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On 31 December Prime Minister Gough Whitlam said ‘that the people of the city would
probably not be allowed back into the city for about the week'. And indeed by 2 January
conditions for entry into Darwin had been relaxed slightly when McHenry stated, ‘that
men or women with property, business interests or essential work would now be considered
for an entry permit' though ‘it was not intended to issue permits to other women
or to children'. However, road blocks remained in place until 1 July 1975. McHenry
plays down the impact of this.

People made a fair amount of play of saying that, you know, the ruthless bureaucracy
wouldn't let people come back; it wasn't that way at all. We did suggest that for
people's own benefit that they ought to think twice about bringing their families
back into the sort of circumstance that applied, and until normality started to prevail.

To support his claims that the permits system was used sympathetically, McHenry
has pointed out that by the end of February some twenty-five thousand people were
back in Darwin. What he doesn't say is that many of these were not residents of the
town but outsiders helping with the clean-up. Strangers, Lawrie argued, were being
allowed in while locals fought for their right to return home. Construction workers
were welcomed as long as they had their own tools, food and shelter—indeed one of
the reasons given for moving people out, given the lack of resources, was to let
people in who had useful skills. Some locals argued that they could provide these
skills themselves but it is hard, from this distance in time, to judge the truth
of that. According to McHenry, ‘those who came in from out of town, army, navy people
etc to help with the clean up did a marvellous, compassionate job, without taking
it totally personally'.

Lawrie and her political foe Mayor Tiger Brennan usually met head to head (or perhaps
beehive to pith helmet) but they were in agreement on one point: people react to
catastrophe in different ways.

I don't think they should've kept people out who lived here, you know…In a disaster
people will panic, and they'll go away and then they want to come back. They wouldn't
allow people to come back to see what had happened to their blinking gear while it
was being looted by all the bloody hippies around the bloody place.

Brennan had a pathological hatred of hippies but he also had a point. He was just
one of many who mention that people jumped in their car and left the day after the
cyclone only to find that by the time they'd calmed down a few days later they were
trapped outside the town's boundaries.

On 4 January Lawrie declared she'd take court action to have the permit system declared
illegal. Roger Ryan of the CLP was unimpressed. ‘We have been subjected to a tirade…The
main reason for getting the people out of Darwin is to clean up to make it a reasonable
place for the women and children to live.' Ryan, like McHenry, uses the word ‘people'
interchangeably with the words ‘women and children', in what I read as a tacit acknowledgment
that the ways in which ‘people' were being spoken about was offensive. Lawrie failed
in her attempts to have the permit system outlawed.

By 7 January there were only 582 children still in Darwin, and the female population
was down to 23 per cent. By 16 January the men were getting restless. As they had
in World War Two, some started a campaign to allow their wives back in. Curly Nixon,
who still had the luxury of a wife in Humpty Doo, says, ‘Now, I was here when they
started the “bring the wives back” campaign, and I reckoned that it was the most
stupidest thing that they ever did.'

Howard Truran had to queue for hours to get a permit that would allow him to join
his wife and children down south for two weeks then return with them. When he got
to the front of the queue he was told he couldn't have one.

I really did my lolly. I suppose it was a little bit of stress. I said: ‘Listen'—I
abused him. I said: ‘I've lived in this town for twenty years. I've seen it built
up from war ruins and blown out. I've got a roof on. I've got water, sewerage, electricity.
My house is liveable and I want to bring my family back. Now you get my bloody entry
permit!' All the people back in the queue [had] probably been through (it) and they
all yelled out: ‘Good on ya, mate! Bore it up him!'

Finally, with the help of his friend Alec Fong Lim, he got his permit.

