Warning (10 page)

Stretton's version of events reads as self-aggrandising (which doesn't mean it is
untrue, simply that he was immodest). He did not arrive in Darwin until eleven on
Christmas night by which stage, according to the key players anyway, some major decisions
such as the evacuation of Darwin had already been made. Certainly the first thing
Stretton did when he arrived was to ask for the immediate establishment of a communications
net ‘between the police, army, RAAF and the MV
Nyanda
'. This became the responsibility
of his chief of staff, Colonel Frank E. Thorogood, who worked closely with (and for)
Stretton over the next six days.

It was forty hours before the radio returned, around lunchtime on Boxing Day. The
song that accompanied this momentous event was the theme song to
Rush
, a historical
TV drama set on the Ballarat gold diggings. People commented on the lightness of
that moment; how the jaunty tune lifted their spirits. Twenty-nine-year-old Kate
Cairns was interviewed thirteen years after the cyclone and she vividly remembered:

the best thing of all that happened was when the wireless came back—well, the radio
was back on…I could have cried…See, we didn't know. There was no communication.
We didn't know what was happening, and then all of a sudden someone said…‘Have you
got a wireless that works, or a tranny?'…Anyhow we pulled it out and sure as eggs
it—‘Hello Darwin, we hope you're okay.'…Oh it was just wonderful. It was sort of
a real communication thing, you know, it was fantastic.

Richard Creswick remembers that the ABC's return to air was accompanied by an ‘influx
of southern journalists'. As the first planeload of journalists—there were some
twenty of them—flew over Roma in western Queensland they were told to put their watches
back an hour and a half—and twenty years. (Although given the state Darwin was in
they probably should have suggested thirty years—back to 1944.) Those journalists
played a crucial role in letting people around Australia know just how bad things
were, but some locals were shocked by the media's insensitivity. You get a visceral
sense of this watching some of the old news footage in which evacuees are doorstopped
in a surprisingly blunt fashion. I watched as one badly injured man was asked what
had happened to his wife. The man gulped and looked very distressed before saying,
‘My wife was killed.' And I realised with a terrible start that this was Colin Clough
and that I'd heard an interview his daughter Kim did for the
7.30 Report
twenty-five
years later.

You could hear this piece of tin, you could hear it coming, crashing and rolling
over with the wind and the next minute Dad went ‘Ahh!' and he screamed out really
loud and I thought, ‘Oh, God, no'. It had dug right into his back and he passed out
on me and I'm lying there and I'm just thinking, ‘Oh, God, what's going on?'…I screamed
at [Dad], I said, ‘Let's go to the car, let's go to the car.' He said ‘We can't take
Mummy.' And I said, ‘I know.'…I remember looking at her and she only had one tiny
little cut on her leg and I kept thinking, ‘There's nothing wrong with you, you're
not hurt.' And she was dead.

Stretton understood the power of communication and as soon as the radio was up he
took to making regular broadcasts. Frank Thorogood believed that it was his way
with radio that was ‘one of the success stories. He has a natural ability to talk
to people, an engaging personality that comes so easily. He was able to give the
people the confidence that, you know things were actually happening.'
⁷
After Stretton
died in late October 2012, his obituary in the
Sydney Morning Herald
described his
time in Darwin as ‘a refreshing change to the obsessive secrecy of governments in
crisis long endured by Australians. Disarmingly open, he held two daily press conferences,
[and] was honest.'
⁸

Howard Truran remembers both his sense of isolation before the radio was restored
and relief when Stretton took to the airwaves. Ten years after the event, in fact,
he wrote to Stretton and thanked him. ‘There was no radio; you had no contact with
anybody outside your street. You never saw any of your friends, 'cause you couldn't
get around, so you never contacted anybody. You just started to clean up yourself
and then different words started to get around.'

