Warning

by Sophie Cunningham

  The Darwin International Women’s Year committee reformed as soon as enough women made it back to town to keep the committee going. It became a force throughout 1975. According to Margaret Muirhead, the chairperson of International Women’s Year in the NT,

  We said, ‘Right now we have all the more reason to do things for women in this year’ because of the devastation that they’d suffered and the extraordinary circumstances that they were living under and looked as if they were going to be living under, certainly for the rest of ’75.

  Margaret Muirhead had needed to be convinced to take on the role. ‘I’d never been very interested in women’s issues. In spite of being uncertain of my own value as a housewife and mother of four, I still hadn’t seen that there were any changes necessary in women’s life, or possible.’ Her work radicalised her. ‘I think a lot of them said, “Ho hum, so what! It will all be over at the end of ’75 and we can forget about it all.”’ Objections men had to IWY included: ‘that women were wanting more to take the jobs of men…What would happen to the children?’

  At this stage only around 2500 of the ten thousand people left in Darwin were women. Curly Nixon, who in normal times would have been working the wharves and acting in his role as president of both the Waterside Workers’ Federation and the Trades and Labor Council, moved into entertainment. This would be, he thought, a corrective for boredom, missing wives, and rape.

  See there was those that wanted their wives back, and those that knew—had enough brains not to want their wives back because the conditions just weren’t the place where you took wives. And, of course, I had to shut my mouth because I had mine here, so couldn’t really take sides…Anyway I said to Rex: Listen, Patto, what say we set up an entertainment committee? Will you pick up the fare for anyone I can get to come here?

  His first choice, Rolf Harris, now seems ironic, given that at the time of writing Harris was being tried on sex abuse charges, but back then he was a major star. He played two concerts on 8 January using cyclone debris for a didgeridoo. That concert and others that followed were hugely successful and a real morale booster. Other entertainers to tour included Johnny O’Keefe and Bert and Patti Newton, but it was Harris who is remembered with greatest affection. ‘When he lobbed here,’ Nixon remembers, ‘he fell into line quite well, actually, old Rolf.’ This was code for the fact that Harris took a genuine interest in what had happened up there, and didn’t complain about the rough conditions. Other celebrities, I was told more than once, were not so amenable.

  Things were slowly starting to improve. Sure, there was no running water but one of the pluses of that—in the retelling anyway—was that as you drove down the Stuart Highway you’d see the flicker of naked people having showers under open fire hydrants. People were being well fed at the high schools and the Greek club was good for a feed, too. By 1 January there were two hundred emergency phone connections up around the city. On 2 January the rush south had declined to a trickle and film of the devastation in Darwin was released to cinemas. The footage was first screened in Darwin itself at a charity performance of Barry Humphries’ Bazza Holds His Own. Most postal services were restored. On 4 January the weather bureau was up and running which, given people’s anxieties about cyclones returning, was a good thing. By 6 January there were four hundred phones and beer was back on sale (though restricted to six cans at forty cents each, which could only be purchased between noon and 2 pm, or 5 and 8 pm). Road blocks moved further south and people had greater freedom of movement. Buses began to run. On 7 January Woolworths reopened, as did the Karen Lee Hair Salon. By 8 January there was free repair of television sets and fresh bread was available to people ‘with authority’. From 9 January you could head to the Nightcliff or Parap pool for a swim. Electricity slowly came on over several days. Cedric Patterson recalls that at first the streets around him were ‘pitch black’ then, ‘all of a sudden this pinpoint of light appeared and then a little while later another one appeared and then a small string of lights’.

  On 10 January Ray McHenry was, to quote the Northern Territory News, appointed ‘Supremo at Last’. This gave ‘unprecedented peace-time powers to the director of emergency services. A 41-year-old career public servant is now the virtual dictator of Darwin.’ McHenry has said, ‘The legislation which purported to give almost “dictatorial-type” powers did not follow until some weeks later. The powers were necessarily wide to enable the validation of the many acts which had been taken pursuant to the post-disaster effort.’ He also said, more pointedly, ‘I couldn’t understand what the hoo-ha was all about…I don’t know what in the hell they felt I was.’4

  Harry Giese did understand what the hoo-ha was about.

  There was a great deal to be learned from the Darwin disaster about the way in which the government should impose itself upon the community. That you could have [the] El Supremo sort of thing, that one man could determine whether you had the right to take your family down south, or whether you had the right to do this or that, or where you should look after yourself, how you should look after yourself: there was the feeling that government was intruding too much into the affairs of the community, and into the affairs of individuals in the community.

