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Their judgments were ill-informed. It would have been better without true knowledge
of the situation not to have ventured an opinion at all…it's been said that it's
contributed to trauma and break-down and so on; well, to me that's a bit like counting
the chickens after they're hatched. None of it would have occurred had there not
been a cyclone. What one had to measure is whether the effect would have been worse
if all those people had stayed in Darwin.

He did, however, believe that counsellors should have been provided and regrets
that they weren't.

McHenry was certainly right to suggest that most people who lived through the cyclone
supported the evacuation, even if they had reservations about how it was carried
out. Ken Frey says, ‘I can't understand anybody, whether they be sociologists or
psychologists or what, saying that it was wrong that this was done in Darwin.' Even
Senator Bob Collins, despite his own reservations, told the
7.30 Report
:

I've seen a lot of crap delivered about how it shouldn't have happened, it was a
panic reaction. It's bloody nonsense. The city had no clean water, had no sewerage
supplies. There was no other decision that could have been taken, other than to evacuate
the women and kids.

(It should be mentioned here that Collins' concern for ‘kids' is fraught. He was
a witty and articulate narrator of the story of Cyclone Tracy, and I found much to
like in his archival interviews. He was also, in 2004, charged with multiple child
sex offences and three years later committed suicide just before the cases went to
court.)

Many of those who claim to support the evacuation go on to describe a situation they
clearly feel ambivalent about. Even Hitchins acknowledges that ‘with the benefit
of hindsight one could say that some of the evacuation was unnecessary but I do believe
that it was the right decision at the time.' Bill Wilson, over the years, became
more critical of the evacuation and decided that it hadn't been necessary. While
he acknowledged that reducing the population in this way did leave men free to work
extreme hours, he believes concerns about disease and starvation were exaggerated.

At the time I think I was supportive of the view that we should evacuate…I'm less
convinced now that the idea for the rest of the population was good…I think it was
bad for the morale of the city, as it turns out, and it's taken a lot longer for
people to recover.

Concerns about typhoid and cholera outbreaks were understandable, but in the event
these diseases were managed effectively by a prompt vaccination program. Tetanus
shots were given as well. Charles Gurd, the first man to raise concerns about an
epidemic, acknowledged that none eventuated. Even gastro was held at bay. It was
due, in part, to Gurd's effective management of the situation that Darwin remained
relatively disease free.

Twenty years after Tracy, Elizabeth Carroll describes landing in Sydney with nothing
but a man's shirt on and ‘feeling like a refugee'.

This is nothing against the people. I mean, it was wonderful to get us all out and
all that, but it was what made us feel like that. I mean, we hadn't bathed, we hadn't
showered; I can't remember what our hair must have looked like; no make-up: we had
nothing like that. We didn't have shoes. Did we have shoes by then? I can't remember.

Wendy James suggests something similar when she talks of experiencing ‘the indignity
and disruption of refugees'.
⁵
Carroll believes that she was given no choice but to
leave. ‘I really wish that we could have stayed because we would have got there,
we would have made it. We would have rebuilt…It was so traumatic and so hard, splitting
the families, and starting a new life again.' Her kids were traumatised for years.
‘Leesa used to vomit if you talked about the cyclone; she never, ever mentioned the
cyclone, ever, and she would get physically sick if you mentioned the cyclone.' Carroll
herself has never felt able to return to Darwin and when you read her interview,
the pain and distress she still felt years afterwards are palpable.

Janice Perrin ended up staying in Canberra for two years after she was evacuated
there. Like many evacuees, she never returned to Darwin, and, like many evacuees,
she saw her marriage end. ‘Warren had a lot of trouble settling and a lot of trouble
sticking with a decision. He would decide that he'd come back to Darwin and he actually
came back and sort of got to Alice Springs, then decided he didn't want to come back
and drove to Canberra.' The injury to his foot from flying glass never properly healed.
Carroll acknowledges that there were many separations, divorces after the cyclone
but says,

It didn't affect John and I as a couple for a few years. John was absolutely wonderful
for the first few years; not that he wasn't wonderful all the way through…Then I
remember two years in John started to really sort of crack and feel it. It did affect
our relationship because it was not an easy [time for] many years, really, and I
really do wish we could have stayed.

Julia Church's experience is typical in some ways. The evacuation was a second, unwanted,
emigration hot on the heels of the family's initial move from England. Moving to
Canberra was incredibly hard, particularly for her parents. ‘It was like going back
right to the beginning, immigrating all over again, but they were middle aged, not
young.' Now in her early fifties, Julia is a renowned printmaker who lived in Italy
for many years. She still feels the loss of Darwin as a home. We meet in a cafe in
Canberra that feels as far away from Darwin as it's possible to be, and we are both
struck by how hard she's finding it to talk about Tracy and what happened after.
Every detail seems significant and painful, each represents the moment her life changed
irrevocably. Julia keeps apologising for this, and seems to have a sense she's making
too much of how difficult things were. ‘But you're not,' I tell her. ‘The archives
and newspapers are full of people with stories like yours. Everyone talks of a pain
they find hard to define.'

