Warning (3 page)

Beth Harvey's husband Pete worked at the weather bureau so she was better informed
than most. Earlier that day she'd got a call from him saying: ‘Tell the ladies [at
playgroup] they'd better get their cooking done today 'cause they won't have any
power tomorrow… And by the way, Ray Wilkie's not going to any Christmas parties…
he's not even going to have a beer, so it's serious.'
¹⁶
Beth had known people who'd
gone through cyclones in Townsville, which added to her nervousness. She spent many
hours trying to convince her friends not to shrug the warnings off.

The 1986 miniseries
Cyclone Tracy
depicted the citizens of Darwin as complacent (and
Darwin's meteorologist as incompetent, though there is no suggestion that was, in
fact, the case) and the story that tropical laissez faire was Darwin's main problem
is a persistent one.

Surveys done after Cyclone Tracy suggest that about a third of those who heard the
warnings did nothing at all.
¹⁷
Around ten per cent had, like the workers at the hospital,
some kind of cyclone protocol to follow, about sixteen per cent made serious attempts
to strengthen their houses. The rest did a few bits and pieces or nothing at all.
So: despite the fact that cyclone warnings were going out over the radio every hour,
some twenty-five warnings in all, most people did little more than make a few low-key
allowances such as walking the dogs earlier than usual, cleaning up the yard and
putting water in the bath.

The fact Cyclone Tracy hit on Christmas Eve made people even less responsive. ‘It
will not happen to me' syndrome, as it's called, joined, in a devastating fashion,
with Christmas celebrations and the general sense that only good things happen at
this time of year. Jim Bowditch, a former editor of the
Northern Territory News
,
was a man described as ‘a Character, though that should probably be written as CHARACTER.
After a few drinks Bowditch was capable of firing the entire newsroom, without preamble
or explanation'.
¹⁸
He was interviewed just a few months after the cyclone and he
was refreshingly frank on the subject.

I was pretty sloshed when Tracy was moving in on Darwin, because with some thousands
of other Darwin people I was celebrating at a normal Darwin Christmas-eve party,
which were always pretty boozy, and I was boozing with printers. Anyone who knows
printers knows what that means…I, with a lot of others at the party, had listened
to the warnings of the approach of Tracy and, as with most other people, I ignored
them.
¹⁹

In his book
The Furious Days
, published only a year or so after Tracy, Major-General
Alan Stretton (appointed by Canberra to head the relief effort) made himself unpopular
by describing Darwin authorities as lacking initiative and being ‘completely unprepared'.
²⁰
Air Commodore David Hitchins, who became heavily involved in the evacuation effort,
acknowledged, when he was interviewed in 1987, that ‘there's an element of truth
in what General Stretton says about the lack of a total coherent plan for coordination
of civil relief in such a situation. Yes, I guess that's pretty right.'
²¹

There was in fact a disaster plan in development; but in light of Darwin's catastrophe-strewn
history the fact that such a thing did not already exist is hard to understand. As
the ABC's Bill Bunbury has written, ‘Darwin has had a long history of destruction
and rebirth [that has] given the Top End's top town a special character.'
²²
In 1875
about a quarter of the white population of Darwin was drowned, travelling on leave
from a tour of duty in a ship sunk by a cyclone off the Queensland coast. The town
was hit by destructive storms in 1878 and again in 1881. A massive cyclone that coincided
with a high tide hit in January 1897 and destroyed most of the town's buildings,
two-thirds of its pearling fleet and twenty-eight of its inhabitants. In 1915 three
boats were sunk; in 1917 a cyclone drowned three people and buildings were extensively
damaged; in 1919 two sailing vessels were sunk in the harbour and across the Beagle
Gulf the Bathurst Island Catholic mission was wiped out. The cyclone that swept in
from the northwest in March 1937 killed one person and caused widespread damage to
most of the town's buildings.
²³

However Stretton's rhetoric did ignore the fact that the Northern Territory had just
completed Australia's first emergency protocol procedures, procedures that were quickly
enacted after the cyclone hit. Indeed, Stretton had helped institute them. Les Liddell
of Tennant Creek was responsible for emergency services in the area and remembers
being handed a disaster plan for Darwin that set out what they envisaged would happen
if major storms or a cyclone were to hit the city over Christmas. ‘“Les, you're the
only one left in town, you might need this.” And off they went.'
²⁴
Liddell went on
to play an important role in assisting evacuees after Tracy.