  Other leaders had also emerged, though: men such as Police Commissioner McLaren, Charles Gurd, George Redmond from the Department of Works. But McHenry was the most rewarded of these and federal cabinet confirmed his role as director of emergency services and co-ordinator on 29 January. McHenry remembers many positive things the close relationship with the federal government enabled, such as social security payments, free phone calls, free transport of pets, free food and the non-payment of rent. All these things, he believed, helped with the recovery process. And perhaps one of the reasons the federal government worked well with him was because McHenry was from Canberra—certainly he wasn’t always on the side of local government. Mayor Tiger Brennan remembers that McHenry wouldn’t let the aldermen of the city council return, which meant they didn’t have the quorum to hold a meeting. Brennan found it counterproductive to keep city leaders out of their home town, when they were most needed.

  Instead of the council there were committees. McHenry’s disaster plan had originally called for seven of them, but they ended up with twenty-four. These included Aboriginal support, communications, clean-up, animal welfare, food, health and women’s activities. Brennan described this turn of events as ‘the blinking communist way’. These committees were slowly phased out as the emergency abated—but not before Brennan declared them the end of him. And so it was that 1975 was the year that Darwin’s mayor, the hippy-loathing, pith-helmet-wearing Tiger Brennan, threw in the towel after three years in the job. With his leaving, a little piece of old Darwin died. Brennan was explicit about the fact that Cyclone Tracy had ended his career and that he’d been driven to exhaustion by the bureaucracy and committees that had followed swift on the cyclone’s heels. ‘Another six months and I would have been in the rat house.’ His departure heralded a Darwin in which women had more of a say. Brennan, the man who’d been heard to complain about the ‘women’s lib crowd’, only resigned in May once he established that Ella Stack was able to take on the mantle of mayor. Increasingly, more women took public office and from 1977 to 1983 a fifth of the Northern Territory’s parliament was female, the highest representation of women of any parliament in Australia. It was in tho
se years, too, that Dawn Lawrie became the Commissioner for Equal Opportunity.

  Press releases went out saying that things in Darwin were ‘beginning to return to normal’ but in truth things did not return to normal for a very long time. Maria Donatelli’s restaurant, the Capri, was the first to reopen after the cyclone and the night that it did people lined up down the street. She describes the weeks that followed as the ‘busiest time of my life. I kept praying somebody else would open.’ Donatelli remembers that the community spirit of Darwin was strong after the cyclone, and that that strength of spirit lasted about four months. After that, things started to go wrong.

  Richard Creswick reunited with his wife in Perth and after a few weeks the two returned to Darwin, living under a tarp at their house in Jingili then squatting at some ABC flats in Stuart Park. They ate at the high schools. He, like Donatelli, remembers some real positives from that early time. ‘Life went back to basics. If you didn’t have a television then you didn’t watch it, you sat outside and you yarned with your friends and there was for that brief period a terrific feeling of community.’

  Neroli Withnall conveyed similar sentiments to the 7.30 Report:

  We waited about six weeks and then we went back. It was lovely…That was probably one of the best years of my life. We lived under the house with a tarpaulin over the floorboards for most of it. One of the things I suppose I learnt most clearly was how very little you need to get by and have a good time.

  Her husband John remembered it somewhat differently. ‘My memory is it was definitely a hard slog. She didn’t seem to enjoy it at the time, I might add. There’s not much to be said for lying awake at night in the wet season and having the water dripping through the floor of the lounge room above…’ They agreed on one thing though. Neroli: ‘It was such a cataclysmic event that everything was dated according to whether it was “before” or “after”. It was like BC and AD.’ John:

  My own feeling is it’s as if a line was drawn across our previous life…When that sort of thing happens, it’s an obvious opportunity to start afresh for lots of people in lots of ways. We were divorced in 1978—I don’t think it had much to do with the cyclone, but you never know, you never know.

  Eight months after the cyclone Women’s Weekly ran a report on the state of Darwin post-Tracy.5 Photographer Keith Barlow, who had been there in the days after the cyclone, then returned, was horrified. ‘What the hell have they been doing?’ Part of the reason was the population was back up to thirty thousand for the dry season. ‘We now have the problem of trying to rebuild the city over the heads of the people.’ But of course many of these thirty thousand were temporary workers rather than returned evacuees.

