Some say that the stories of the brutal treatment of dogs after Cyclone Tracy, particularly by police from interstate, was a beat up. Another crazy rumour sweeping the town. But this rumour is substantiated by dozens of people who witnessed the casual slaughter. Because of fears that hungry and traumatised dogs would form packs, the order had gone out that all dogs, and indeed cats, were to be shot. Some police dreaded the task. Others became a bit too enthusiastic. Air Commodore Hitchins found:
a police gentleman with two loaded revolvers sticking out of his belt patrolling around the RAAF tarmac on a motorbike and when I asked him who he was, he said that he was there to make sure that there was no civil trouble and what’s more there were a lot of loose roaming packs of dogs…And he was there to shoot all these dogs on the RAAF Base.
Hitchins told the man to get on his bike and bugger off.
Police were told that to set an example they had to destroy their own dogs. This, after nights of no sleep and evacuated families and devastated houses. One policeman, a friend of Beth Harvey’s, tried to finish off his six-year-old dachshund, but found himself unable to do it. ‘I went to shoot her and she just licked my hand.’ He ended up giving her to Harvey to care for alongside her labrador. People were given the option: take their pets to the police station or take the risk that police would shoot them from their cars without warning and in front of the owners.
Cats were better at eluding armed police, but you have to wonder if the Northern Territory’s present day feral cat problem—responsible for the extinction and endangerment of several species of small marsupial—escalated dramatically after Tracy. Ray Wilkie says that in the weeks following the cyclone the cats were left to run around—sometimes he’d look up at night and see thirty or forty pairs of feline eyes looking down at him from the wreckage.
Interstate animal welfare agencies arrived in town immediately after the cyclone but by 2 January the RSPCA were lobbying to get more of their staff into Darwin. According to the Northern Territory News, ‘the society’s phones were being jammed by Darwin evacuees seeking information about their pets’. Increasingly women looked out for animals, on their own behalf, and also on behalf of men who feared for their pets if they left them alone. Kate Cairns was living in Jingili under the ‘dance floor’ of a house across the road from her ruined one. She moved in there for a few days, along with eleven other people, as many dogs and two cats.
I was looking after something like eleven dogs at one stage, because they were being shot. And these were pets. And the men were going out every day helping the clean-up… In some cases it was the only thing they had left and they weren’t game to leave the dog unattended. And so when all the women went and—there were very few of us women left in Darwin after the mass evacuation—the guys would say: ‘Katie, would you look after my dog?’
George Brown, who’d been out of town when the cyclone hit, felt great affection for the nameless woman who hid his dogs for him. The woman was
…one of the ones that determined she wasn’t going to be evacuated. She contacted me and said: ‘Do you want your dogs?’ And I said: ‘Yeah, well thank you very much’, and sort of took her in my arms and thanked her and comforted her, and she comforted me that she was all right and I was back again, and there were the two dogs—well the dog and the pup.8
Shooting pets was an extreme policy without a shred of nuance, like much that happened after Tracy. However, concerns about the dangers of packs were not unfounded. Bill Wilson, a dog lover himself, acknowledges that ‘dog packs formed and some of them were getting quite violent and they were quite dangerous’. Ken Frey was one of a number of people going from house to house doing a survey on the state they were in, and, if necessary, recovering bodies. It wasn’t long before he got himself into a fix. ‘In one place I got in and found, when I got into a bedroom whose door was not locked but closed, that there was a pack of dogs in there and they were by this time extremely hungry, and I was lucky to get out the front alive.’ As a result of such experiences he had no qualms about the orders given to shoot dogs—after several run-ins he was wishing he could shoot them himself. But it’s a long way from those concerns to what actually happened.
Ray Wilkie remembers the way one dog was killed. ‘One day an officer came around, and there was an old dog in our place—he was a nice old fellow—and the [policeman] said: “You got a dog there?” and I said “Yes. He’s not hurting anyone”…Out he came and bang, that was it.’ Events like this were an added trauma for people who had just been through a catastrophe. Wilson: ‘all they had left was their animals; they had no house, and in some cases no husband, no wife, and for these people to come in and act the way they did I think was wrong…’ In its twentieth anniversary special, the Northern Territory News describes Anne Taylor handing over her cat but begging them not to touch the dog. To no avail. They shot the dog right there at the door in front of her. Taylor remembers, ‘I went insane with rage. I got into the car and tried to run them over.’
Vicki Harris’s description is the most distressing of all.
Phil and Bob had gone—they’d gone over to Bob’s place and on their way they’d seen the policeman shooting at this labrador. And the labrador had blood coming out its ears and its nose and they were just shooting at it because they couldn’t catch it and they just kept shooting at it…And Phil said: ‘There’s no way I can leave our dog and just, for her to be shot like that,’ he said: ‘I couldn’t do it.’ So he ended up taking her to the police station at Casuarina and he had her destroyed; they shot her. And that’s actually what they sort of said to people, you know: ‘Have your dog put down humanely’… But she was a lovely dog and it was really quite sad. Phil had to take her in there and make her sit and stay, and the guy tied her up with this lump of rope, and you know he was only a really young policeman. He must’ve only just been in rookies, and he was given the unenviable job of shooting everybody’s pets. I just wonder really, today, how that guy fared through it all because that would’ve been—on top of what he’d no doubt seen, with the dead bodies and one thing and another—that would’ve been the [last] straw, I think. It would’ve been absolutely awful to have had to shoot people’s dogs.