A year before Tracy, in the wet season of 1973–4, the roads to Darwin had been cut
off for almost three months. There had been major floods around Australia and in
some parts of the country rainfalls had been the highest ever recorded. Almost every
river in Queensland had been flooded, and in the northwest and the Gulf country,
the flooding had been extensive and enduring. On Australia Day 1974 Brisbane flooded
and sixteen people died. Ray McHenry knew there were indications that the Territory
could expect a difficult wet season and he was attempting to prepare for it. It was
during that time that McHenry approached the Natural Disasters Organisation in Canberra
and ‘obtained the services of a military officer to familiarise himself with the
Territory's problems and to develop a comprehensive plan for disasters of both a
Territory and a Regional nature'. According to McHenry that plan was developed with
input from the federal government, local government, the private sector and representatives
from all over the Territory. It was approved on 5 December 1974, twenty days before
Tracy. Talks about the management of the wet season in Darwin were held in Canberra
four days before Tracy struck. McHenry was also in the middle of preparing drafting
instructions for the introduction of a disaster management bill to the fledgling
Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory. (Disaster plans were not backed by
legislation in most states back then. Victoria didn't get an act until 1986 and Western
Australia has only enacted such legislation in the last decade. The lag between planning
and legislation continues to this day.)

Ray McHenry was to become an important and divisive figure in the story of Cyclone
Tracy. Long-time Darwin resident Harry Giese, who for twenty years had been Director
of Welfare, was one of his many critics. Giese's job had involved being a long-term
member (1954–73) of the Northern Territory Legislative Council, which meant he had
to introduce and defend bills on behalf of the federal government, and fight these
into legislation. He had to rebut attacks both from those who thought he was too
progressive, and from those who wanted a faster pace of change. It was a difficult
position to be in. Then, said Giese, ‘I got a call, on the morning after the announcement
of the Whitlam victory, from McHenry, advising me that I no longer had a job in the
Northern Territory and that he was taking the job as Director.'
²⁵
His deputy, Ted
Milliken, has commented that Giese's ‘displacement…was one of the meanest things
that I have ever seen done to anybody in my life'. McHenry was unpopular but he was
also tough, canny, and extremely competent.

Malcolm McKenzie, who ran the Rapid Creek betting shop, described the people of Darwin
as ‘eternal optimists'
²⁶
but it's not just the people of Darwin who tend to optimism.
In his book
The Human Side of Disaster
, Thomas Drabek emphasises the fact that people,
particularly men, often don't respond to warnings. They go into denial and have a
tendency to minimise the risks. Jim McGowan, the deputy chairman of the Queensland
State Disaster Management Group from 2007–11 says that despite three days' warning,
Brisbane residents failed to take the appropriate action during floods in 2011. ‘People
knew that they were coming for three days and yet at the end of it people said they
weren't warned. I think the new level of warning goes something like, “I want to
know that the flood is going to come to the third rise of the back steps of my house.”'
²⁷
But some people I spoke to felt that this was inevitable and that uniformed emergency
services had an unrealistic sense of what you could expect. Certainly people will
only act on warnings when they are expressed in a way that is made meaningful to
them. In the archival interviews several mentioned this—that the wording of some
of the warnings regarding when and where Tracy might make landfall were technical
and slightly incomprehensible. You also have to ask what responding to warnings would
have achieved. People who filled up their baths and cleaned up their yards had their
houses destroyed as completely as the next person; in fact filling the bath created
a problem when they had to hide in the bathroom. The only thing that people really
could have done to look after themselves was to leave town.

