Warning (5 page)

It was now, when the wind returned, that things tipped. Things to that point had
been bad, they'd been indescribable, but it was now that everyone was untethered
from the world they knew. The Harveys' house lifted from its moorings and dropped
again. Rattled buildings, buildings that had been shaken for hours, exploded into
the night, evaporated into the air. Darwin slipped through the looking glass into
a new kind of reality. A young policeman, Robin Bullock, actually says this—that
he felt his sense of reality shift as the cyclone went on for what ‘seemed like a
lifetime'.
²⁰
Sections of the roof at the Fannie Bay Watch House were blown off and
prisoners were moved from block one to block three. Ted D'Ambrosio's brother was
out at the Darwin Golf Club and tied himself to a pillar to stop himself flying away.
His son drove home in a small Mazda and when he, somewhat miraculously, made it
home, told his dad he'd seen caravans flying through the air over the Stuart Highway.
Cedric Patterson's archival interview reads like a dreamscape as he talks of his
house slowly falling apart and the stars coming in. He saw ‘a piece of asbestos cement
about the size of a dinner plate and it was just floating in the passageway. And
I can remember brushing it out of the way with my hand and thinking: “That's strange.”'
He talks of hiding under the drawer and feeling dazed, of walls collapsing. Walls
are described as ‘melting' and one man describes being sucked out of his roofless
house as if he were riding a magic carpet. Shards of broken glass swirled around
rooms as if in a giant blender. Everyone started making deals with God, even the
atheists. Some people couldn't breathe, the wind was so ferocious. Elspeth Harvey,
stuck in her car with her family and a menagerie, was so desperate for a piss she
held on to the car door handle and ‘had the fastest pee in the world', but while
the door was open her cat escaped.
²¹
Petrol was sucked out of petrol tanks and air
out of car tyres. Houses rocked like boats at sea. People sheltering in cars were
picked up into the air, blown a few hundred metres and then dumped down again. Bead
curtains, all the rage in the early seventies, whipped through the air like stock
whips. One woman was blown out of the house with her five-month-old son in her arms.
They landed uninjured but the baby was dangerously cold and instinct drove the mother
to lick him, much as a cat would, in an effort to keep him warm.
²²
Another mother
remembers being blown three blocks from her home with her young daughter in her arms,
the two of them spinning like feathers through the air. Housing girders twisted themselves
into forms of abstract beauty. Thousands of sheets of corrugated iron scraped and
scratched along the ground, sounding like millions of fingernails running down a
blackboard. Ordinary household objects became lethal. Sergeant C. Simpson: ‘I was
struck on the left shin by a china mug and the handle became embedded in my leg…'
²³
A refrigerator wedged itself in the high water tank near the airport.

At the Wrights' house things actually became less ferocious after the eye because
everything had already been torn down. Arthur hugged Pat until dawn saying, ‘It's
all right love, don't worry, just stay here with me.' Twenty-eight-year-old barrister
Tom Pauling, lover of theatre and already sporting the flamboyant moustache that
would survive Tracy and many decades beyond into his term as Administrator of the
Northern Territory, played to type by taking to the Courvoisier VSOP cognac. David
McCann, the city's magistrate, sat in the YMCA with a mattress pulled over his head.
Richard Creswick sat in the bath with three cats, a dozen tinnies and a bottle of
something strong and taught his housemate Eric (who was sitting under the hand basin)
the words to ‘Waltzing Matilda'. At some point Creswick began to crawl towards his
bedroom to grab his duffel coat, only for a lightning flash to reveal the bedroom
had been blown away. Over in Nightcliff, Howard Truran narrowly missed being impaled
by a thirty-foot piece of timber with a pointy end like a javelin that was flying
through the air. It went through the ceiling above him, then stopped four feet from
where he and his wife were lying. Truran believed his wife's crucifix had protected
them from being speared. The palm in the Botanical Gardens that was about to flower
for the first time in a hundred years that Christmas Day was destroyed.

As well as these ferocious winds there was 255 mm of rain that night. The wind chill
factor of all that rain and wind meant that, for some, hypothermia set in. And almost
everyone rode out the night wondering why they had been subjected to such terror,
assuming that other people, in other houses, weren't having such a bad time. Constable
Stephenson expressed what many felt when he said, ‘I thought it was only my house
and kept thinking “why us”.'
²⁴

All this: the fear, the destruction, and the noise, finally finished at, as Charles
Gurd put it, ‘the first uncertain light of dawn'.
²⁵
When Tracy was finally done with
Darwin it headed, slowly, southeast across Arnhem Land. A week later the cyclone
petered out over the gulf country of Queensland.

