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He was dressed in an old pair of shorts which looked as though they'd been used pretty
substantially in removing debris and materials…Tiger had come up to see what the
situation at the hospital was…It's difficult to explain the feeling that you have,
that you're probably among very few people who would have survived this sort of blow.
Indeed, before Tiger came along, you had almost the feeling that you might have been
alone. There was a euphoria that you felt, that at least you'd been spared the sort
of situation where you were beside people who were killed or badly injured…I could
feel for those people, many in the northern suburbs… it must have been traumatic
in the extreme.

Senator Collins, who was a volunteer for St John Ambulance, grabbed a CSIRO vehicle
and drove the fourteen kilometres from Berrimah into Darwin to see what was happening.
He was lucky he could drive—most cars weren't starting and those that did soon had
their tyres shredded by debris. And there was this: the task of finding the car keys.
Some found them in a few hours, some after a few months, and many never found them
at all. The damage Collins saw on that drive was so extensive he claims he wouldn't
have been surprised to find out that ten thousand had died. ‘The closer I got to
Darwin, the more bizarre the sights became…I mean huge pieces of H-iron steel were
twisted like liquorice.' Knowing that what lay ahead of him was likely to bring on
an asthma attack, he stepped into a chemist and nicked some Ventolin. ‘I walked over
to the chemist shop, which was smashed to pieces, and just walked inside.' Even this,
the collapse of normal etiquette, was disorientating. ‘I felt really weird…I actually
expected to feel a hand on my shoulder at any stage, saying, “You're under arrest
for stealing Ventolin.”' Collins arrived at the ambulance station to find it had
suffered fairly significant damage. Nonetheless casualties had been quick to turn
up. ‘There were thousands of—in today's terms—quite serious foot injuries from broken
glass.' Collins himself headed out on the road, and was amazed to find that, despite
the early hour, earthmoving equipment had already started to clear the streets. ‘They
had graded tracks down Bagot Road, through all of this debris.' He went on to work
for three days straight. ‘There were no reserves, we all had to do it…In those three
days and nights we would have seen more trauma, physical and mental…than most ambulance
officers would have seen in an entire lifetime…' After that intensive stint many
of the ambos were evacuated out due to exhaustion. It was quite a few days later
before Collins managed to return home. To his surprise his stereo equipment had survived.

Richard Creswick staggered into work for his 10.30 am shift at the ABC to find that
staff were gathering. ‘There's no doubt we were all shell-shocked although I think
at the time we didn't realise it… We—none of us had any enthusiasm for work, although
I think we all realised that we were all in the midst of probably the biggest story
of our lives.' Keith Bushnell knew it was, that's for sure, and he'd got out of the
cupboard that he and his friend Toni were hiding in, found his camera still intact,
and headed out to take footage. ‘He and Mike Hayes went out together,' recalls Creswick,
‘and Mike did a voice piece about the devastation in which I think he used the line
that: “It was the end [of] a bloody good town”. Keith convinced a pilot to take that
footage south for him and that ended up being the film of the devastation that got
out.' The footage is easily found these days, and it's still shocking to watch Hayes
report from a ruined Darwin, head bowed:

Like a lot of the people who've left I'm just wondering about the new Darwin…It wasn't
a very pretty place [but] it was a place of people with a unique way of life. This
is Mike Hayes from ABC news, in the wreckage of what was a bloody good place to live.

Hayes became emotional again in 1999 when talking about it on the
7.30 Report
.

I was much more frightened after the cyclone than I was during. And I think a large
part of that is, you know, shooting news…I might have exposed myself to some pretty
frightening scenes and I was also well aware that this was Darwin, a couple thousand
miles from the cavalry, and the wet season could well have cut some roads between
here and there and I feared for what might develop in the next weeks.

Danny Thomas, the assistant general manager at Northern Research, had gone down to
the wharf to find that only one boat of twelve was left, though some began to arrive
home over the next few hours. Ida Bishop had gone into work as soon as she could
to see what had happened to her colleagues.

I went in and saw the men all standing around the corner, all very quietly not saying
anything. So I went up, and I said, ‘Is everything okay?' And Danny Thomas said:
‘No.' And I said: ‘Who?' And he just said names, and I said: ‘Oh' and I walked away.

