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The Darwin International Women's Year committee reformed as soon as enough women
made it back to town to keep the committee going. It became a force throughout 1975.
According to Margaret Muirhead, the chairperson of International Women's Year in
the NT,

We said, ‘Right now we have all the more reason to do things for women in this year'
because of the devastation that they'd suffered and the extraordinary circumstances
that they were living under and looked as if they were going to be living under,
certainly for the rest of '75.

Margaret Muirhead had needed to be convinced to take on the role. ‘I'd never been
very interested in women's issues. In spite of being uncertain of my own value as
a housewife and mother of four, I still hadn't seen that there were any changes necessary
in women's life, or possible.' Her work radicalised her. ‘I think a lot of them said,
“Ho hum, so what! It will all be over at the end of '75 and we can forget about it
all.”' Objections men had to IWY included: ‘that women were wanting more to take
the jobs of men…What would happen to the children?'

At this stage only around 2500 of the ten thousand people left in Darwin were women.
Curly Nixon, who in normal times would have been working the wharves and acting in
his role as president of both the Waterside Workers' Federation and the Trades and
Labor Council, moved into entertainment. This would be, he thought, a corrective
for boredom, missing wives, and rape.

See there was those that wanted their wives back, and those that knew—had enough
brains not to want their wives back because the conditions just weren't the place
where you took wives. And, of course, I had to shut my mouth because I had mine here,
so couldn't really take sides…Anyway I said to Rex: Listen, Patto, what say we set
up an entertainment committee? Will you pick up the fare for anyone I can get to
come here?

His first choice, Rolf Harris, now seems ironic, given that at the time of writing
Harris was being tried on sex abuse charges, but back then he was a major star. He
played two concerts on 8 January using cyclone debris for a didgeridoo. That concert
and others that followed were hugely successful and a real morale booster. Other
entertainers to tour included Johnny O'Keefe and Bert and Patti Newton, but it was
Harris who is remembered with greatest affection. ‘When he lobbed here,' Nixon remembers,
‘he fell into line quite well, actually, old Rolf.' This was code for the fact that
Harris took a genuine interest in what had happened up there, and didn't complain
about the rough conditions. Other celebrities, I was told more than once, were not
so amenable.

Things were slowly starting to improve. Sure, there was no running water but one
of the pluses of that—in the retelling anyway—was that as you drove down the Stuart
Highway you'd see the flicker of naked people having showers under open fire hydrants.
People were being well fed at the high schools and the Greek club was good for a
feed, too. By 1 January there were two hundred emergency phone connections up around
the city. On 2 January the rush south had declined to a trickle and film of the devastation
in Darwin was released to cinemas. The footage was first screened in Darwin itself
at a charity performance of Barry Humphries'
Bazza Holds His Own.
Most postal services
were restored. On 4 January the weather bureau was up and running which, given people's
anxieties about cyclones returning, was a good thing. By 6 January there were four
hundred phones and beer was back on sale (though restricted to six cans at forty
cents each, which could only be purchased between noon and 2 pm, or 5 and 8 pm).
Road blocks moved further south and people had greater freedom of movement. Buses
began to run. On 7 January Woolworths reopened, as did the Karen Lee Hair Salon.
By 8 January there was free repair of television sets and fresh bread was available
to people ‘with authority'. From 9 January you could head to the Nightcliff or Parap
pool for a swim. Electricity slowly came on over several days. Cedric Patterson recalls
that at first the streets around him were ‘pitch black' then, ‘all of a sudden this
pinpoint of light appeared and then a little while later another one appeared and
then a small string of lights'.