Members of the Bagot community stayed put like everybody else, despite being aware
that something was coming. Aboriginal activist and welfare worker Vai Stanton told
Kevin Gilbert that she had been ‘very involved at that time [of Tracy] with the fringe-dwellers
because we were trying to get them tarpaulins for the wet season because we were
expecting a very wet “Wet”, you know'.
²⁸
And there were ‘claims that a prominent
Larrakea [sic] leader, Bobby Secretary, told “quite a few people” in Melbourne in
September 1974 that “the spirit who watched over their land, had said that a very
big cyclone was to come”.'
²⁹

Beth Harvey expressed a fatalism that both black and white residents shared: ‘There
is no point panicking. If it's coming it's coming. You just have to be prepared.'
Liz Foster, a thirty-four-year-old woman who'd lived in Darwin for two years, remembered
that the wildness of the weather that Christmas Eve evoked ‘a fear, but not really
believing that you're going to get killed or anything. It's just this awe that you
have about nature—this thing that is so much bigger than you and that nobody has
any control over—wouldn't matter what you had—nothing could control that.'
³⁰

DISAPPEARED

DARWIN OLD-TIMER Edna Harmer was worried about the cyclone, but what can you do?
She spent the evening repairing crochet that fringed a tablecloth so it would look
nice for Christmas Day. Charles Gurd stayed back from work for the hospital's Christmas
party but drove home relatively early in the evening because the weather was making
him nervous. Richard Creswick spent much of Christmas Eve at a long lunch. He went
back to the ABC to oversee the evening's television news before driving home through
the pounding rain. Down at Humpty Doo, a few miles inland, Bob Collins—only twenty-eight
but already a senator for the Northern Territory—spent most of the evening trying
to save his stereo. Hedley Beare, who for the last two years had been the Northern
Territory's Director of Education and who lived in a house on the Esplanade in the
centre of town, became quite agitated. At about ten that night he put the kids' Christmas
presents back in a cupboard and got the children out of bed to shelter in the hallway
near the bathroom. He and his wife Lyn wheeled a steel-framed bed from one of their
sons' rooms into the hall as an extra source of protection. They sat there for the
next nine hours. Julia Church remembers: ‘We started to open our presents then decided
to wait till the morning—so we'd have a few presents left. It was a longstanding
family tradition, not being able to wait till Christmas morning.' They all went to
bed, but then rain started coming in through the louvres and the house became like
a ‘bowl filling up with water'.

Maria Donatelli, born in Italy, had quickly become a Darwin institution and in 1974
she owned the Capri, an Italian restaurant in Knuckey Street. Becoming concerned
about the wild winds, she called her staff and told them to go home. They couldn't
leave because the customers were refusing to go; soon after, though, they left the
customers to it. Cypriot Savvas Christodoulou, owner of Savvas Motors and a Darwin
resident since 1948, was holding his annual Christmas party at the garage. The winds
were so strong by the end of the night that many of his guests didn't want to leave,
but he managed to get rid of them by 11.30 pm. This was around the time that Toni
Joyce, who was visiting Darwin to spend time with the ABC cameraman, Keith Bushnell,
saw Bushnell's roof lift—then drop back into place. Bushnell looked at her and said,
‘It's OK, kitten,' promising her she'd be ‘safe as houses'. An unfortunate simile.

Janice Perrin had lived in Darwin her whole life and wasn't too fussed at all. She
was trying out a new recipe—glazed and steamed ginger chicken—and watching a thriller
on the telly when the power went. A little later some tendons in her husband's foot
were sliced by flying glass; her memories after that become vague. She remembers
that she was menstruating, and was dressed only in underpants and a nightie. As the
night wore on this worried her, but there was no way she was going to be able to
change. ‘I remember being in the kitchen, I remember the colours of the kitchen,
I remember putting a mattress on the floor…'
¹

Over at the Fannie Bay Watch House the police on duty were dealing with a man who
had ‘turned himself in'. ‘He was in a very drunken condition and continued to rave
about his missing wife…He continually stated that he thought she had been murdered
and said, “I don't think I would have done her any harm—but you never know after
a bottle of whisky.”'
²
Policeman Bill Wilson was not on duty that night. He was with
his wife Patricia, a former policewoman—he'd met her on his first day on the job—and
she ‘spent a large part of the time with the cat tied in a towel and strapped to
her'.
³
Dr Ella Stack was at the Darwin hospital when a nurse, Sister Anne Arthur,
told Stack to go home to her family. In a spectacular case of bad timing, Sister
Arthur happened to be going into labour at the time so Stack left, but somewhat reluctantly.
When she got home she was seized by an ‘intuition'. She dragged her sleeping husband
out of their bed and a few minutes later a wooden beam speared it. Many people describe
these moments of insight; moments that, in hindsight, saved lives.