Bishop coped by going home and holding onto familiar things. ‘Barbara had won a turkey
on the chocolate wheel in town earlier in the afternoon of Christmas Eve. And so,
as I said, there's nothing else to do but to continue in routine…'

Thomas, as it turned out, had spent the morning searching the beaches. He'd found
the drowned body of Koji Yoshanda, Bishop's former boss and the operations manager
of Northern as well as Don Hoff who had been on the
NR Kendall
with Yoshanda. An
engineer who'd managed to escape from that boat scaled the cliffs at Larrakeyah and
got himself home. Thomas also found the bodies of people who weren't colleagues.
In all, Northern Research lost two boats with six badly damaged, from a total of
eighteen. The Gollin Kyokuyo company suffered even worse material losses, losing
seven men and three of six steel-hulled trawlers. The official number of deaths at
sea now sits at twenty-two.

The families of the Japanese men who worked on these trawlers often didn't speak
English so their experience of the cyclone was particularly extreme. It's hard to
imagine the isolation of the women and children after they found out their husbands
and fathers were dead. Ella Stack remembers taking in one woman whose husband had
died. ‘There was nothing the Japanese company could do to take them anywhere. They
were living in cars themselves. They had nowhere, no accommodation, so they just
stayed in one room with us. And we managed with our little bit of English.' The barge
Alanna Fay
returned to harbour to find ‘all the boats floating upside down'. Five
boats from around fifty were left in Darwin Harbour and only one patrol boat, the
Assail
, was in good enough shape to conduct search and rescue duties on Boxing Day.

People familiar with Darwin will know the glorious Nightcliff pool, which sits on
a cliff overlooking the usually calm seas, its lawns spotted with a few palm trees.
I go there most mornings I'm in Darwin and swim laps before the water heats up beyond
reason. The pool was there in '74, but come Christmas morning there was a body in
it. Nonetheless, it served as drinking water over the next few days. When the health
department were told about the body, they suggested boiling any water taken from
the pool for twenty minutes. So that's what people did.

Half-prepared Christmas food was salvaged before the heat ruined it, and camp stoves
were used to finish the job. People sorted through freezers trying to figure out
what would go off the quickest. All manner of things were eaten over the next few
days, from tins with the labels washed off. A meal might be a salad fashioned from
beetroot and marmalade.

Over the course of the night the entire Church family had got banged and knocked
about. The worst injury was a deep cut to Julia's dad's foot, which soon enough developed
into an ulcer. That morning Julia found a small towel, which she wrapped around herself
as a gesture to modesty before the family headed for Casuarina High. It was on that
walk that they realised that it hadn't just been them. ‘The entire suburb had been
reduced to a series of platforms—the “dance floors”—all that was left after the walls
and roofs had gone. They looked like oil rigs in the sea. Usually around there was
frangipani and bougainvillea, a riot of colour—but the colour had blown away.'

Julia witnessed several pretty crazy scenes at relief centres and remembers it now
as a kind of microcosm of a society under stress. Some people were good organisers—guys
with army reserve experience took over—while others were good at taking instructions.
Some people sought out injured people and Julia's mum was one who used her windowless
car to drive people around. Julia helped dig deep trenches for latrines. But other
folks went feral. People built strange fortresses out of cushions and rugs. Agreements
were made to pool the food and share buckets of water—but then some women would drop
used nappies into the buckets. Fridges were set on their sides with doors open to
form a vessel for water, but someone broke glass into that to ruin the water supply.
The basest human reactions were on display. Forty-eight-year-old Irene Cormick, who'd
run a tourist park that had been destroyed overnight, headed into town to help and
saw something similar at the centre set up at the Wagaman School.