On 10 January Ray McHenry was, to quote the
Northern Territory News
, appointed ‘Supremo
at Last'. This gave ‘unprecedented peace-time powers to the director of emergency
services. A 41-year-old career public servant is now the virtual dictator of Darwin.'
McHenry has said, ‘The legislation which purported to give almost “dictatorial-type”
powers did not follow until some weeks later. The powers were necessarily wide to
enable the validation of the many acts which had been taken pursuant to the post-disaster
effort.' He also said, more pointedly, ‘I couldn't understand what the hoo-ha was
all about…I don't know what in the hell they felt I was.'
⁴

Harry Giese did understand what the hoo-ha was about.

There was a great deal to be learned from the Darwin disaster about the way in which
the government should impose itself upon the community. That you could have [the]
El Supremo sort of thing, that one man could determine whether you had the right
to take your family down south, or whether you had the right to do this or that,
or where you should look after yourself, how you should look after yourself: there
was the feeling that government was intruding too much into the affairs of the community,
and into the affairs of individuals in the community.

Other leaders had also emerged, though: men such as Police Commissioner McLaren,
Charles Gurd, George Redmond from the Department of Works. But McHenry was the most
rewarded of these and federal cabinet confirmed his role as director of emergency
services and co-ordinator on 29 January. McHenry remembers many positive things the
close relationship with the federal government enabled, such as social security payments,
free phone calls, free transport of pets, free food and the non-payment of rent.
All these things, he believed, helped with the recovery process. And perhaps one
of the reasons the federal government worked well with him was because McHenry was
from Canberra—certainly he wasn't always on the side of
local
government. Mayor Tiger
Brennan remembers that McHenry wouldn't let the aldermen of the city council return,
which meant they didn't have the quorum to hold a meeting. Brennan found it counterproductive
to keep city leaders out of their home town, when they were most needed.

Instead of the council there were committees. McHenry's disaster plan had originally
called for seven of them, but they ended up with twenty-four. These included Aboriginal
support, communications, clean-up, animal welfare, food, health and women's activities.
Brennan described this turn of events as ‘the blinking communist way'. These committees
were slowly phased out as the emergency abated—but not before Brennan declared them
the end of him. And so it was that 1975 was the year that Darwin's mayor, the hippy-loathing,
pith-helmet-wearing Tiger Brennan, threw in the towel after three years in the job.
With his leaving, a little piece of old Darwin died. Brennan was explicit about the
fact that Cyclone Tracy had ended his career and that he'd been driven to exhaustion
by the bureaucracy and committees that had followed swift on the cyclone's heels.
‘Another six months and I would have been in the rat house.' His departure heralded
a Darwin in which women had more of a say. Brennan, the man who'd been heard to complain
about the ‘women's lib crowd', only resigned in May once he established that Ella
Stack was able to take on the mantle of mayor. Increasingly, more women took public
office and from 1977 to 1983 a fifth of the Northern Territory's parliament was female,
the highest representation of women of any parliament in Australia. It was in those
years, too, that Dawn Lawrie became the Commissioner for Equal Opportunity.

Press releases went out saying that things in Darwin were ‘beginning to return to
normal' but in truth things did not return to normal for a very long time. Maria
Donatelli's restaurant, the Capri, was the first to reopen after the cyclone and
the night that it did people lined up down the street. She describes the weeks that
followed as the ‘busiest time of my life. I kept praying somebody else would open.'
Donatelli remembers that the community spirit of Darwin was strong after the cyclone,
and that that strength of spirit lasted about four months. After that, things started
to go wrong.

Richard Creswick reunited with his wife in Perth and after a few weeks the two returned
to Darwin, living under a tarp at their house in Jingili then squatting at some ABC
flats in Stuart Park. They ate at the high schools. He, like Donatelli, remembers
some real positives from that early time. ‘Life went back to basics. If you didn't
have a television then you didn't watch it, you sat outside and you yarned with your
friends and there was for that brief period a terrific feeling of community.'

Neroli Withnall conveyed similar sentiments to the
7.30 Report
:

We waited about six weeks and then we went back. It was lovely…That was probably
one of the best years of my life. We lived under the house with a tarpaulin over
the floorboards for most of it. One of the things I suppose I learnt most clearly
was how very little you need to get by and have a good time.