People had different reasons for the sense of loss they experienced when they were
forced to leave. For some, it was being evicted from a place they'd always lived
in and felt connected to; for others it was having finally found a place that they
could call home, a place that they had fallen in love with. The Churches' lives had
blossomed in Darwin—Julia at fourteen was loving school and discovering boys—and
Canberra was a backward step. Darwin, caught up in the political tumult of the seventies,
had been changing rapidly. Then suddenly Julia found herself back to old-fashioned
when-the-bell-goes assemblies. At her school in Darwin:

there were school excursions to Timor and Indonesia. It was an unselfconscious place.
We hung out with Indigenous kids and even the ‘local' kids came from all over the
world, Chinese Australians, Greeks, Dutch. The teachers came from around the world
also. It was one of the first open school systems and at school there was a lot of
work done on Indigenous issues. We were being shown the bush and introduced to it.
I guess I felt more of a sense of belonging rather than being other. Teachers were
out there. Well travelled, radical, well read. Lesbians, communists. They wore sarongs.
They introduced ideas that were new to us.

In Canberra the kids were nasty to them and accused Julia and her sister of feeling
‘special' because of what they'd been through. One teacher actually said that to
them. ‘You might feel you're really special but you're nothing.' Julia ended up wagging
all the time, and in general remembers that she and her siblings were ‘pretty mental'
for quite a while.

The lack of autonomy that evacuees, particularly women and children, experienced
meant that for many of them they were, for the first time, treated as Darwin's Indigenous
residents long had been (and as most refugees everywhere are today). ‘Whites complained
at being administered by methods refined against Aborigines for decades. Told where
they could live, separated from spouse or children, needing permits to enter the
city, at the mercy of police, politicians and pen-pushers…'
⁶
Separated from their
families and taken from their homes. Told where to go and what to do but given minimal
information. Left to sit around and wonder, ‘What happens next?' People didn't like
it. Of course they didn't. No one would.

The reality was that nearly half of the population of Darwin ended up scattered around
Australia. Despite the fact, as the St Vincent de Paul Association for Darwin evacuees
in Brisbane noted, that ‘the majority had very strong feelings about Darwin being
their home and returning at the earliest possible time', fifteen thousand never did
return. Some of the anger around the evacuation led to the formation of residential
action groups whose aim was to stay abreast of information, such as compensation,
that affected evacuees. But there was more to it than that. The key reason that it
was so hard for the non-returning evacuees was the loss of community. It's much easier
to recover if you're with a group of people who have been through the same thing.
In Julia's memory, her parents finally began to feel more settled when they could
put money down on a house and set up the Woden Valley Bridge Club as a kind of Darwin
away from Darwin.

Harry Giese, who had been working with the evacuation centres in the days after the
cyclone, established the Disaster Welfare Council (DDWC) on 4 January 1975.

One of the things that Ella Stack and I did—together with Bishop O'Loughlin and Ian
Barker, a local lawyer…we had started to move around the suburbs and town area of
Darwin to talk to groups of the people that remained in those areas, to build up
something of an
esprit de corps
among them to give them a bit of hope, to try and
inform them as to what was happening both here and elsewhere…Also with the interstate
groups, so that we…could act as a liaison between the people here and those members
of their family that were interstate.

They also provided an ongoing coordination point for voluntary agencies during the
recovery period, including those from other states. The DDWC presented a report in
March 1976 which recommended that large-scale evacuation of people only ‘proceed
in the most extreme of cases and encouragement be given to the movement of families
as a social unit'.
⁷

The Red Cross is just one of several organisations to ask themselves why some communities
are more prepared, and more resilient, than others. Why do some just get on with
the job while others fracture? Much has been written about the different fates of
two superficially similar neighbourhoods in Chicago during the heatwave of 1995,
which killed more than seven hundred within a week. The largest cluster of deaths
occurred in the locality of North Lawndale, and the smallest in Little Village. Both
areas were home to vulnerable people—a number of poor, elderly Hispanic people living
alone—but in North Lawndale the fatality rate was ten times higher. The difference?
Little Village was a close-knit community and people took to visiting each other
when things got tough. In North Lawndale there was a drug problem, which meant there
was a lot of violent crime and, as a consequence, people didn't go out much. Older
people living there had no one to look in on them. The lesson generally drawn from
this example is that community saves lives. But of course a sense of community is
not something that can be built overnight.

After Tracy, the permanently evacuated were more likely to suffer Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD), sleeping problems, issues with addiction, anxiety, depression
and a range of other disorders. A report published in the
Australian Medical Journal
in 1975 studied 67 Darwinians who'd been evacuated to Sydney. Five to eight days
after the cyclone, when they were tested, 58 per cent were assessed as ‘probable
psychiatric cases'. (The likelihood of psychological disturbance increased with age
⁸
and was more pronounced in women.) A report by the same author published in a psychiatric
journal in 1977
⁹
found that the two main risk factors for people experiencing ongoing
distress were: having believed they would die, and the stress of relocation. ‘While
psychological dysfunction was increased initially (58 per cent) and at ten weeks
(41 per cent), it had returned to an Australian general population control level
(22 per cent) at fourteen months.' However psychologist Gordon Milne later found
that the rate of disturbance did not drop nearly as quickly among those evacuees
who never returned. In 1981, 31 per cent still suffered emotional disorders. The
rate for those who returned quickly, or never left at all, was 13 per cent.

History has not been kind to our understanding of the evacuation. There is no doubt
that it caused far too much distress at the time, and continued to do so for decades
to come. There is no way of being certain, of course, that there wouldn't have been
mass fatalities from disease, exposure or shortage of food and water, as those who
took charge so obviously feared. What
is
certain is that what happened after Cyclone
Tracy has become—according to John Richardson, a recovery specialist with experience
both in government organisations and with the Red Cross—a blueprint on how not to
respond to catastrophe. Lives for the survivors were bisected into Before Tracy and
After Tracy. This was especially so for those who never found their way back, and
many of them feel sadness still.