Warning (21 page)

Vicki Harris's description is the most distressing of all.

Phil and Bob had gone—they'd
gone over to Bob's place and on their way they'd seen the policeman shooting at this
labrador. And the labrador had blood coming out its ears and its nose and they were
just shooting at it because they couldn't catch it and they just kept shooting at
it…And Phil said: ‘There's no way I can leave our dog and just, for her to be shot
like that,' he said: ‘I couldn't do it.' So he ended up taking her to the police
station at Casuarina and he had her destroyed; they shot her. And that's actually
what they sort of said to people, you know: ‘Have your dog put down humanely'… But
she was a lovely dog and it was really quite sad. Phil had to take her in there and
make her sit and stay, and the guy tied her up with this lump of rope, and you know
he was only a really young policeman. He must've only just been in rookies, and he
was given the unenviable job of shooting everybody's pets. I just wonder really,
today, how that guy fared through it all because that would've been—on top of what
he'd no doubt seen, with the dead bodies and one thing and another—that would've
been the [last] straw, I think. It would've been absolutely awful to have had to
shoot people's dogs.

It's likely that young rookie was Robin Bullock, who, after he finished up at the
morgue, was given the job of shooting dogs and other animals.

I think there was some sort of over-reaction there. I really think the dogs probably
could've survived quite well, truth be told…I know that we had requests from owners
who were leaving, to put the dogs down, because they couldn't stand the idea of them
just wandering and perhaps not being fed—'cause they were all domestic animals.

Bullock reckons he shot twenty or thirty dogs in all, but only at the police station,
when their owners brought them in. This was often done when people were being evacuated
and couldn't take their animals with them. Former Sergeant John Wolthers, who was
in charge at Casuarina police station, ‘acknowledged the pain the policy inflicted
on pet owners. He said it was one of the saddest tasks the police had been forced
to perform.'
⁹

Jingili was a suburb I spent time in when researching this book and at one stage
I minded a dog called Daisy. At sunset, if the tide was low, I'd take her down to
the broad expanses of Casuarina Beach, which was covered with dogs and their owners
bounding, jogging and generally milling around. One night I had dinner with neighbours
and sat on their balcony, surrounded by a dense tropical garden. I mentioned my interest
in the dogs and what had happened to them. ‘The dogs?' my host asked. ‘They buried
them all up the road.' He gestured towards the end of the street, towards Jingili
Primary School. So, it seems there were mass graves after all, though it wasn't humans
who were put into them. I sat there wondering if the garbo who'd buttonholed Stretton
during a press conference all those years ago had been on his way there, to dump
his carcasses in a trench that now sits under a primary school sports oval. Certainly
the landscaping at the Jingili water gardens, at the other end of the street, had
been moulded over the wreckage of the houses from the northern suburbs. ‘You didn't
know?' one of the gardeners told me, as I was walking Daisy one night. ‘They bulldozed
the rubble to make these hills.' I hadn't known, but there was no doubting that the
gardens had some high hillocks. Modern Darwin is full of these little moments. Reminders
that you don't have to dig very deep to find the remnants of all that horror, some
forty years ago.

I'VE GOT TO HAVE MY TRIPS

IT IS impossible to overstate the significance of the timing of Cyclone Tracy's arrival
a week before 1975. That was the year of the
Racial Discrimination Act
. It was the
year Gough Whitlam went to Wave Hill and granted partial title to the Gurindji people
‘and through Vincent's fingers poured a handful of sand'.
¹
It was the year the
Aboriginal
Land Rights (NT) Bill
was introduced into parliament. It was International Women's
Year. Gay rights were finally on the agenda and homosexuality was legalised in South
Australia. The death penalty was abolished. The Vietnam War finally ended, following
Australia's withdrawal in 1972. Legal Aid was introduced. The British honours system
was replaced by the Australian one on, of course, Australia Day (though the LNP government
in power at the time of writing has reintroduced it, on 25 March 2014). No-fault
divorce was introduced. By the time Whitlam was dismissed on 11 November 1975 a record
number of bills had been introduced and enacted. By Whitlam's own estimation, more
than half his reform plan was implemented during his government's two short terms.
A few days after Whitlam's dismissal, East Timor declared itself independent, only
to be invaded by Indonesia. Refugees who fled the slaughter that ensued arrived in
Darwin close to a year after Tracy, to find a town still in ruins.

Even as a nine-year-old child I felt the seismic shift caused by the Labor Party's
win in 1972, and the energy and charisma radiated by our new prime minister, Gough
Whitlam. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons that Cyclone Tracy has so imprinted
itself on me is because it unleashed its force at such an extraordinary moment in
modern Australia's history. As we headed into 1975 the ride just got bumpier, or
more exhilarating, depending on your point of view.