I saw things in humans that I would never ever wish to see again. I saw the panic.
The people that you thought were strong, were weak; and the ones you thought were
weak were strong. It was the grabbing…But you would not believe that people could
change, from people into such horrible creatures.
⁶

Some people simply got in their car and drove out of town. People started arriving
in Alice Springs from Darwin around four-thirty or five on Christmas afternoon, which
means they'd headed out through the rubble and ruined streets first thing in the
morning. Their cars were pretty battered. Alan Hawkins, head of Alice Springs Apex,
said, ‘I think it was just instinct that they got in the car and got out as quickly
as they could.' People were shell-shocked and:

basically arrived in the clothes they had on their backs. They had no money, no food.
Some of them had the presence of mind to take water, or bring water with them, but
they just arrived. They were worn out physically, and I think just mentally they
didn't know what was going on. They had no idea what was going on.
⁷

The wife of one such couple, he recalls, had cradled her dead baby all the way down
from Darwin. One thousand battered cars arrived in Alice Springs over the next three
days, then were stranded because of the need to get a roadworthy before going further
south. At Tennant Creek, where food was scarce because the wet season had cut supplies,
Indigenous people went and harvested watermelons and rockmelons and brought them
into town to give to people who were driving through. ‘There you are,' they said,
‘you need food for the people, here it is.'
⁸

Without any landmarks to orientate them people could not find their way to their
houses, or the houses of friends and family. According to Ray Wilkie, ‘The whole
geography of the area had completely changed—the topography nearly had changed—so
you got lost.' People talk of this time and time again, their intense disorientation
when their town was no longer recognisable to them. ‘Everything looked so different,
there wasn't a bloody leaf on a tree. You know, there was absolutely nothing, which
meant you could see for miles and miles and miles, something you could never do before.'
There wasn't much of anything else, either: no sewerage, water, electricity or phones.

It wasn't just buildings that fell to pieces, it was people. As journalist Gay Alcorn
put it, ‘The cyclone destroyed not only lives, houses, furniture, photographs and
pets but a way of living and thinking.'
⁹
A friend of mine expressed it to me more
bluntly. ‘The cyclone made people psychotic. Not the night itself, but the fact it
destroyed everything.' Teacher Ruary Bucknall, who was in Alice Springs when the
cyclone hit, returned to Darwin on Boxing Day, on the same flight as the acting prime
minister, Jim Cairns. When he got to Wagaman and saw the damage to his home he sat
down at the house and ‘bawled my eyes out for about—I don't know—ten minutes or so.
Just couldn't get over the shock of the whole thing…the complete state of devastation.
I don't think it's anything that a normal person can comprehend.'
¹⁰
When Alan Hawkins
got himself to Darwin an entire ten days later he decided to walk from the airport.
‘I got halfway into town, and I just stopped and looked at the devastation. I reckon
I just sat there and cried for about twenty minutes; I just couldn't take it all
in, it was just too much for me.'

When Dr Slim Bauer, the first director of the ANU's North Australia Research Unit,
heard news of Tracy he went to Brisbane, bought a caravan, loaded it with food, tools
and materials, then drove north to Darwin. He got there four days after the cyclone
and, despite having been warned how bad things were, was extremely shocked. ‘The
thing which struck us—the first thing which struck us really forcibly was that when
we topped the rise at Yarrawonga, we could look straight across to Darwin town, to
the downtown area and the Stokes Hill, and of course you never had been able to do
that before.'
¹¹

In this strange new world, everyone's sense of time began to shift. Chronology frayed.
People remember the devastation they awoke to, but after that things blur. Ella Stack
wrote: ‘The days had lost their names: it was no longer Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.'
Beth Harvey describes that first day, and many thereafter, as like ‘a dream'. Harry
Giese was concerned that age was getting to him though his memory was no worse than
many much younger than him. ‘I've got, I must admit a very confused memory, whether
this is a result of the shock at that time, or whether it's a case of old age affecting
memory, I wouldn't like to hazard a guess.' Liz Foster can't remember how many days
after Tracy it was that she thought she saw a ruby sparkling in the rubble and went
to pick it up—only to find that yes, it was a ruby ring, but there was still a finger
in it. The way in which people spoke of what they endured had a liturgical quality.
Elizabeth Carroll: ‘I honestly don't remember what we did, how we did it. I remember
just these specific things: the rubbish bins, washing my hair. I remember the fear.'
¹²
Colleen D'Arcy described it as ‘strange—a time out of your life that you can't really
explain'. Several men interviewed struggled to remember when their family was evacuated,
and when they got to see them again. Often they ended up confessing to Francis Good,
or whoever interviewed them, that they simply had no idea. Even General Stretton,
who didn't arrive until late that first night, wrote that he quickly ‘lost all track
of time'. By 27 December, ‘It seemed months ago since I had left my family sitting
down to Christmas dinner at home in Canberra.'