Warning (19 page)

On Saturday 28 December a legal aid solicitor came in to see all prisoners. At 11.30
am all thirteen prisoners were released for a court appearance, then returned just
after midday. It was some time after 5 pm that ‘Sgt Blake advised that prisoner 4764
Rigas [was] complaining of a toothache.' From that time on Rigas was described, variously,
as suffering: ‘a toothache', a ‘mouth injury' then, twenty-four hours later, ‘facial
injuries'. Different coloured pens in the watch house journal suggest that these
descriptions were added retrospectively, once it became clear that Rigas' injuries
were so serious they could not be covered up. After a visit from the Greek consulate,
police were ‘advised that prisoner 4764 Rigas has a mouth injury'. Rigas was eventually
taken to hospital under prison officer escort, where he had to have his jaw wired
together. On New Year's Day he was out of hospital and taken to court to arrange
bail, before being returned to hospital late in the afternoon.

QC Ian Barker attempted to get a clear picture of what happened to Theo Rigas when
a preliminary hearing was held on 2 January. The Supreme Court of the Northern Territory
transcript in which Barker interviews Constable Griffith of NSW, who'd arrived in
Darwin on 27 December 1974, reads:

And if people present said they saw you punch Rigas on the jaw, you would say that
they, perhaps were not telling the truth would you?

—That's correct Sir.

I put it to you you did punch him on the jaw?

—No Sir.

I suppose you would go on denying that if I asked you for the rest of your life?

—Yes Sir.

It was found there was enough evidence for the defendants to stand trial, and the
trial date was set for March. The Greek consulate put up the bond for each of the
defendants and soon after two of the men, A. Magaulias and G. Fordaulis, were released
with only a sixty dollar fine. By 27 March 1975 it was Rigas and Rigas alone who
stood before Justice Muirhead, and pleaded guilty to two counts of receiving stolen
goods. In his defence of Rigas, Barker argued that ‘it was hard for people like that
to see their town virtually disappear overnight'. Muirhead responded:

I will take into account, as Mr Barker has urged, that your behaviour was in some
way an unfortunate unplanned reaction inspired by the destruction you had observed…as
I have said previously the courts will not be slow to impose sentences which may
serve as a warning and perhaps as a deterrent to those who have in the past been
tempted to profit by or may yet be tempted to take advantage of unusually exposed
premises and property.

Rigas was imprisoned with hard labour for fifteen months. Constable Griffith was
never charged. As for Guildin Kelly, he appealed his nine-month sentence without
success.

A few days after Selma fizzled out and before Tracy hit, Peter Dermoudy was quoted
as saying that many houses in Darwin would not stand up to a big wind. He was right.
There was a lot less material damage after the cyclone of 1937. While the storm surge
after that cyclone was bad, so bad that everything turned green with algae afterwards,
the buildings did okay. In general older buildings were more likely to be standing
after Tracy, while only five per cent of buildings built since the mid-fifties had
survived. Grant Tambling's house was one of the few modern houses that made it, but
it was architect designed, and tucked behind a hill.

It's unsurprising that one of the first questions people asked after they staggered
out of their houses and saw the completeness of the town's destruction—a question
they still ask some forty years later—was why the damage caused by Tracy was so extensive.

So, while it's been conjectured that the earthquake that hit a few days before Cyclone
Tracy—about 400 kilometres out, in the Timor Sea—led to some structural damage, the
real problem was the poor standards houses had been built to, particularly in the
newer suburbs north of the city. Mayor Tiger Brennan:

There have been millions spent on developing those bloody suburbs. Right. Now they
were the ones that suffered most. The older buildings seemed to stand up, and if
you look at the buildings there you'll see that the housing commission buildings
didn't suffer as much as the blinking administration buildings…Most of them suffered
because they blinking built the things on stilts that the whole top went, they landed
on top of these blinking low-storey buildings.

