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  In Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria it is the dogs who bear witness to the ruination of human civilisation:

  He was met by the bony, hollow-ribbed, abandoned dogs of the town that had run to the hills and back again after the cyclone. Now, having appeared from nowhere, they roamed along streets that no longer existed, searching for their owners. They did not bark or howl. The shock of the cyclone had left them like this: speechless, dumbfounded, unable to crack a bark. Unable to emit a sound out of their wide-opened mouths.

  But perhaps my biggest motivation is the fact that the human race is transforming the land, the seas and the weather. There are signs of that all around us, and in a country that already tended to extremes of drought, flood and bushfire we are now facing a world where there will be more calamities more often and larger numbers of us will be affected. There is a line in the Yolngu language of northeast Arnhem Land, Wä ngam ngarra marrtji buma ngarra dhuwal, which translates as: ‘I create different places as I travel.’ In another version, the line is: ‘I make this place as I go’ and it is true, we are doing this: we are making this place as we go. I want to understand somehow, what it is we are making.

  WARNING

  THE SKY at the Top End is big and the weather moves like a living thing. You can hear it in the cracking air when there is an electrical storm and as the thunder rolls around the sky. It’s a kind of call and response cycle which brings to mind a story—that cyclones are crocodiles thrashing and fighting through the air: roiling storm clouds moving with intent. It’s a dance of sorts, a constant movement between cold and hot air, between high and low pressure.

  Cyclones need sea temperatures of 26.5 degrees Celsius or above to form, because that’s the temperature at which water vapour turns to cloud. This means that cyclones tend to form towards the equator. Systems that form on the north side of the equator spin anticlockwise and are called hurricanes. Those that form on the south side spin clockwise and become cyclones. If the cyclone forms in the tropics it becomes known as a tropical cyclone. When a low-pressure system moves into this area it begins to warm, causing it to rise, pulling clouds into it as it lifts. The system becomes denser and denser with moisture. The faster the air heats, the quicker it rises and this creates an updraft. It is the air rushing in towards the middle, sucked in by the updraft, that forms the devastating winds of the cyclone and it’s this central column that becomes the eye. The more extreme the temperatures—the hotter the high air, the colder the low—the more unstable the system: the higher the velocity of the winds, the wilder the rain, the greater the rotation of the clouds. The energy of the rising air produces enough momentum to move a weather system but how fast it might move, and what path it might take, are hard to foresee. This was certainly the case with Tracy. But of course sometimes a system loses momentum altogether and dissipates. All these elements make predicting cyclones a difficult art.

  Tracy—unformed and unnamed—began her life in the northern hemisphere, which had had its coldest winter for a decade. Freezing air had massed low over Siberia in early December and then this low-pressure system had moved heavily, slowly, towards the equator. Some time on 19 December, northeast of Bathurst Island, above the warm Arafura Sea, the dance between temperature and pressure began in earnest.

  By 21 December the low-pressure system was only 220 kilometres away from Darwin, but then it stopped moving and sat, heavy in the sky, brooding. It was officially powerful enough to be described as a cyclone and it had a name: Tracy. Early on Christmas Eve Tracy suddenly turned ninety degrees southeast, towards Darwin. This took some by surprise and led others to assume it would make another dramatic turn before it actually hit the town.

  Judging a cyclone’s movements was such an inexact science that early on Christmas Eve Ray Wilkie, who was thirty-nine years old and the Director of the Bureau of Meteorology, was worried he was making too much of things. ‘I could see on the bunting on the service station, a little bit of wind just moving them. That’s how gentle it was. And then this slight bit of high cloud coming in, just a bit of high cirrus.’ Tracy was so small and slow moving ‘you could have walked a quick walk and kept up with it’.1 And it stayed small. At its height Tracy’s eye was twelve kilometres wide and the winds spiralled out for about forty. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina was a massive 644 kilometres wide when it made landfall in 2005. But the fact Tracy was slow meant that once it hit, it stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