Despite teasing Ida Bishop for her ‘intuition', her boss had sent his prawn trawlers
to sea to ride out the cyclone. During Cyclone Selma they'd moored them in the harbour
but the moorings had snapped, so they were trying a different approach. Getting the
ships out of the harbour with a Christmas skeleton staff was trickier than usual,
but nonetheless they headed out around 7.30 pm. Soon the trawlers were battling ferocious
seas and a wind velocity estimated at over 170 knots. Bob Hedditch of Northern Research's
Anson
said that by midnight things were really bad. ‘The wind blew in our windows
on the bridge and tore the back off.' By that stage he was measuring the winds as
reaching 280 km/h.
⁴
Another trawler, the
Frigate Bird
, was taken out of the harbour
at 11.30 pm in an attempt to stop it smashing into the wharf. At some point her
engine failed and she capsized, then grounded on a reef. Captain Odawara of the Gollin
Kyokuyo Fishing Company took the
Flood Bird
to sea around the same time. As the HMAS
Arrow
rode out, ‘one of the ship's company remembers counting some seventeen vessels—prawn
boats, two ferries and a schooner—anchored behind them in Darwin's inner harbour
before the tropical cyclone struck.' Meanwhile, back at home in her house at Parap,
Ida Bishop put on her nightie, then put the kids' Christmas bikes by the bed. She
didn't want the cyclone to ruin Christmas.

Presents—the giving of them, the loss of them, the finding of them in the wreckage—would
soon take on enormous symbolic power. By the next morning undelivered Christmas presents
would sit among bodies at the Nightcliff post office; unopened ones would litter
the ruins.

Charles Gurd sat in an armchair in his bungalow on Myilly Point with his dog on his
lap and watched water stream down walls, thinking these were his final hours. Ken
Frey and his wife had moved to the bathroom when the winds first got bad, but ended
up going down to the storeroom because of concerns the bathroom wasn't safe. Pat
Wright, who lived in Smith Street in the centre of town, found her husband, Arthur,
being lifted up by the roof as he tried to stop it pulling free from the house. His
shoulder was being badly wrenched. Pat convinced him to give up on the roof and hide
in a downstairs toilet in the dark. They sat there and listened to the house being
destroyed around them and became increasingly concerned that a nearby water tower
would come down on top of them. ‘You could hear the nails coming out of the timber
and everything else.'
⁵
At Savvas Motors the garage began to break up so Christodoulou
ran around bracing it with timber. ‘I couldn't find the hammer that night, to nail
the nails, and the only thing we found—the chopper. I hit the nails with the opposite
end of the chopper. I never even hit my fingers once. We nailed about two thousand
nails.'
⁶
A nun at the East Arm Leprosarium describes ‘a rush of wind, a sudden crashing
noise, and the whole panel of glass louvres above my bed splintered…[there was a]
terrible grind as the entire roof was lifted off.'
⁷
At Bagot community some people
broke into the shop because it was safer in there. Eight-year-old Stephanie Nganjmirra
Thompson hid under the kitchen table with her mother and three siblings. It was very
noisy, particularly once the roof soared into the sky. Her mother was a big woman
and she protected her children with her body. She promised them that she'd stop drinking
if they survived. (Stephanie's mother went on to become a president of Bagot Reserve.)

By one in the morning the winds had really got going. Ida Bishop, who had a great
eye for an image, said ‘it was like a giant running his hands down the side of the
house going
vvrrrrrrrrr
like this, and you could feel the shudder of the wind going
along'. Ray Wilkie spent the night under his office desk, on the phone while he still
had a line, trying to keep track of the situation. His last call before the phones
went was to Don Sanders. ‘Well, if I sound a bit panicky, Don,' he said, ‘it's because
I am.'
⁸
People hid under their beds, often finding that their animals had beaten
them to it. A woman saw her dogs flung through the sky on their chains but by some
kind of miracle, they made it back to the house. The Church family ran for their
lives. Julia was totally naked, her sister was in a nightie, her dad was in his shorts
and her mum wasn't wearing much either. As the roof began lifting off a vacuum was
created. ‘We ran down the corridor toward the lounge. The door was buckling inward;
my father grabbed it instinctively and we formed a chain down the corridor.' The
door went and they ran into the bathroom. The walls went there as well and they made
a dash for it, downstairs to the unlocked car. Julia was desperate for a wee and
at some point used an ice cream container she found in the car. The piano blew out
of the house, narrowly missing them. Julia wasn't actually frightened. None of them
were. ‘The human spirit,' she tells me, ‘is amazing.' Plaster flew around them, white
and flaking. Julia imagined they were in a snow dome.