UNCERTAIN LIGHT OF DAWN

‘IT WAS like going to sleep in England and waking up in Alaska,' was how Ida Bishop
described the shock of stepping outside her house into Christmas Day. Savvas Christodoulou
took in what he saw—his garage survived but his house didn't—and decided he needed
to take an entire two days off work. Edna Harmer found she hadn't just lost her crochet,
she'd lost everything she'd ever owned. Jack Meaney went out to look at the damage
then came back in and said to his mother, ‘The whole bloody town's gone.'
¹
Don Sanders,
who'd weathered the storm at the ABC studios, describes emerging to ‘a most unneerie
[sic] sort of sky and cloud formation. It was the utter silence. It was, as I can
well imagine Hiroshima was two hours after the big “egg” went off; just nothing.'
Bernard Briec, looking around at the devastation and wondering if a nuclear bomb
had hit, thought: ‘Everyone's dead and we're the only people who survived.' Cedric
Patterson wiggled out of the wreckage, ‘And when we saw the scene ahead of us, it
looked like a view or a picture of the Great Western Front, over the trenches.' Charles
Gurd said, ‘Well, it was like a moonscape, you know. By this time [dawn] it was raining
quite hard and blowing horizontally, and it was still pretty near dark, sort of half
light, it was a very weird kind of feeling. It felt like wartime. It felt like a
scene from the war more than anything else.' Hedley Beare says it was ‘a world I
could never have conceived of. It was almost like stepping into another planet'.
He and his youngest son Martin went for a walk. ‘We walked in silence. When we got
about opposite the Catholic cathedral, or thereabouts, Martin just turned to me,
buried his head in my tummy, and said: “Oh Dad, this is terrible.”'
²

Robin Bullock had arrived in Darwin with his family not long before Tracy. He had
weathered the night with them as well as his mother and step-father, who'd come up
to celebrate Christmas with him. When he walked out of what was left of his house
he found that an explosion he'd heard in the night had been caused by the roof from
the block of flats across the road. It had sailed across and was sitting on his Toyota
Land Cruiser. ‘It was very nice we didn't decide to hide in the car, because there
was a piece of six-by-four straight through the roof and into the driver's seat.
That would've been a bit ordinary.' He ventured out further, but what he saw was
almost impossible to comprehend. ‘You were looking at a place you'd never seen…It
was incredible. And just people walking around, as they do. Like some of the footage
after September 11th, after it had settled a bit and people just wandering around
aimlessly.'

Bill Wilson: ‘It was like soldiers coming out of battle, having listened to shell-fire
for hours and hours and hours and trying to make sensible decisions…' This issue—of
the incapacitating effect of trauma—was a source of some contention in days to come.

The war analogy spoke to many. On 19 February 1942 Darwin had been subjected to Japanese
air raids amounting to the largest attacks ever mounted by a foreign power against
Australia. They were the first of almost a hundred air raids over the next two years.
Howard Truran first moved to Darwin in the early fifties, when the city was still
rebuilding. On Christmas Day 1974 his garden was so stripped he could see the Travelodge
Hotel, standing seven miles away in the centre of town. ‘We're right back where we
started from,' he thought.

There was a storm surge of about four metres at Casuarina Beach, but it was not nearly
as bad as it could have been. If the cyclone had struck during high tide much more
of Darwin would have been submerged and, according to Ray McHenry, ‘the bulk of the
population would have been washed into the sea'. It is true the damage would have
been even worse.

The view was so clear that Beth Harvey suddenly realised how close her house was
to the water and became nervous about tidal waves. Peter Spillett looked out at the
sea and saw a sheet of water all the way through East Point.

It was yellow. The whole area was misty—it was raining—a very yellow mist. It was
an awful looking colour…No sounds at all—no birds, no frogs, nothing, I think that
was one of the things that hit us more than anything else, was that there was not
a sound of anything which you would normally associate with the wet season, like
cicadas or birds or frogs—nothing, absolutely nothing.