Truran is referring here to the rumours that were ricocheting around the place, including
the one about the numbers of the dead. Another was that the cyclone was going to
double back and hit Darwin for a second time. Later there were the stories of the
apocryphal Greek men who dressed up as women so they could be evacuated on the first
planes out. Anxieties about looters spread like wildfire. Police were rumoured to
be shooting people's dogs out of car windows, as they drove around town. Some of
these events, of course, turned out to be verifiable. But, Truran says, Stretton:

came on the air, at night, and that was the best thing that he ever did with people,
was that he talked to people at night, in his quiet voice. We used to lay in bed
at night in the dark, with just the hurricane lamp, and he used to tell the people
of Darwin—speaking to the people of Darwin—what had happened during the day, and
what he was doing. And he says: ‘Don't worry. Don't panic.' He said: ‘We will get
you all out.'

WE WILL GET YOU ALL OUT

THE DISASTER plan that was still in development when the cyclone struck had decreed
a meeting point in the event of such an emergency. First thing on Christmas morning
that point was six feet under water. Not a promising beginning. People then gravitated
towards the Darwin police station and Hedley Beare recalls stumbling into a makeshift
morgue along the way to the first informal meeting that took place.

I went through, down a passageway that was dark, because there were no electric lights,
and the water was dripping through the ceiling—this is the police station! When we
came to the corner and turned there was a very darkened room, and all the corpses
were lined up, one by one, on the floor.

Some planning committee members had been injured, and some were on leave, but others
stepped into the breach.

David Hitchins remembers:

Mr O'Brien being there with a can of beer in his hand. He was definitely not in full
possession of his faculties and I do believe he was shocked and I was told that his
house—he was married with several youngish children and I do remember being told
that his house was torn asunder around his head and that may well account for the
fact he was in a shocked condition.

According to Jim Bowditch, O'Brien had not long before been dug out from under his
house by Fannie Bay prisoners.

Despite their various difficulties this group of men, including Charles Gurd, David
McCann, Tiger Brennan, Alan O'Brien, Jim Gallacher, Grant Tambling and others, came
together. One can imagine the unlit room in the police station that had only recently
been built on the corner of Mitchell and Bennett streets. The temperature is starting
to rise again, which means the humidity is too. There's filthy water and broken glass
on the floor. A shocked and possibly hungover Brennan, his pith hat on as always,
is filling the room (as always) with cigar smoke. Poor O'Brien is standing there
with a beer in his hand. Beare is reeling from his slalom through the corpses, but
he's hoisted a cheeky grin back onto his face because he's such a positive man. At
forty-two, he wears his greying brown hair in an acceptably minor comb-over. His
expressive dark eyes, in contrast to the smile, are sad. Gurd is imposing, tall and
balding. Tambling has dark hair, longish by politicians' standards (it is the seventies
after all) and a heavy-set brow. Ray McHenry is forty-one, a handsome man with a
dimpled chin and the compulsory sideburns. It's a crowded, close room for a group
of big blokes who have all survived the hardest night of their lives and are about
to begin their longest week.

According to McHenry:

The first meeting of the Emergency Services Group took place at 2 pm on Christmas
Day. In the meantime those who had roles in the disaster situation as Heads of the
various Committees had already swung into action…There was a distinct calm amongst
those who had a role, yet I suspect many felt the enormity of the task at hand because,
for the first time [we] were able to put together some basic appreciation of what
had happened in the various geographic areas of Darwin…The decision to evacuate was
canvassed, and subsequently confirmed at a second meeting held at 6 pm that day.

Beare says that the ‘decision to evacuate was made not by show of hands but just
by a general awareness amongst that group…It was almost self-evident…[Stretton] says
he made the decision, but in fact it was a consensus that just was…was there.'

That evacuation was such a strong impulse says many things. In part it's just an
adrenaline-fuelled reflex: not fight but flight. But it also says something about
colonisers' tenuous connection to the lands of the Larrakia nation on which Darwin
was built that the first thought when disaster hit was to bodily lift everyone out
of the place. It also speaks to a frontier-town mentality, in which it was the role
of working men to protect their women and children from the harsh conditions their
jobs had compelled them to live in.

This is not to say there wasn't a serious basis for concern regarding the survivors'
well-being. The decision was, in part, a response to Charles Gurd's advice that disease
was bound to break out, given the lack of fresh water and the large number of people
jammed into evacuation centres. The centres weren't set up to house people long term
and it would be a while before basic services like running water and sewerage would
return. McHenry also mentions the widespread concerns that Tracy would double back
and send all the debris flying about again. That prediction did not eventuate; nonetheless
the possibility of Tracy returning, or a second cyclone hitting the city, needed
to be taken into account.