The Northern Territory was feeling it too. Margaret Muirhead: ‘I think we forget
how many changes were brought about in 1975. For instance, in the Territory, that
was the year that women were allowed to sit on juries.' At that time ‘they couldn't
be bank tellers either'. The rationale was that the money was too heavy for them
to carry, and they couldn't handle a gun.

While Whitlam himself was not a young man (he was fifty-six when he took office)
the generational change his government represented permeated everything. Australia
was finally embracing its younger people and their values, rather than rejecting
them. I don't know what I expected when I interviewed Malcolm Fraser, one of the
men who brought Whitlam's term in office to such an abrupt halt on 11 November 1975,
but he spoke about his former foe with great warmth. Indeed the tone of our conversation
was so conciliatory I had to go back to Whitlam's famous speech on the steps of parliament,
after his dismissal by Governor-General Sir John Kerr, to remind myself of the temper
of the times. Malcolm Fraser, Whitlam boomed, his face fierce with rage, ‘will undoubtedly
go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr's cur'.

It was important to speak to Fraser because his government was in power from 1975–83,
which is to say for the years of the rebuild. It was not possible to speak to Gough
Whitlam because of his poor health; many other key political players, such as Jim
Cairns, have died. Despite how recent such events seem to me, it is sobering to be
reminded that they now sit firmly in the realm of history.

The only other time I'd seen Fraser in the flesh was at protest marches against his
government's attempts to cut tertiary education funding in 1981. So I hadn't expected
to find his imposing presence so moving. I was struck by how much I liked him and
what a sincere honour it felt to meet him. His voice, patrician, deep, controlled,
threw me back to those highly charged years, much as Whitlam's speeches, when you
listen to them, are now evocative of that time. At eighty-three Fraser still speaks
with great clarity. He was highly engaging and our conversation helped give me both
a sense of the times and the differences between Canberra's perspective on Tracy,
and the perspective of those who'd been through it. The main question I asked of
him, indeed the reason I'd wanted to meet him, was to help me understand whether
Cyclone Tracy was more than just a destructive storm. Had it acted as a catalyst
for political events during the tumultuous mid-seventies? His answer, in short, was
that I should resist ascribing too much political power to those massive winds.

Prime Minister Whitlam was in Europe when Cyclone Tracy hit, which was why the task
of heading the rescue operation fell to his deputy, Jim Cairns. Dr Rex Patterson,
the minister for the Northern Territory, was staying on a cattle station in Queensland
over Christmas but did end up arriving in Darwin on the same flight as Stretton.
The two men got on well, and in
The Furious Days
Stretton says Patterson gave him
much-needed support over the next week or so. Cairns arrived in Darwin on Boxing
Day and was affected by what he saw. As a result he did all he could to smooth the
way for a quick and efficient federal response. His wife Gwen, who accompanied him
on the trip, was also deeply moved by Darwin's plight and worked on behalf of evacuees
once she returned to Melbourne. It was Cairns who took a submission to the cabinet
on 28 December, acknowledging that the disaster was unprecedented in Australia, and
endorsing the evacuation, as well as providing for the immediate payment of special
benefits. Opposition leader Bill Snedden believed, Colonel Thorogood remembers, ‘that
disaster was above politics, the government and the opposition had agreed to co-operate
fully in the relief of Darwin'.

When I spoke to Fraser he returned to this theme several times—that not everything
that happened in a country should be politicised and that neither Tracy nor any other
disaster should be played for party politics. It's possible of course that a certain
bipartisan idealism is easier to maintain when one is no longer an active player;
but certainly it's hard to imagine such a coming-together of the parties in today's
political climate.

It's been said that the days after the cyclone marked the high point of Cairns' political
career. By February 1975 Cairns had declared ‘a kind of love' for Junie Morosi and
by July 1975 he'd been dismissed from the ministry—unfairly, many felt—for misleading
parliament. Tracy improved Cairns' political standing, albeit briefly, but marked
a downturn for Whitlam, who returned to Australia on 28 December only to resume his
overseas tour three days later. John Menadue, the head of the Prime Minister's Department,
tried to persuade Whitlam to stay. But ‘he looked me in the eye and said: “Comrade,
if I'm going to put up with the f—wits in the Labor Party, I've got to have my trips.”'
²
Thus began a series of headlines in newspapers around Australia, riffing on the pun
of a ruined Darwin versus the ruins of Crete. On 3 January the
Northern Territory
News
quoted the opposition spokesman for foreign affairs, Andrew Peacock, as saying,
‘Australians have been given proof that the prime minister, Mr Whitlam, has abandoned
credibility in favour of selfish junketing.'