  When people talk about their childhoods in 1970s Darwin, you get some idea of why it was a good place to grow up. Ten-year-old Bernard Briec had come with his family from Senegal, via France, arriving in Darwin in 1969. After school: ‘I came home, took my shirt off, took my shoes and socks off and went running around the place barefoot. Used to go down to Rapid Creek on McMillans Road, and we used to go swimming in the waterholes there, in the creek there…Life was very good.’2

  These days Julia Church is an artist who lives in Canberra but when she was a kid she too lived in Darwin. Her parents, immigrants from the UK, moved to Darwin in 1971 after a brief stint in Sydney. For her father, ‘Darwin was a dream come true’3 and his dream was of a ‘working person’s utopia’. Julia, eleven when they arrived, says that the whole family immediately felt at home.

  It was a very romantic place, an amazing place. It felt as if it was a new community we were building. Because it was small people managed to do a lot when they got there… Back then there was a lot more untouched bush. The bush was closer. Crocs helped maintain that feeling of the power of the natural world that might creep back in. The beautiful gardens were tropical and wild and misbehaved. In your garden you had wildlife from fruit bats to frill-neck lizards. It was rich and smelly, a cacophony of sound.

  But there was a darker side to Darwin, as there had been since white settlement. In the 1970s it held the world record for per capita alcohol consumption. It was the ‘hardest-drinking town in the world’,4 as ABC journalist Mike Hayes put it in a twenty-fifth anniversary special put together by ABC-TV’s 7.30 Report. Seventy per cent of the workforce were public servants, and many of them had been in Darwin for less than two years. They tended to be under thirty-five, and there were more men than women. People came and they went, but the recent election of the Whitlam Labor government after twenty-three years of Coalition rule meant there was an even higher turnover than usual. The exception, according to Ray McHenry, who was first assistant secretary in the Department of the Northern Territory, was ‘a core population in Darwin of some 8000, who would truly be described as Darwinians. Persons of Aboriginal descent make up a large section of that core group.’5 There were close to 2500 Indigenous people living in Darwin at that time. Some of them were Larrakia and some were from the stolen generation. The total population was about 47,000.

  In 1974 ABC journalist Richard Creswick was twenty-seven and new to Darwin. Interviewed fourteen years after the cyclone, he was blunt about the advantages of his posting: ‘It was a quick way—a two-year way—of getting a promotion that might take many more years in the older cities.’6 Ken Frey, who’d worked for the Department of Works and Housing in the Territory for close to thirty years, put it this way:

  We lived in a younger community; there were very, very few old people here at all. All the older people from Darwin had been moved out during the war; not that many of them actually came back…Every two to
three years there’d be a great dearth of many people in the public service—and privately—and there’d be a great inroad of new people coming in. And so you found it difficult, in many cases, to develop very close friendships, and things like this.7

  Some ten thousand people got out of town for Christmas that year as they always did, and many of those remaining didn’t really understand the damage a bad cyclone could do. Only a few had lived through the last big cyclone, which had blown through in 1937. Tom Baird, an Indigenous man who was born in 1923, had. It left him feeling that newcomers just didn’t get it. ‘Some of them said, “We’ll go down the beach and watch the cyclone come in”…They didn’t actually believe what the old timers used to say about how devastating the cyclones could be.’ But he also acknowledges that no one really expected a cyclone as bad as this one. With gusts as high as 250–275 km/h, Tracy was a severe Category 4. Gusts over the Cox Peninsula may have been more than 325 km/h (that is, Category 5), while at Nightcliff and East Point, which were a few kilometres out of the centre of Darwin along the coast, the winds were more like 250–290 km/h. ‘We had no idea ourselves that the cyclone would be as bad as Trace or anything like that.’8