Keith Cole's ‘ten-acre block was covered with the soaked, dead bodies of numbers
of lorikeets that used to nest in our trees'. Animals ran up and down the streets
howling and crying.

Wendy James headed to her mother Pearl's house, to find the house intact and her
mother asleep. When Pearl woke she said, ‘I told you to come here.' And she was right.
Out of six family homes lived in by the various members of the James family, only
Pearl's had survived. To Wendy's distress it turned out her seventeen-year-old son,
Alan, had walked through the tail end of the cyclone in search of her and was now
nowhere to be found. They were eventually reunited, but Alan didn't talk to her for
a year about what happened as he searched for his parents. Apparently a car had hailed
him in the hope he could help them—the driver's child's legs had been amputated;
Alan could not help. When he finally made it home the neighbours told him that his
folks had disappeared during the eye and offered to put him up if they couldn't be
found. Wendy had spent the night convinced her son was dead and now Alan was fearing
the worst for her. It was, to say the least, a stressful time.

The first thing the Wilsons did when the cyclone calmed was to go back to the car
where they had put their pets. The animals had survived and had ‘obviously come to
a truce, because the cat was still in the front and the dogs in the back'. Then they
had a scotch for breakfast: a Christmas Day ritual they continued for some twenty
years. When Roy Barden came to, he ‘thought I was the only person left alive in Darwin'.
He'd lost a lot of blood from multiple cuts he'd received when peppered with debris.
There was something draped across his leg that he was worried might be the body of
a member of his family, though he soon realised it wasn't. His hip was so badly injured
it took him twenty minutes to walk down the stairs to see if anyone had been blown
over the side of the house. He started to limp off to the police station for help
when he came to his senses and realised his family might be alive and in need of
him, so he staggered back up the stairs and knocked on his door. His son Douglas
called out, ‘Is that you Dad?' Barden remembers it as ‘the best cheer squad I'd ever
had in my life'. He went into the bathroom and his wife Doris threw her arms around
him. Another son, Arthur, was under a quilt in the bath with their corgi, though
the only sign of the dog was its nose.

Maria Donatelli went to the Capri to find that her bar had been drunk dry by the
customers trapped there through the night. Colin Clough and his three children, including
his twelve-year-old daughter Kim, still shocked and stunned by the death of their
wife and mother, simply lay there.

Kate Cairns found one of her cats dead. ‘I cried for the cat, not for the devastation
and the fact that we didn't have anything dry to put on or—[
laughter
] we'd lost our
house—none of that…I think that was a good thing that came out of that cyclone. I
think you get your values back.' She couldn't find her dog Zac because he was hidden
in a caravan over the road. Her relief was great when her neighbour walked across
the road to her, wading through the water with the dog in his arms, saying, ‘Look
what I've got, look what I've got.' Later that day, as she sorted through her freezer,
she made sure to put some meat aside for her own and other animals to eat.

Everyone checked on their neighbours. Tom Pauling ended up walking up the street
with a neighbour, a man he'd fought with constantly in the past, but that morning
they were ‘almost arm in arm'.
³
They found people sheltering in their cars and took
them to the remains of Pauling's roofless brick house. Then he headed to friends',
and on the way saw a man:

standing in what remained of his lounge room which was just the floor. In the middle
of the lounge room was this artificial Christmas tree complete with decorations that
for some unknown reason hadn't blown away. While we were there, he looked at us,
picked up the tree and said, Happy f— Christmas, and hurled the tree down onto the
ground.

When Ken Frey visited his neighbours one lot didn't answer and, to his shame, he
walked off. He found out later they were in a wardrobe that had fallen over, door
first, and they'd had to break their way out the back of it. The claustrophobia doesn't
bear thinking about. Frey's colleague, the architect whose children had gone flying
out of the house, found his kids: ‘The two boys had somehow or other got across the
road, and they got behind a fence across the road and they dug into the flowerbed.'
That family was one of the families who chose never to return after they were evacuated.
The Wrights were stuck in the toilet because so much debris was thrown against the
door. Someone called out to them, then responded when they shouted back. They went
to a neighbour's and used swimming-pool water to make a cup of coffee. According
to Pat ‘it was the sweetest cup of coffee I'd had in a long time…' Hot beverages
were in demand as people recovered from the cold. One old woman waited three days,
pinned under the wreckage, before she was found, and the first thing she did when
she was rescued was ask for a cup of tea.