  Ray McHenry considered this chaos a vindication of his position that the numbers of people in Darwin had to be kept low and the number of people evacuated high. But by June 1975 McHenry had moved back to Canberra. From the outside it appears that he, like Stretton, had been driven out of Darwin by pressures that included the ongoing campaign run against him by the Northern Territory News, but it’s less clear from this distance whether the real pressure was political or personal. Certainly his public position was—ironically, given his role in separating families during the evacuation—that he didn’t want to be apart from his family any longer. By the time he returned to Darwin for a visit, in early 1976, ‘the depression in the place was absolutely unreal’ he said, arguing that if the entire population of Darwin had been put back as early as February 1975, ‘that depression would have started earlier’.

  Things were getting crazy. ‘There were squabbles, and punch-ups, between “old” Territorians and “those blow-ins from down south”.’ There were strikes, which the Women’s Weekly claimed were workers’ responses to the extra bonuses being given to the public servants—usually southerners—who had stayed on or recently arrived in Darwin. These kinds of reports need to be balanced against the knowledge that members of the federal building unions from around Australia gave up their annual leave to act as volunteers. But Air Commodore Hitchins concurs that ‘too much money was splashed around’ and says that public servants were flying off to Brisbane every weekend and demanding flashy accommodation. While this may be an exaggeration, there is no doubt it was hard to get people to work in Darwin over these months, or to encourage them to stay.

  According to the chairman of the Reconstruction Commission, Anthony Powell, ‘There was a lot of tension in the community, and people weren’t “normal”. They’re anxious and deprived, and it’s hard to achieve consensus. We can’t get skilled staff. They won’t come up here without their families, and we’d have to house their families and so it goes on.’ Jim Bowditch believes people weren’t facing the fact that the old town was over. ‘It was always a bull dust town. We aren’t pioneers and we never were. We’re a spoiled community, a city community.’ People became passive, or perhaps overwhelmed, in the face of what was happening to them.

  ‘Tracy Village’ was set up for construction workers and another 1700 demountable dwellings and caravans were brought to Darwin and located on house sites. The hotels and hostels were full and some people just slept under bits of canvas strung up over the ruin of their homes. Out on Darwin Harbour, the Patris was costing the government fifteen thousand dollars a day to house about nine hundred people at any one time. About 5500 people lived there in the few months it was moored. The Northern Territory News described it, with typical insouciance, as a ‘luxury’ liner but the living circumstances were, as Richard Creswick and others have commented, pretty grim. It’s hard to imagine for whom the Patris ‘was the best time I ever had’—as one mother was quoted as saying as she stood on Fort Wharf watching the ship leave that November. One of the people who moved to the Patris was Peter Dermoudy.

  A lot of relationships that were shaky broke up and things like that. It was a time for people to reassess everything. I sort of had a change of life, too, I suppose. I had a change of female companions. The companion I was with went off with a 21-year-old gambler, funny things like that, you know. It wasn’t quite so funny at the time, but it’s quite humorous now.6

  Here’s a waltz through police log books7 at the time which give you a bit of an idea of what life on the Patris was like: a person ‘discharged’ a firearm on 28 February causing Constable Snoad to fire a shot. Snoad ‘was relieved from duties’ and a man was arrested for disorderly behaviour. On Saturday 1 March police had to contact a Bob Gillings to let him know his wife was dangerously ill in Brisbane. Later that day Gillings was reported as drunk and disorderly in the public lounge of the Patris and police had to escort him to his cabin. On 3 March they tried to locate a man (in fact a headmaster) who was living on the ship regarding a five-year-old missing child who was believed to be camped in his car. On 5 March police boarded to look for a missing girl, Elly Jones, who was fifteen and was believed to be with her friend Maria in room 623. ‘Negative result.’ On 8 March a message had to be given to Mr R. G. Pollen regarding the death of his daughter-in-law. He couldn’t be found. That same day a person was asked to remove their motorcycle from a restricted area but they refused. On 9 March an anonymous tip-off told police there was a game of two-up on ‘Mediterranean’ deck. ‘It appears very likely that a game had been in progress but no evidence of same on arrival of police.’ That same day there was also an incident in which two police were assaulted, ‘outnumber
ed and withdrew’. They returned with more police and arrested two of the offenders. Complaints about noise in the lounge were made later that night. On Saturday 15 March two drunken men accused each other of assault and someone claimed that the Patris staff insulted them. On Sunday 16 March, several card games were reported. On 19 March an ambulance was called because a woman was ill. On Sunday 23 March police:

  received a complaint from a Mr Daltry of cabin no. 335 and a Mr Burns of cabin no. 298. Both men state they are disgusted with the behaviour in general on board the ship. They said they had their wives and children on board and that they could not use the lounge areas because of language, drinking and fighting. They further stated they were going to see their Member of Parliament.