Ray McHenry, largely oblivious to the ways in which he, and the evacuation in general,
were patronising towards women, was very sensitive to the paternalism being directed
towards Darwin locals by the Commonwealth. ‘Beware of those who advocate the “shock
syndrome”. It smacks of paternalism and is offensive to those who are able to cope.
It often becomes an excuse for unwarranted intrusion in matters best left to local
authorities.' Indeed, McHenry argued that surviving the storm was one of the reasons
he was such a good organiser after it. ‘The personal experience of the cyclone and
the problems of Christmas morning were invaluable to me in the co-ordination, directing
and decision making roles that followed.' He argued that, ‘future arrangements for
welfare counselling should incorporate provision for rapid training of volunteers
and preferably those who have been involved in the disaster situations themselves'.
Despite this advocacy for the recognition of those who had been on the ground during
a disaster, McHenry doesn't seem to recognise that this criterion clearly skilled
up many women as well.

Some women still found a way to make a contribution. Those living outside Darwin,
particularly in Alice Springs and Katherine, took charge of the relief effort. In
Alice Springs 150,000 dollars was collected within a few hours of reports of the
cyclone filtering through. Women who stayed on in Darwin took on a range of tasks,
including cooking, administration and nursing. Charles Gurd remembers that ‘one lady
in particular' did a wonderful job of getting messages out. She stayed on her wireless
for a couple of days. He describes her as a local hero, though he can't remember
her name. A woman called Eileen Cossons set up the kitchen–mess hall in the grounds
of the old police station, fed hundreds of people most days, and even took it upon
herself to rescue the Supreme Court judges' wigs and gowns which ‘hippies' had taken
to wearing when they sheltered in the Supreme Court buildings after the cyclone.
One woman was kept on as an essential worker because she was a hairdresser, and hairdressers
were considered to be essential to the morale of the few women left in town. Ironically,
she ended up giving short back and sides to blokes for some time afterwards. Air
Commodore Hitchins remembers that, ‘several of the ladies who stayed behind there,
the ones that didn't have young children, they started communal laundries for the
blokes…Mrs Brown, she scrounged around and found as many serviceable washing machines
as she could, set them all up under a brick building…'

Liz Foster made the decision to stay on Christmas Day, after surveying the extent
of the damage. This was despite the fact that her marriage was unhappy and Tracy
would have given her the perfect cover for separation. But she decided she didn't
‘want to run away under those circumstances' and instead sat on the switchboard at
Darwin police station working, like everyone else, until she dropped. She and her
husband were offered a functioning flat by a policeman who was happy to move to a
hotel—on the proviso she managed to get his puppies out safely.

A lot of the calls that came through, of course, were individuals from down south
inquiring about their family, and we were issued with lists. As people had to register
that they were okay, the lists came in. So we were able to check the list and, of
course, if they weren't on that list as being confirmed okay, well then they were
[considered] missing. And that's when they would get emotional…

It's hard to argue that it wasn't an important job, or that it needed a man, not
a woman, to do it. Foster claims she felt not official but social pressure to leave
town. She was asked, ‘What are you still doing here?' by some, in a manner she felt
suggested she should get out. In general, though, she was treated with respect but
none the less, she found living in a town devoid of women and children difficult.
The policeman's flat was:

on the corner of Daly and McKinn and I remember having underwear pinched off the
line, and that frightened me a bit. I used to go over to the Territorian Hotel and
do my washing, and then I'd take it up to the CIB room in the police headquarters
and do my ironing. Then, after that, I think I got a bit anxious—there were a few
rumours going around—like the underwear being pinched and, I don't know, [I just
felt] insecure. So we moved into the hotel. I had more things pinched there—my watch.
There was no glass in one of the windows; we were in a corner room and we used to
get wet every night.

Once the wet season ended she and her husband Greg moved back to their roofless house.
The Fosters' already-troubled marriage was one of those that did not survive.

In the wake of disasters, pecking orders get reinforced. The rich are in a stronger
position to become invested in rebuilding. Race and gender lines become more rigid.
While a sense of community can be intensified after a disaster, its fault lines become
exaggerated. A report on Gender and Health by the World Health Organization, published
in 2002, wrote: ‘When compounded by a calamity, the comparatively lower value ascribed
to girls in some societies may take on lethal manifestations.'
¹¹
To this day women
get a raw deal in times of disaster. For a start, women and children are certainly
more likely to die: after the tsunami that swept through Southeast Asia on 26 December
2004, women died at four times the rate of men. Most of those who survived did so
by climbing up palm trees. When I visited, not long after the tsunami, and found
myself looking at palm trees, sheer, twisted, without so much as a foothold, it became
clear why so many children, women and old people died.