Despite Fraser's suggesting otherwise, Whitlam did, in a sense, attempt to play party
politics after Tracy. So it's surprising that he got his PR so wrong, given how right
his party got other aspects of the emergency. The Labor government was extraordinarily
generous to Darwin's citizens. And of course, like all politicians, Whitlam was aware
of the disaster's potential to increase his standing. He was even overheard saying
that rebuilding Darwin would ‘win them the next election', or so the story goes.
Bill Wilson insists: ‘That conversation was reported to me later, and I have no reason
to disbelieve the person who told me.' Whatever the truth of the matter, Wilson's
description of Whitlam's behaviour when he visited Darwin reflects the disconnect
between Canberra and the Northern Territory and suggests why criticisms of Whitlam
abounded.

I will never ever forget this—nor forgive…Whitlam arrived in Darwin and came to the
police headquarters, and was to visit us in the communications centre. I've already
described how that room was very hot, very smelly, I suppose, that we were not still
not getting adequate showers, clothing was a bit dirty and so on. Five minutes before
Whitlam came in, one of his aides arrived with two cans of fly spray, one in each
hand, and promptly proceeded to spray the room—but not only the room, each of us
sat at a desk they'd walk up to with this can and spray us to make the place smell
nice. That caused a great deal of discontent. Those of us that were humiliated like
that never ever, I don't think, forgave Gough Whitlam for the incident. He probably
didn't know himself but he copped our blame for it. He walked in, the great man,
and shook hands with us all and said:—Oh, great job you're doing. Fine, blah blah
blah, And walked out in about thirty seconds…

Thorogood also saw the brief tour as problematic.

Did Mr Whitlam's visit to Darwin, coming from Europe, staying for a day, going back
to Europe again—did it achieve the aim? Well, I don't know what his aim was, but
I'm not sure that it contributed much at all. I think the government relationship
that had worked, and was continuing to work, was this great relationship that had
been forged between Stretton and Cairns.

Whitlam was one of many cabinet ministers to visit Darwin between 26 and 28 December.
Snedden flew in with Cairns at 2.45 pm on Boxing Day. Five ministers flew in on 27
December and attended a conference, chaired by Lionel Murphy, at which it was decided
that the Australian government would pay return fares to Darwin for all evacuees.
Air Commodore Hitchins attended that meeting. ‘I remember being very impressed with
the alacrity with which Justice [sic] Murphy got that act together and declared the
government's intention to provide substantial aid to the people of Darwin.'

Despite the positive results, it was a lot of elite personnel to manage for a city
under such extreme strain, and Stretton wasn't shy about saying so.

Politicians and people seemed to think that we were there to act as their secretaries
and I, at one stage of the game, had to ask Mr McClelland and a whole lot of them
for about the fourth time to please refrain from interfering with what our operations'
staff were doing with limited facilities and possibly one telephone that was trying
to serve twenty purposes.

At one point Stretton asked Doug McClelland to leave the ro so he could take a call
and McClelland stormed out, unimpressed.

A series of photos of Stretton and Whitlam in Darwin shows two men in spectacular
shirts, engaged in very intense conversation. I like to think that one of these photos
captured the moment when Stretton remonstrated with Whitlam about the ministerial
visits. Thorogood tells the story this way:

General Stretton said: ‘Prime Minister, is there any way that you could keep these
ministers out of my hair.' I'm not sure whether they were the exact words he said,
perhaps he said: ‘keep them out of Darwin'. But he certainly made the point that
the Ministers were really not appreciated and were not contributing to the relief
operation very much. Now Whitlam—because he's a big fellow, and General Stretton's
a big fellow—so I think Whitlam being slightly bigger looked down, and he said…‘I
don't know what you're complaining about General, I've got to work with the bastards
all the time.'

It's easy to sympathise with Stretton's frustration—can you imagine having to play
host to minister after minister in the midst of such ruin and deprivation?—but these
visits signalled to the people of Darwin that what had happened to them was being
taken very seriously. That yes, the rest of Australia did know what had happened
to them, and that they cared.

It has been suggested to me that John Howard was the first Australian prime minister
who really understood how to handle a disaster, as his exemplary performances after
both the Port Arthur Massacre and the Bali bombings of 2002 testify. Certainly Whitlam
did not get it right, and ten months after he was mocked for leaving the ruins of
Darwin for those of Crete he was dismissed from office. However Fraser—while he concedes
that Whitlam did not seem to understand how important it was that he stay in Australia
rather than returning to Europe—believes Whitlam handled the disaster well enough.
He certainly didn't think that Cyclone Tracy contributed significantly to Whitlam's
failing popularity. The government was already in trouble, he argued (and the opinion
polls suggested) and those ‘wounds were caused by recession, inflation and the oil
shock'. If Fraser's point is that disaster management was, and was seen as, essentially
bipartisan, it is borne out by his own record. The new Fraser government continued
with the program that had been put into place for Darwin in the final few months
of Whitlam's term.