Charles Gurd walked to the hospital at dawn. ‘It felt like High Noon. There was no
one around…Darwin as a city had ceased to exist.' When he got to the hospital the
floors were awash with water that was red with blood. There was no power or electricity—but
nor was there much structural damage. The hospital's anaesthetist had been killed
by flying corrugated iron while at home. Casualties had already begun to arrive and
over the course of Christmas Day there were 128 formal admissions to the hospital—that
is, people who were seriously injured. More than five hundred outpatients were treated.
Most of the harm had been caused by flying objects and glass, and ranged from minor
lacerations to extremely serious injuries. Roy Edwards, who'd lost a lot of blood
after being gashed by flying louvres, told Ella Stack, ‘I was bemoaning my fate a
little bit and I happened to turn my head to one side and on the…bed next to me was
a young lady without a foot. So I didn't feel sorry for myself any longer.' One of
those patients was Ted D'Ambrosio's wife, who had an injured arm. D'Ambrosio had
had to cut his car free of fallen trees with a chainsaw to get her there. A bloke
in a VW turned up and took Roy Barden to the hospital. ‘He went through the water
just like an amphibious vehicle.' It turned out they were among the first people
there but then people began arriving in their hundreds. ‘There was this mass of people
descending on the hospital with wounds and cuts…' Barden had the glass pulled out
of him, was given twenty stitches and then put to bed with plastic over his feet
to keep the rain off, because the hospital's windows no longer had any glass.

Ray McHenry picked himself up off his bathroom floor, looked around and said, ‘Oh
my God.' He, like almost everyone else, had thought that it was only his house that
had been blown away. He solicited his neighbour's help to rescue one of his eight
children, who'd become trapped under a cupboard. McHenry ended up taking a carload
of people to the hospital, including a pregnant woman he'd rescued from the ruins
of her house. What was usually a fifteen-minute journey took him three hours.

Having managed to save his own life, his family's and indeed his neighbour's, Laurie
Gwynne ‘sat on a heap of rubble and cried'
⁴
before organising to get the family to
the hospital. The children were covered in bruises inflicted by debris, but also
by Shirley, who'd kept pinching them through the night to make sure they were still
alive. All Laurie's toes were broken. At dawn Janice Perrin got out of her car nearly
naked and walked until a car picked her up and took her to a nearby fire station,
which had become an evacuation centre. That was where she found her mother, who'd
been blown away along with her house and was badly injured. Perrin was given clothes
to cover herself up and then went for a long drawn-out search for tampons or sanitary
napkins. In the end she had to make do with Chux.

The
Northern Territory News
, when it returned on 31 December, made light of these
private dilemmas, and took to running a series of stories on how the women left in
Darwin were pining for sunglasses and cosmetics under headlines like ‘A Lift for
the Girls'. The issues were more fundamental and Charles Gurd remembers that ‘things
like women's sanitary things, you know, no one had them, and we didn't normally stock
them, but we had to fly them in'. After Perrin was sorted out she went to the hospital
with both her mother and her husband, Warren. ‘Well the hospital was an absolute
mess, there was no power of course and there were a million people everywhere.' She
stayed and organised tea for people, Warren got his foot stitched up and it was decided
her mother needed to be evacuated.

Bernard Briec remembers that a story went around about a guy who'd booked himself
into the Mandorah Hotel across the harbour, slept through the entire event, then
woke demanding room service. The lord mayor, Tiger Brennan, was a former miner who'd
once lived in a caravan on the Nightcliff foreshore. Aided by a cocktail of rum,
antihistamines and painkillers, he'd slept through the entire night and woken to
a house that either lost its roof or didn't, depending on who you believe. Either
way it was a heroic sleep. ‘When I woke up at seven in the morning I looked out and
saw this house over here had disappeared in which the lady who used to do my laundry
used to live. I threw on a singlet, a pair of shorts, and my brothel brogues, and
tore round to see what I could do with it, but she was gone from there.'
⁵
After Ted
D'Ambrosio had taken his wife to hospital he went to see how Brennan had fared. He
found the mayor staggering around asking, ‘What's happened to my town?' They broke
his fridge open and had a beer. After that Brennan dropped by Harry Giese's up on
Myilly Point with his usual hat on, and: