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Some police from New South Wales arrived looking as though they were going into a
battle zone in Vietnam. McLaren was the police commissioner up here at the time and
he ordered that all interstate police be disarmed except to the extent of one sidearm.
They had riot guns and almost bazookas and cannons—that's what they looked like.

McLaren, it should be mentioned here, has been described as one of the heroes of
Cyclone Tracy. Bishop Ken Mason described him as ‘a quiet, gentle man…whose calm
nature gave such a quiet, confident and consistent leadership'.

Peter Talbot recalls that ‘up at the Travelodge there was a big party every night,
booze party, all the coppers…we used to watch the Commonwealth police get around
with that big rifle just like the wild west'. Before the cyclone, police had not
carried guns in Darwin so this was a real shock. Lorna Fejo: ‘I guess, me, as an
Aboriginal person, I was really terrified of the Commonwealth Police because they
were walking around with guns on their hips, and it frightened me and my children.'

The Kings Cross policemen were accused of looting and drunkenness by Tiger Brennan,
who described incidents in which police ‘stood over several publicans for beer'.
By 1 January Brennan was telling the press, ‘It's time for the southern cops to go
home. I have heard complaints about some of the southern police but I am not prepared
to give details now.' Another senior official described them as ‘a gang of cowboys'.
NSW Deputy Commissioner Newman defended his force, while McLaren insisted that evidence
of police looting was not found and that all complaints were investigated. Wilson:
‘As regards stealing, I've heard allegations, but I've never seen any evidence, and
I've never heard of any proved things that some of the interstate police looted.'

Off the record, though, several people told me that police looting absolutely occurred—and
I didn't have to look far for corroboration. I found the following notes in hand-written
police journals in the Territory's archives:

Interstate police—obtained 80,000 cigarettes from S.C. Eyles this date—Yesterday
6 NSW police went to camera shops—Coles Casuarina bypassed C'wth police on duty and
removed a number of camera & equipment. Same Crew travel about in private car.
Armfuls of clothing have been seen carried into Travelodge by interstate police who
openly boast of achievements.

These accusations made it as far as a typed ‘complaints' book but then appear to
peter out.

When Darwin was burned and looted in wake of the bombings of 1942 much of the destruction
was caused not by the Japanese who made it to shore but by Australian and US soldiers.
As journalist Mark Day wrote about those fraught days, ‘There was panic, looting,
cowardice, desertion and a stampede south to get out of harm's way.' Darwin's Chinese
population back then were victimised by looters, as they have been throughout history.
Because they weren't Australian citizens they had less recourse to justice when attacked.
Furthermore, as Charles See Kee has commented, those in Darwin, ‘were worse off than
in any other parts of Australia because Darwin was isolated away from everywhere
and nobody knew what was going on'. After 1956, changes to the law meant that many
Chinese people in the Northern Territory became naturalised, but even then they were
still banned from a range of sporting and social venues. Nor were they allowed to
join the unions. Bill Wong remembers that they weren't allowed to serve on a jury
either, until well into the 1970s. It wasn't until he mentioned this to Jock Nelson
that the situation was quickly sorted out. (And the Chinese community were cranky
at him because it was a task they didn't particularly want to perform.)

Alec Fong Lim lost his brother Arthur in Tracy, his aunt had both feet amputated
and two other relatives were badly crushed by falling walls. His family owned the
Vic Hotel in the city centre, and Lim's Hotel in Rapid Creek, which was famous for
its caged bar (‘rage in the cage'). Fong Lim went on to serve on the Cyclone Trust
Fund Committee and became mayor of Darwin in 1984. That was all well in the future
and quite unimaginable when his family first moved to Darwin, in 1938. At that time
the Chinese numbered three hundred out of a population of two thousand. He remembers
that the anglos lived in Smith Street, Mitchell Street and The Esplanade. China Town
was in Cavenagh Street and Indigenous people lived in compounds and police paddocks.
His father bought a shop next to the Star Theatre in what's now the Smith Street
Mall.

Imagine the consternation amongst the Chinese community, whose businesses were exclusively
in Cavenagh Street, when this country bumpkin bought a business in Smith Street—the
white man's domain!! ‘You will never succeed', they said. ‘The whites will not trade
with you and you must operate in Cavenagh Street.'