It’s likely that young rookie was Robin Bullock, who, after he finished up at the morgue, was given the job of shooting dogs and other animals.
I think there was some sort of over-reaction there. I really think the dogs probably could’ve survived quite well, truth be told…I know that we had requests from owners who were leaving, to put the dogs down, because they couldn’t stand the idea of them just wandering and perhaps not being fed—’cause they were all domestic animals.
Bullock reckons he shot twenty or thirty dogs in all, but only at the police station, when their owners brought them in. This was often done when people were being evacuated and couldn’t take their animals with them. Former Sergeant John Wolthers, who was in charge at Casuarina police station, ‘acknowledged the pain the policy inflicted on pet owners. He said it was one of the saddest tasks the police had been forced to perform.’9
Jingili was a suburb I spent time in when researching this book and at one stage I minded a dog called Daisy. At sunset, if the tide was low, I’d take her down to the broad expanses of Casuarina Beach, which was covere
d with dogs and their owners bounding, jogging and generally milling around. One night I had dinner with neighbours and sat on their balcony, surrounded by a dense tropical garden. I mentioned my interest in the dogs and what had happened to them. ‘The dogs?’ my host asked. ‘They buried them all up the road.’ He gestured towards the end of the street, towards Jingili Primary School. So, it seems there were mass graves after all, though it wasn’t humans who were put into them. I sat there wondering if the garbo who’d buttonholed Stretton during a press conference all those years ago had been on his way there, to dump his carcasses in a trench that now sits under a primary school sports oval. Certainly the landscaping at the Jingili water gardens, at the other end of the street, had been moulded over the wreckage of the houses from the northern suburbs. ‘You didn’t know?’ one of the gardeners told me, as I was walking Daisy one night. ‘They bulldozed the rubble to make these hills.’ I hadn’t known, but there was no doubting that the gardens had some high hillocks. Modern Darwin is full of these little moments. Reminders that you don’t have to dig very deep to find the remnants of all that horror, some forty years ago.
I’VE GOT TO HAVE MY TRIPS
IT IS impossible to overstate the significance of the timing of Cyclone Tracy’s arrival a week before 1975. That was the year of the Racial Discrimination Act. It was the year Gough Whitlam went to Wave Hill and granted partial title to the Gurindji people ‘and through Vincent’s fingers poured a handful of sand’.1 It was the year the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Bill was introduced into parliament. It was International Women’s Year. Gay rights were finally on the agenda and homosexuality was legalised in South Australia. The death penalty was abolished. The Vietnam War finally ended, following Australia’s withdrawal in 1972. Legal Aid was introduced. The British honours system was replaced by the Australian one on, of course, Australia Day (though the LNP government in power at the time of writing has reintroduced it, on 25 March 2014). No-fault divorce was introduced. By the time Whitlam was dismissed on 11 November 1975 a record number of bills had been introduced and enacted. By Whitlam’s own estimation, more than half his reform plan was implemented during his government’s two short terms. A few days after Whitlam’s dismissal, East Timor declared itself independent, only to be invaded by Indonesia. Refugees who fled the slaughter that ensued arrived in Darwin close to a year after Tracy, to find a town still in ruins.
Even as a nine-year-old child I felt the seismic shift caused by the Labor Party’s win in 1972, and the energy and charisma radiated by our new prime minister, Gough Whitlam. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons that Cyclone Tracy has so imprinted itself on me is because it unleashed its force at such an extraordinary moment in modern Australia’s history. As we headed into 1975 the ride just got bumpier, or more exhilarating, depending on your point of view.
The Northern Territory was feeling it too. Margaret Muirhead: ‘I think we forget how many changes were brought about in 1975. For instance, in the Territory, that was the year that women were allowed to sit on juries.’ At that time ‘they couldn’t be bank tellers either’. The rationale was that the money was too heavy for them to carry, and they couldn’t handle a gun.
While Whitlam himself was not a young man (he was fifty-six when he took office) the generational change his government represented permeated everything. Australia was finally embracing its younger people and their values, rather than rejecting them. I don’t know what I expected when I interviewed Malcolm Fraser, one of the men who brought Whitlam’s term in office to such an abrupt halt on 11 November 1975, but he spoke about his former foe with great warmth. Indeed the tone of our conversation was so conciliatory I had to go back to Whitlam’s famous speech on the steps of parliament, after his dismissal by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, to remind myself of the temper of the times. Malcolm Fraser, Whitlam boomed, his face fierce with rage, ‘will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr’s cur’.