Stretton's arrival that night unbalanced the delicate ecosystem of power and responsibility
that had developed over the traumatic first day. It was Hitchins' job to meet Stretton
at the airport (based next to the RAAF) at 11 pm. That first meeting did not go well:

I was driving him along a dark airfield after I met him at the aeroplane, but he
told me, or gave me to understand, that he had the full authority of the Australian
Government to take charge of Darwin and everything there and he had total command
of the place, including, I believe he told me that he had powers in excess of those
held by the Administrator. If he didn't tell me that then, he certainly did tell
me sometime later. I was a little concerned about my own position and I sought an
assurance from my own Service that the normal chain of command would apply, and I
was very promptly officially told that that was so and that I was certainly not under
the command of anyone other than those I would normally be under the command of.

McHenry claims Stretton disputed the decision to evacuate at the first meeting held
after his arrival (around midnight) but Stretton denies this:

Although there were varying opinions expressed about the necessity for evacuation
and other matters, no positive decisions were taken at these meetings except that
they would all meet again at 9 am on Boxing Day. This 9 am conference on Boxing Day
therefore provided the forum for me to take firm control and co-ordinate the rehabilitation
of the city.

Stretton's control may have been firm but it was repeatedly questioned and always
beset by tensions both complex and counter-intuitive. Darwin's public servants saw—and
resented—it as a military incursion, even though Stretton himself was of the view
that it was civilians who should manage the relief and rebuilding. He and Ray McHenry
were in agreement over this one thing at least: there should be no suggestion that
Darwin was under military rule. This was understandable, but it had the effect of
cutting out of the relief effort people who were trained to deal with the situation—as
Air Commodore Hitchins discovered.

Like Stretton, Hitchins had fought in World War Two and Korea and had flown into
Vietnam. His nickname was Crazy Horse, and he was not a man to be messed with. In
all his photos the man has sparkling eyes, a jaunty moustache and a warm smile, but
the smile would not be so apparent in the days to come. Hitchins believed the military
should have coordinated the relief operations. In his view they ‘were probably better
placed to cope with it than anyone else and therefore should be given a chance to
get on with it.' He felt particularly strongly on this matter when it came to the
evacuation itself. Indeed, he had begun organising it with Qantas when McHenry told
him he hadn't the authority to arrange ‘anything of the kind'. Hitchins says:

I apologised to the gentleman with whom I'd been speaking and said, ‘Well, I'm very
sorry. If I haven't got any authority around here, which apparently I haven't, if
you want to see me I will be back at the Airforce Base where I do have some authority.'
So I packed myself up and left them to it.

He was aware of fears that ‘the military jackboot' was about to descend ‘upon the
population'. But he believed that his ‘relationship and that of the other military
commanders in Darwin was such that we would not have a problem'.

‘I really and honestly believe that we knew—we were residents of Darwin in the same
way as anyone else was—I am confident that we could have dealt with the problem without
that sort of objection arising.' He thought a more serious concern was the Darwin
people reacting badly to orders from down south.

His authority denied, Hitchins began evacuating some of the hundreds of people who
lived on the base and for whom he was responsible. He thought it was all he could
do, given McHenry's directive, despite his concern this would look as if he was taking
care of his own first. (Much more shamefully, the British High Commission flew its
own people out while refusing to help more broadly with any rescue efforts. In retaliation
they were advised they could not fly within Australia, and ended up flying their
people to Singapore.)

Hitchins remained relatively diplomatic whenever he was interviewed, but a pilot
involved in the evacuation of Darwin all those years ago still has a bit to say on
the matter. ‘I can assure you Dave (Crazy Horse) Hitchins hated Stretton with a passion…Just
why they overlooked Hitchins I have no idea, he was an ideal military man, competent,
smart and a great organiser, who never suffered fools wisely.'
¹
That pilot believes
Hitchins never recovered from being sidelined, and also notes that he went on to
be a great supporter of pilots during the strike of 1989.