Her husband John remembered it somewhat differently. ‘My memory is it was definitely
a hard slog. She didn't seem to enjoy it at the time, I might add. There's not much
to be said for lying awake at night in the wet season and having the water dripping
through the floor of the lounge room above…' They agreed on one thing though. Neroli:
‘It was such a cataclysmic event that everything was dated according to whether it
was “before” or “after”. It was like BC and AD.' John:

My own feeling is it's as if a line was drawn across our previous life…When that
sort of thing happens, it's an obvious opportunity to start afresh for lots of people
in lots of ways. We were divorced in 1978—I don't think it had much to do with the
cyclone, but you never know, you never know.

Eight months after the cyclone
Women's Weekly
ran a report on the state of Darwin
post-Tracy.
⁵
Photographer Keith Barlow, who had been there in the days after the
cyclone, then returned, was horrified. ‘What the hell have they been doing?' Part
of the reason was the population was back up to thirty thousand for the dry season.
‘We now have the problem of trying to rebuild the city over the heads of the people.'
But of course many of these thirty thousand were temporary workers rather than returned
evacuees.

Ray McHenry considered this chaos a vindication of his position that the numbers
of people in Darwin had to be kept low and the number of people evacuated high. But
by June 1975 McHenry had moved back to Canberra. From the outside it appears that
he, like Stretton, had been driven out of Darwin by pressures that included the ongoing
campaign run against him by the
Northern Territory News
, but it's less clear from
this distance whether the real pressure was political or personal. Certainly his
public position was—ironically, given his role in separating families during the
evacuation—that he didn't want to be apart from his family any longer. By the time
he returned to Darwin for a visit, in early 1976, ‘the depression in the place was
absolutely unreal' he said, arguing that if the entire population of Darwin had been
put back as early as February 1975, ‘that depression would have started earlier'.

Things were getting crazy. ‘There were squabbles, and punch-ups, between “old” Territorians
and “those blow-ins from down south”.' There were strikes, which the
Women's Weekly
claimed were workers' responses to the extra bonuses being given to the public servants—usually
southerners—who had stayed on or recently arrived in Darwin. These kinds of reports
need to be balanced against the knowledge that members of the federal building unions
from around Australia gave up their annual leave to act as volunteers. But Air Commodore
Hitchins concurs that ‘too much money was splashed around' and says that public servants
were flying off to Brisbane every weekend and demanding flashy accommodation. While
this may be an exaggeration, there is no doubt it was hard to get people to work
in Darwin over these months, or to encourage them to stay.

According to the chairman of the Reconstruction Commission, Anthony Powell, ‘There
was a lot of tension in the community, and people weren't “normal”. They're anxious
and deprived, and it's hard to achieve consensus. We can't get skilled staff. They
won't come up here without their families, and we'd have to house their families
and so it goes on.' Jim Bowditch believes people weren't facing the fact that the
old town was over. ‘It was always a bull dust town. We aren't pioneers and we never
were. We're a spoiled community, a city community.' People became passive, or perhaps
overwhelmed, in the face of what was happening to them.

‘Tracy Village' was set up for construction workers and another 1700 demountable
dwellings and caravans were brought to Darwin and located on house sites. The hotels
and hostels were full and some people just slept under bits of canvas strung up over
the ruin of their homes. Out on Darwin Harbour, the
Patris
was costing the government
fifteen thousand dollars a day to house about nine hundred people at any one time.
About 5500 people lived there in the few months it was moored. The
Northern Territory
News
described it, with typical insouciance, as a ‘luxury' liner but the living circumstances
were, as Richard Creswick and others have commented, pretty grim. It's hard to imagine
for whom the
Patris
‘was the best time I ever had'—as one mother was quoted as saying
as she stood on Fort Wharf watching the ship leave that November. One of the people
who moved to the
Patris
was Peter Dermoudy.