This was not, in fact, the case after Cyclone Tracy. Of the initial list of fifty-one
fatalities only sixteen were female. The names added to this list once those found
or deemed lost at sea were included were also predominantly male. However, the likelihood
of assault and rape increases in the aftermath of such events and this does seem
to have been the case after Tracy. These assaults can occur both because of the number
of strangers that move into an area after a disaster, and the close and stressed
living conditions everyone ends up living in. It can be difficult to find details
of such assaults—it is in non-disaster situations too—and we're often reliant on
anecdotal reports. For example, one observer noted in the WHO report subsequent to
the floods in Australia in 1990, ‘women experiencing violence in the home, who were
socially isolated, became even more isolated and there was an increase in domestic
violence'. After Hurricane Katrina the official number of reported rapes was four.
However when Judy Benitez, the executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against
Sexual Assault, created a national database to track sexual assaults in the wake
of the hurricane she found a different story. Six weeks after the website was set
up it had received a further forty-two reports of sexual assault. One advocate for
the database was the singer Charmaine Neville, who was raped on the roof of a school.
Another woman says she tried to report her assault, but: ‘The police was stressed
out themselves… they didn't have no food. They didn't have water. They didn't have
communication. They didn't have ammunition. The National Guards didn't want to hear
it.'
¹²

In Darwin, there was, by 3 January 1975, only one case of reported rape. However
in the year 1974–5 thirteen ‘Offences of a sexual nature' were officially recorded.
In 1975–6 that number dropped to nine.
¹³
That's quite a statistical variation, especially
if you take into account how small the population was in the first six months of
1975. It does suggest there were more sexually violent crimes as a direct result
of the stresses and strains caused by the cyclone; and it is always true that many
rapes go unreported. According to a survey reported in the
Northern Territory News
in October 1975, only one rapist in twenty was ever convicted and an estimated seventy
per cent of rapes were not reported. (Things haven't improved. Sexual assault continues
to be one of the most under-reported of all crimes. The Australian Bureau of Statistics
[ABS] Personal Safety Survey [2006] found that the nationwide rate of reporting rape
to the police has increased from 15 per cent in 1996 to 19 per cent reported in 2005.
Only a minority of reported rapes will result in criminal charges, let alone a conviction.)
¹⁴

Curly Nixon's wife was living just south of Darwin, and when he became concerned
for her well-being, he said, ‘Old Snowy and I got the twenty-two out, and taught
her how to shoot from the hip with a twenty-two, and so forth.' Richard Creswick
recalls that there was ‘an influx of construction workers, single for the most part.
A lot of people were working on the restoration of the power system and I think the
character [of the town] started to change a bit.' There were social problems on the
Patris
, a liner from the Greek-owned Chandris fleet that was docked in Darwin Harbour
for some nine months after Tracy, and: ‘A perception that in that post-cyclone period
we started to get the nasty things, the more murders, rapes and those unsavoury types
of crime, but, you know, that may be subjective.'

Some people argued the permit system should have been even tougher in an attempt
to keep unsavoury types at bay. This particular issue was fraught, as Dawn Lawrie
pointed out in Giese's DDWC report. ‘They disguise it [the permit system] by saying
that we can't cope with no hopers, hippies, drop outs etc., and you ask them to define
them and it's more or less everyone with whom they disagree.'
¹⁵
McHenry writes, in
the same report: ‘There would be people in Darwin who say we shouldn't have hippies
here and yet there are hippies in every other part of Australia.' He elaborates,
slightly confusingly, ‘There are those who would argue that prostitutes should be
here because there are so many single men around the place. I don't know which is
worse, prostitutes to satisfy the blokes, or fights over prostitutes.'