So, that left civilians to deal with the problem. Hedley Beare, a compassionate and
constructive man, had been quick to ask himself on Christmas Day, ‘What do you do,
when the world has ruptured like this?…How do we rehabilitate it?' With McHenry's
and Stretton's permission he went on to coordinate the largest evacuation that has
ever taken place in Australia: it's said that as many as thirty-four thousand were
evacuated by air and road over a five-day period. Those figures vary wildly, in part
because it was hard to know how many people drove out of town on Christmas Day. That
figure was later put at 2500.

Organising the evacuation was particularly difficult when communications were fraught.
Hitchins describes the elaborate process: ‘If you wanted to find out what was going
on on the tarmac, you had to write a note on a piece of paper, give it to someone,
get him to go and find the recipient, write the answer on the back of the thing,
and bring it back to you.' Beare was up against the same problem.

We had to find a way of communicating with the bus drivers…And so our telephone was
a group of about ten to twelve men, who could either walk or ride bicycles…I'd say:
‘Look, would you go out to the Casuarina High School and tell Geoff Hodgson such-and-such,'
and give him a list of details. He'd be gone for the day!

Casuarina is eight kilometres out of town. It would have been a hot ride.

For about two days we were getting several hundred people out to the airport. So
one day at the co-ordinating meeting I said: ‘What we need is the means to communicate
by radio or something, particularly to Casuarina, Nightcliff and Darwin.' And the
Army brought in one of those field stations, so they located one at the MLC building,
one at Darwin, Casuarina and whatever. And I think we tripled the number of people
we put on the aeroplanes that day, because we could talk to the other centres.

There was difficulty in keeping up the number of voluntary evacuees to the airfield.
Communication issues were one reason that it was a struggle to evacuate people. Another
was the sheer numbers that had been committed to. There was a mad rush to get the
population down from the official figure of forty-seven thousand (in fact there were
a few thousand fewer in town over Christmas) to ten thousand, in ten days. It seems
almost compulsive, and Bill Wilson and others have commented that the figure seems
to have been plucked out of the air. Why ten thousand rather than fifteen thousand?
Or eight, or twenty? Stretton claimed that he:

had already doubled their recommended figure and proposed to double it again on succeeding
days…It was unacceptable to have aircraft waiting with no evacuees at the airport;
it was equally unacceptable to have large numbers of evacuees waiting for long periods
at the airport with no aircraft.

Two days in, on 27 December: ‘Dr Hedley Beare, the chairman, looked incredibly drawn
as I informed him I was proposing to fly out over 4000 today and there would be considerable
increase tomorrow.' Stretton had still not arrived at a final figure for evacuation
but thought ‘another 20,000 had to be got out'. By 28 December it's estimated that
five thousand had gone by road, and twelve thousand by air. And Stretton had settled
on his final figure.

Jim Cairns reassured me that I had the full support of the Government. He stressed
that the relief operation was fully in my hands. He accepted my decision to reduce
the population to 10,500 and agreed that at his conference he would emphasise that
I was acting in a civil capacity and there was no suggestion of martial law.

That last point might well have been a reaction to people's feeling that they were
being forced out of the city. By 29 December Stretton spoke of getting eight thousand
out in a single day, ‘which, of course, is another record'.

By this point it starts to sound like a competition. Hitchins later commented: ‘If
General Stretton says the evacuation was completed in five days, I think he's probably
right but I don't think it would have mattered a damn if it had been done over ten
or twelve days and done in a much more organised fashion.'

Beare was helped by schoolteacher Jim Gallacher and six volunteers, and they filled
as many planes as they could. Priority was given to the sick, injured and pregnant.
Second priority was women and children only (unless the father was deemed to be essential
to the well-being of the group). Third was elderly couples, then married couples,
and lastly single people. They were allowed fifty pounds of luggage each. A powerful
force at work in this prioritisation was the recurring, seldom-challenged suggestion
that women had less to offer the rebuilding process. Only five to ten per cent of
Darwin's female population was left in the town come 31 December. Many women had
been shipped out when they didn't want to go.