It was about now that some people were whisked out of their houses. Ken Frey describes
a colleague's experience:

One of our architects, who had three children, went into the bathroom, and the two
youngest they put into the bath itself, thinking that it was fairly safe. And the
mother, I think, was against one wall with the husband. And one of the children was
hanging onto the hand basin when the wall went out; the bath went with the wall,
and so did the hand basin. So all three children went out and the two parents were
left in there…

Shirley Gwynne was sucked out of the house in Wagaman that she'd lived in for six
years, then flung on the ground and hit by flying chunks of concrete. She described
it as like being caught in a giant washing machine. She then managed to crawl towards
their storeroom with her baby Damian in her arms, but as she was doing this the family
pool collapsed, releasing forty thousand litres of water and washing her son from
her arms. ‘I thought I had lost him forever…' Gwynne crawled around in the dark,
searching for him. Miraculously, she found him caught under the tyre of her Mazda.
The car lurched and threatened to crush them both but she somehow found the strength,
in winds of more than two hundred kilometres an hour, to lift the car off herself
and her child. Her husband was screaming at her to crawl into a car trailer.
⁹

Soon after the ‘hard blow' at around 2 am, the crew member from HMAS
Arrow
who'd
counted seventeen vessels in the harbour looked around to see none left. ‘All had
presumably sunk.' Soon after that, the
Arrow
hit the Stokes Hill Wharf in the harbour
and there was a series of explosions as the ammunition on board went off. Some of
the men managed to get onto the wharf before the boat sank. They held on to whatever
they could in wind and rain so fierce it ripped off their clothes. The boat's skipper,
Bob Dagworthy, got to a life raft. Out on the
Anson
Bob Hedditch recalls: ‘By 2 am
we had no lights, no steering and only the main engine to keep us going…We lost both
our anchors and I didn't have a clue where we were.'

Bishop Mason sat drinking beer with Bishop O'Loughlin, both men feeling regret at
having held midnight masses. The Wilsons decided their house was no longer safe and
were forced to put the cats and dogs into the car and leave them to it while they
staggered towards the roadway. Bill put Patricia's arms around a street sign but
then ‘her feet lifted off the ground, the wind was that strong. It's like those cartoon
things you see with people hanging onto a sign, almost horizontal.' No one, and I
mean no one, was adequately dressed for the occasion. Elizabeth Carroll wore her
new long nightie, one pretty enough to wear as an evening dress, into the toilet.
She stood there, alongside three adults and five children, for the entire night.
The independent member for Nightcliff, Dawn Lawrie, escaped her collapsing house
with nothing but her kids, a dog, the puppy and its puppy food.

Well, there were already seven people in the car. So with my husband, myself, our
three kids and the two dogs, we somehow piled on top of these. And out of the gloom
staggered a drunk, and we said: ‘Quickly mate, hop in [and] we'll get you to the
college.' And he said: ‘No, she's right. I'm looking for a party.' I said, ‘You crazy
man, the whole town's blown away.'…That was the last we ever saw of him [
laughter
].
Presumably, he was blown to Timor.
¹⁰

When she got to the cyclone shelter she put her kids in an industrial fridge for
safety.

Wendy James, a much-loved figure in Darwin, had moved there in 1937 when she was
a small child. When her sister-in-law Barbara James warned her about the cyclone
she'd sent two of her four sons to her mother Pearl's house in Rapid Creek, so they
could keep an eye on her. Quite a few people weathered the cyclone at Pearl's. That
house stood strong while Wendy's collapsed around her and her family after a tree
crashed through the roof. She, her husband Earl and their two younger boys went downstairs
to hide in the shed. Only when the door had slammed behind them did they realise
that the pool chemicals kept there had exploded through the tiny room. They tried
to get out but something had blown across the door and they were locked in.
¹¹

Constable Terence David Barry lived on Trower Road in one of the newer northern suburbs.
At two in the morning his house, like many, started to disintegrate.