stay in Darwin. But we were more or less ordered: “Get out of Darwin. Go!”’8 Fejo was put on a bus to Mount Isa but ended up further south. She finally found a way to return to Darwin (illegally, and without a permit) despite being told in Adelaide that Darwin was ‘finished’.