Their shop was looted during a riot with soldiers in 1941. ‘I can still see them,
as we all cowered in the back of the shop, ready to defend ourselves…The damages
were all blamed on the soldiers, but I remember that a lot of civilians took the
opportunity to ransack my beloved tobacconist shelves.'
³

The first person to be sentenced for looting after Cyclone Tracy was Guildin Kelly
(newspapers and other records also called him Goldin and Goldie). He was arrested
on Sunday 29 December and went to court the next day. Kelly was an Aboriginal man,
and he had taken whisky and brandy worth fourteen dollars. But that was not all he
was charged with and, in an ironic twist on the problem of policemen wearing civvies,
Kelly, who was not a member of the police force, was wearing a police cap, apparently
to trick a man into handing over his grog. This meant he was also charged with impersonating
a police officer. Magistrate David McCann sentenced Kelly to nine months (though
McCann and many others remember Kelly's sentence as three to six months). McCann
described the situation this way: ‘I was rather disappointed that the first person
they'd managed to arrest and charge with stealing, which was in the area of looting,
was an Aborigine…it would have been a little more representative of what was actually
going on had somebody other than an Aborigine been charged.' McCann's record shows
him being in sympathy with the fair treatment of Indigenous people in the Territory.
He was certainly in favour of the shifts in the legal system that were occurring
in response to Lionel Murphy's and Crown Law Officer Clem O'Sullivan's push for change.
This makes his harsh sentencing puzzling. In this case, he argued, it was on the
secondary charge that Kelly had to be made an example of. Kelly's claim to be a police
officer may have been malicious, but it was also a bit of a joke since there were
no Indigenous members of the police force in the Northern Territory in 1974. For
this reason Frank Thorogood questions the legitimacy of the ‘Aboriginal man impersonating
a police office charge'. The then-president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties,
Mr K. D. Buckley, described the sentence as ‘unduly harsh…the sentence seemed so
severe it almost gave the appearance of discrimination', though his further claims
that Kelly had actually been carrying out valuable work cannot be sustained. Major-General
Stretton felt so strongly that the severity of Kelly's sentence was motivated by
racism that he ran up Darwin's courthouse steps to confront McCann. To onlookers
it looked, for all the world, like a military intervention. The ensuing altercation
made the front page of newspapers around the country on New Year's Eve and became
the stuff of history books, highlighting the tensions between the Commonwealth and
the Territory as much as between black and white.

McCann: ‘My immediate view was I wasn't going to take orders from anybody, particularly
orders relating in a courthouse situation… Stretton, I think he was in his full regalia,
not in his best uniform but, you know, it was quite obviously a military presence…'
This is not quite true. The photo of Stretton charging up the steps that was run
in the
Northern Territory News
is dramatic, but he's certainly not wearing anything
resembling full regalia. However Clem O'Sullivan also describes Stretton's visit
to the magistrate's courts as an ‘invasion attack'. In hindsight, both sides have
a point. Stretton that the racial politics of the Territory were problematic and
McCann that Cyclone Tracy, like many disasters since, was becoming the excuse for
what felt like a military, and federal, intervention.

Stretton's sprint up the courtroom steps on 30 December captured in a symbolic, albeit
unintentional, fashion the deep rift between the Territory and the rest of Australia.
His radio speeches also captured a certain disconnect between Canberra and Darwin,
one that seems relevant here. It predates Tracy and is arguably present today. Thorogood
said he had to ask Stretton:

to be careful of one phrase. He kept talking about ‘the people back down in Australia'…I
kept on: ‘No, no, down south, but not down in Australia'. But it never seemed to
offend anybody so I guess it didn't matter. I guess people in Darwin often did think
that the rest of it was Australia anyway.