He's right that housing commission buildings, with their double brick walls, did
particularly well. ‘Those early days houses were built on like a tank, you know.
They were very heavy timbers and things like that, and most of them lost their roofs,
but they stayed actually on their foundations.' Ken Frey, who joined the Department
of Works and Housing in 1946, argued that, regardless of craftsmanship, age strengthens
buildings. They settle and as they do so, dust solidifies their joints.

A Larrakia woman I spoke to told me she felt that the racism Greeks endured after
the cyclone was because they were often builders, and it was builders who were in
the line of fire as the community cast around for blame. Frey, among others, suggested
that poor Greek construction work was the reason that houses broke up. The line was
that builders were using green wood, cutting it instead of bending it, not using
enough nails, and generally engaging in shonky building practices. Government architect
Cedric Patterson does not accept these assessments and talks about the Greeks and
Italians as being the original builders of Darwin.

If it was not for these Greeks and Italians, the cost of building in Darwin would
have been a hell of a lot higher and not so satisfactory. They worked extremely hard
and they deserve every respect and thanks from the people, for what they did in Darwin
over their lifetimes.

As Patterson points out, while many of the builders of Darwin's newer northern suburbs
were Greek, they'd also been the builders of the older houses which had survived
the cyclone of 1937.

What had changed was the rate of development. When Charles Gurd arrived in 1972 ‘there
were houses being built by the hundreds all over the place. They looked pretty flimsy,
and I remember my wife saying that if there was a cyclone all these houses would
blow away.' And it's certainly true that once houses broke up, more debris flew around
and that, in turn, damaged more houses. By 1974, Darwin was growing at the extraordinary
rate of 13.5 per cent per annum. The rapid expansion meant that it was hard to get
workers of a high standard, in the numbers needed. Nor were there enough building
inspectors. Len Garton:

We employed about four or five [of] what we considered competent building supervisors.
And we used to meet each night and discuss, along with photos, the various jobs that
they completed that day and put a price on what we estimated to be the cost for repairs
and so on. And we all felt, along with myself, that many of these houses were very
poorly constructed…We've seen many instances where the bond beam had lifted and the
curtains had blown under the bond beam and the bond beam had come back down and jammed
the curtain. Obviously the bond beam wasn't anchored to the bottom of the wall, or
the top of the wall.

He was also concerned that galvanised iron roofs were not fixed properly to the rafters.

In the course of cleaning up—you know, you were just wandering around and see there's
a stack of iron and you just go and look at it out of interest. And you find it's
got half a dozen nails in the bottom and half a dozen nails in the top and nothing
in the centre, which to me was a bit frightening, particularly as you look at the
number of nails in the iron as of today—every second flute's nailed.

A lot of the damage caused by the cyclone was caused by the way the roofs behaved—blowing
off the top of houses, and ploughing into, or landing on, neighbours. And of course
once a house lost its roof, it was much more likely to collapse.

Cedric Patterson, on the other hand, suggests the buildings were of reasonable standard—they
simply weren't tough enough to stand up to a ‘freak' like Cyclone Tracy. And he certainly
didn't think the fact that the houses lifted up, then dropped down again, indicated
anything other than normal construction.

As well as the rate at which houses went up, there was the issue of building codes.
As a result of Cyclone Althea, which hit Townsville in 1971, James Cook University
developed cyclone-proofing guidelines in 1973. However, George Redmond, director
of construction for the Department of Works at the time of Tracy, has said those
guidelines didn't help much in Tracy because nobody ‘realised the vulnerability of
the high-tensile steel roofing, and the holding down of the roof'.
⁹

Either way there was a limit to the difference a few more nails would have made.
Ken Frey:

Roofs before—metal roofs, galvanised iron—had been nailed. But even where they'd
been screwed these failed, because tests done by manufacturers—and by universities—all
relied on what they call static tests. In other words, they'd put a static load on
the thing. But of course, in a cyclone it's not static, you know, you've got flutter
in your wind, you've got little vortices coming off, and there's a whole lot of flapping
going on. And even where the screws held, the sheet material of the roof would fatigue
over the screw, and just split across it, and the whole roof then would peel off.