It was important to speak to Fraser because his government was in power from 1975–83, which is to say for the years of the rebuild. It was not possible to speak to Gough Whitlam because of his poor health; many other key political players, such as Jim Cairns, have died. Despite how recent such events seem to me, it is sobering to be reminded that they now sit firmly in the realm of history.
The only other time I’d seen Fraser in the flesh was at protest marches against his government’s attempts to cut tertiary education funding in 1981. So I hadn’t expected to find his imposing presence so moving. I was struck by how much I liked him and what a sincere honour it felt to meet him. His voice, patrician, deep, controlled, threw me back to those highly charged years, much as Whitlam’s speeches, when you listen to them, are now evocative of that time. At eighty-three Fraser still speaks with great clarity. He was highly engaging and our conversation helped give me both a sense of the times and the differences between Canberra’s perspective on Tracy, and the perspective of those who’d been through it. The main question I asked of him, indeed the reason I’d wanted to meet him, was to help me understand whether Cyclone Tracy was more than just a destructive storm. Had it acted as a catalyst for political events during the tumultuous mid-seventies? His answer, in short, was that I should resist ascribing too much political power to those massive winds.
Prime Minister Whitlam was in Europe when Cyclone Tracy hit, which was why the task of heading the rescue operation fell to his deputy, Jim Cairns. Dr Rex Patterson, the minister for the Northern Territory, was staying on a cattle station in Queensland over Christmas but did end up arriving in Darwin on the same flight as Stretton. The two men got on well, and in The Furious Days Stretton says Patterson gave him much-needed support over the next week or so. Cairns arrived in Darwin on Boxing Day and was affected by what he saw. As a result he did all he could to smooth the way for a quick and efficient federal response. His wife Gwen, who accompanied him on the trip, was also deeply moved by Darwin’s plight and worked on behalf of evacuees once she returned to Melbourne. It was Cairns who took a submission to the cabinet on 28 December, acknowledging that the disaster was unprecedented in Australia, and endorsing the evacuation, as well as providing for the immediate payment of special benefits. Opposition leader Bill Snedden believed, Colonel Thorogood remembers, ‘that disaster was above politics, the government and the opposition had agreed to co-operate fully in the relief of Darwin’.
When I spoke to Fraser he returned to this theme several times—that not everything that happened in a country should be politicised and that neither Tracy nor any other disaster should be played for party politics. It’s possible of course that a certain bipartisan idealism is easier to maintain when one is no longer an active player; but certainly it’s hard to imagine such a coming-together of the parties in today’s political climate.
It’s been said that the days after the cyclone marked the high point of Cairns’ political career. By February 1975 Cairns had declared ‘a kind of love’ for Junie Morosi and by July 1975 he’d been dismissed from the ministry—unfairly, many felt—for misleading parliament. Tracy improved Cairns’ political standing, albeit briefly, but marked a downturn for Whitlam, who returned to Australia on 28 December only to resume his overseas tour three days later. John Menadue, the head of the Prime Minister’s Department, tried to persuade Whitlam to stay. But ‘he looked me in the eye and said: “Comrade, if I’m going to put up with the f—wits in the Labor Party, I’ve got to have
my trips.”’2 Thus began a series of headlines in newspapers around Australia, riffing on the pun of a ruined Darwin versus the ruins of Crete. On 3 January the Northern Territory News quoted the opposition spokesman for foreign affairs, Andrew Peacock, as saying, ‘Australians have been given proof that the prime minister, Mr Whitlam, has abandoned credibility in favour of selfish junketing.’
Despite Fraser’s suggesting otherwise, Whitlam did, in a sense, attempt to play party politics after Tracy. So it’s surprising that he got his PR so wrong, given how right his party got other aspects of the emergency. The Labor government was extraordinarily generous to Darwin’s citizens. And of course, like all politicians, Whitlam was aware of the disaster’s potential to increase his standing. He was even overheard saying that rebuilding Darwin would ‘win them the next election’, or so the story goes. Bill Wilson insists: ‘That conversation was reported to me later, and I have no reason to disbelieve the person who told me.’ Whatever the truth of the matter, Wilson’s description of Whitlam’s behaviour when he visited Darwin reflects the disconnect between Canberra and the Northern Territory and suggests why criticisms of Whitlam abounded.
I will never ever forget this—nor forgive…Whitlam arrived in Darwin and came to the police headquarters, and was to visit us in the communications centre. I’ve already described how that room was very hot, very smelly, I suppose, that we were not still not getting adequate showers, clothing was a bit dirty and so on. Five minutes before Whitlam came in, one of his aides arrived with two cans of fly spray, one in each hand, and promptly proceeded to spray the room—but not only the room, each of us sat at a desk they’d walk up to with this can and spray us to make the place smell nice. That caused a great deal of discontent. Those of us that were humiliated like that never ever, I don’t think, forgave Gough Whitlam for the incident. He probably didn’t know himself but he copped our blame for it. He walked in, the great man, and shook hands with us all and said:—Oh, great job you’re doing. Fine, blah blah blah, And walked out in about thirty seconds…
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