Managing Indigenous people's relationship to alcohol using the law continues to the
present day as the contentious, and recently defunct, Banned Drinkers' Register shows.
Even the term long grasser is, according to Ted Egan, based on the fact that Indigenous
people liked to drink outside. ‘The arrangement was that the supplier, quite often
a taxi driver, purchased the liquor for them, and left the wine “In the long grass”.'
⁴
A friend, self-described planning reform enthusiast and co-director of the National
Live Music Office Dr Ianto Ware, has said to me that the Northern Territory's Liquor
Act has ‘an above average capacity to rule against people's use of intoxicants'.
While this isn't directed just at Indigenous people, this approach is ‘unusual but
also very, very old fashioned. Usually when it comes to alcohol consumption and
the social contexts that surround it, we regulate the places people drink, without
specifically targeting the drinker.'
⁵

Some people were upset about Guildin Kelly's treatment for another reason: they felt
the Greeks were the ones who should have been punished. Accusations of looting became
a significant flashpoint for the racial tensions that existed in Darwin between
Greek families—many of whom had been there since the 1920s—and the rest of the population.

The source of this antagonism towards the Greeks is unclear, though Jack Haritos
remembers they were always known as the ‘Greasy Greeks'.
⁶
When I spoke to Greek people
still living in Darwin they had little interest in dwelling on the racism they (or
their parents) had been subjected to.

There were complaints in police reports about Greek evacuees not sharing. Other accounts
phrase it in terms of different cultural responses to disaster. They discuss the
fact that those who came from a place where they could not expect government help
were more focused on saving themselves. Spiro Papas, on trial for larceny and possessing
stolen goods, explained it this way:

I put my family in the school and I go round and try and find some food because we
got the wrong idea, so where we could find the food—just stole some food to live,
because the Greeks don't believe in Salvation Army and Red Cross. We don't have experience—in
our country they're poor and happen, something like this happen—you know—we don't
get help.

Curly Nixon remembers,

the
NT News
was the judge and jury of a mob of Greeks that [are] supposed to have
got caught looting and taking stuff south. But when it got into the court later on—without
any apologies—it was proven in course that all the stuff that they'd had in these
trailers actually belonged to them, and had belonged to them for ten/twenty years—some
of it. Some of it had only been just bought before Christmas, as presents and that…there
were signs appearing: ‘Keep Australia Beautiful—Kill a Greek a day'…And when the
poor bastards were proven innocent, there was no apologies or any headlines on the
front page about how they were proven innocent, and a mistake was made—no way in
the world.

Peter Talbot also defends the Greeks' reputation. ‘Another thing too, they reckon
all the Greek was the biggest looter in Darwin, they wasn't.' Meanwhile his daughter,
who worked in the court system producing summonses, told him that most of those arrested
had been ‘Australians'. McLaren believes the Greek situation was exaggerated. ‘There
was a group of Greeks who went to a shopping centre and they were going to help themselves
to food and so forth, no doubt I suppose not knowing what the future held for them.'
⁷
Bill Wilson again: ‘You shouldn't tar the whole community with the actions of a few
people, but if the police were winners, reputation-wise, out of the cyclone, the
Greek community were the losers.' Cedric Patterson, who was a supervising architect
for the Commonwealth Department of Housing and Construction when Tracy struck, remembers
that:

These two Greek fellows—young chaps, very good workers—they'd finished the contract
they were on and they were going south with their families. And the way it was relayed
to me, was that they were stopped at a road block, accused of looting and stealing
which they certainly had not. And one of the fellows was smashed in the mouth by
one of the police, and finished up having his jaw completely shattered and had to
come back and have it all wired.

It's possible Patterson's story may be a variant of the arrest and assault of Theo
Rigas. Rigas, a postal line worker and bricklayer who'd been arrested for larceny
and possessing stolen property, was brought into the watch house at eight at night
on Friday 27 December. He was one of seven men (including Spiro Papas) and two teenage
boys who'd been questioned after their homes and cars in Rapid Creek were found to
contain a large number of clothes, bolts of cloth, furnishings, cassette stereos
and the like. The court transcripts quote Constable Ian Doube as saying: ‘I noticed
that the vehicles in the yard, apart from the truck, were loaded with what appeared
to be new goods in the way of lazy boy chairs [sic], great quantities of food, great
quantities of clothing and linen. Some of the clothing and some of the linen was
in new wrappers.'
⁸
The men said that these were their own goods and certainly there
are many stories of people being arrested for putting their own goods in the back
of their car, or, as happened to Patterson, being harassed when they were trying
to get back into their own homes. The Greek men were formally arrested and the children
sent home—though not till the next morning. ‘Both prisoners fathers still in custody
and they were therefore given permission to sleep in one of the cells.'