After Cyclone Tracy new screws and washers were developed to better withstand horizontal
pressures and the constant jigging they had to bear during a cyclone. I remember
Neville Barwick's evocative word, his description of the way in which buildings rattled
and rattled until they simply ‘unzipped'.

By 1974 houses were deliberately of a lighter construction. This was as much to do
with modern aesthetics as changes in mass manufacturing. The CSIRO had developed
a light timber code for houses, which was generally very successful but not good
in areas where there could be a lot of wind. This extended to the furniture. During
Tracy some people scrambled under standard-issue kitchen tables only to find they
were too flimsy to provide adequate protection. According to Frey some of these issues,
such as the CSIRO's building codes, were especially problematic in Darwin because
it was a territory, not a state, capital. This meant that designs were reviewed in
offices in Canberra and Melbourne where, Frey claimed, changes would be made without
an understanding of the implications for those who lived in Darwin.

These days national planning codes still compel architects to reduce the number of
glazed windows in buildings they design for the tropics so as to make them more energy
efficient. This makes sense if you are designing a building that is to be heated
or cooled with air conditioners, but not otherwise. It is plentiful ventilation
that makes some tropical houses, particularly the early Burnett houses, such a joy
to behold and inhabit. And, despite the lightness of their appearance, Burnett houses
did better than many buildings during Tracy.

Beni Burnett was the principal government architect in the Northern Territory in
the late thirties and early forties. The child of Scottish missionaries, he grew
up in Asia then, as a young architect, worked in China and Singapore, and you see
the influence of Asian architecture in his work. His first projects were residential
accommodation for the huge influx of public servants coming to Darwin as part of
the defence build-up in the pre-war years. One of the last buildings Burnett designed
in Darwin, in 1941, was a new post office but, because of the bombing of Darwin,
that building was never completed. Burnett was evacuated to Alice Springs just before
the air raids and never returned to Darwin; but the mark he'd made in his brief time
there was permanent.

His buildings were simple and maximised airflow. They stood on stilts, had high ceilings,
banks of louvres above partial external walls and few internal walls. You only have
to stand in one and you yearn for a plantation chair and a gin and tonic. When I
spent time in Darwin one of my friends lived in a Burnett house, one of the last
still standing. The owner of the house loves it but is not overly romantic on the
subject. Louvres and mosquito netting don't block the increasing noise of the city.
There is little privacy. The boundary between outside and inside is blurred. However
it is a cool and beautiful space to sit in, filled with the whirr of fans and the
click of geckos. It's these ambient qualities that make Darwin such a delight to
be in, and, of course, so vulnerable when the weather turns.

It wasn't just the built environment that suffered in the wake of Cyclone Tracy,
but the natural one. Robin Bullock remembers that after Tracy he was allocated a
place at Union Terrace.

It was like a desert. There was not a blade of grass, from Lee Point Road down to
where Walagi [Sanderson] High School is now…The houses at the bottom used to have
dingoes and buffalo wandering around there. I remember that. We were half-way down
to there. But they scraped everything clean. It was red-orange dirt all the way from
Lee Point Road down to Patterson Street. You could stand in your yard, backyard,
and see right up both ends. Just not a blade of grass. A lot of coffee rock, so digging
holes was hard. Any decent soil there had been scraped off.

Keith Cole says something similar. ‘The tragedy of Tracy was also seen in the environment.
Darwin had been a lush, tropical city with beautiful gardens and fine eucalypt stands
and a wide variety of birds. Tracy smashed the lot.'

Perhaps this is why, in the years after Tracy, gardens were tended with an enthusiasm
the good folk of Darwin had not shown before. Something about living in a town stripped
of all plant- and wildlife meant that people were keen to bring plants, birds and
animals back into their lives. Green ants took four years to come back, and some
people missed them so much they took nests from further inland and put them in their
gardens. According to Margaret Muirhead, nurseries sprang up all over the place.
‘I remember one man say[ing], “unless you have a garden or went through Tracy, you
really have nothing to contribute to the conversation”.'