  Other than Indigenous people, it was mainly Darwin’s Chinese population who could date their connection with the place back for any period of time—a century in some cases. They knew a bad wind when they felt it. Lily Ah Toy, who lived a couple of hundred kilometres down south in Pine Creek, felt the build-up from down there: ‘The wind was jerky, this went on for days and my in-laws—my mother-in-law said, “Now, this wind is not good, it’s no good at all it’s been jerking for days.”’9

  Old-timer Curly Nixon, who’d lived in Darwin since 1949, was cautious also. While he hadn’t weathered a major cyclone himself, some of his friends had. ‘Old Snowy was living here…I took notice of him…and I put six-inch nails into my roof and tied everything down that I couldn’t put under cover.’ Jack Meaney had lived through five cyclones. ‘You could almost feel it. If you’ve been through a cyclone, everything sort of dies before it comes along; the calm before the storm they call it.’10

  Of course, some newcomers also had an understanding of what weather could do. Journalist Barbara James had grown up in tornado country in the States so she took the warnings seriously. So did fifty-four-year-old Charles Gurd, Darwin’s Director of Health. He’d lived in Fiji and his wife had once been shipwrecked during a cyclone, so he knew exactly how bad things could get. Soon after he arrived in Darwin in 1972 he’d put a plan in place for Darwin hospital that assessed which buildings would be safest should a cyclone hit, and established procedures for handling mass casualties should they occur.

  Some old-timers, on the other hand, maintained a carefree attitude based on the view that Bathurst and Melville Islands would protect them from cyclones. Historically there was some truth to this, but Cyclone Tracy was to break all the rules. Dentist Howard Truran had lived in Darwin for twenty years. ‘They used to have a habit of coming around Bathurst and Melville Island and sort of being stationary, like Tracy was. And then they would sort of veer off down the west coast.’11

  Ida Bishop, a woman in her late forties who’d been born in Darwin, worked for a shipping company called Northern Research. She had twelve prawning vessels to take care of, which meant she took cyclone warnings very seriously. She remembers discussing the possibility of the cyclone with her boss, Nao Nakamura. ‘I said to him: “I don’t like today…There’s something dreadful going to happen.”’12 Nakamura called her fanciful but Bishop’s concerns persisted. ‘There was no sound of a bird. There was always “whoo-hoo” and things going on, but there was this ominous quiet. And the heat. And it just made me feel creepy. I thought: “There’s something going to happen.”’

  Vicki Harris said as much to her friend Fay. ‘I’ve got this funny feeling,’ she said; she’d been saying something similar to her husband for weeks already: ‘Something dreadful’s going to happen, I can just feel something’s going to happen’.13 Harris was only twenty-two at the time but when she was interviewed almost thirty years later she remembered that the clouds were high and strange. The sky, as someone else put it, was ‘purple and green and everything it shouldn’t be’.

  It was midday on Christmas Eve when Len Garton, a fifty-six-year-old insurance assessor who’d lived in the Territory since 1941, actually saw the thing. He was sitting in an office at Mudginberri Station, about 250 kilometres east of Darwin, and everything went dark. He walked outside and saw ‘a black velvet cloud hanging down from twenty [or] thirty thousand feet to almost ground level’.14 It was rolling, or pulsing, at the same time.

  At the Bureau of Meteorology, Ray Wilkie began placing calls to let people know Tracy was on the way. Gurd got his call and the hospital staff began their preparations with some trepidation. They had 237 patients to look after that night, and several babies on the way. Cyclone warnings started appearing hourly on the ABC, the announcements recorded by broadcaster Don Sanders himself because he wanted to shake people up a bit, make sure they weren’t just hearing the same old voice and therefore assuming it was business as usual. Sanders was fifty and had a classic ABC voice: rich and calming. He told people to check their transistors, batten down their houses, remove pictures from walls and ornaments from tables. He suggested sheltering under beds and tables, filling the bath with water.

  He was right to be worried that these warnings would be ignored. They usually were, partly because they were so frequent: every wet season there were around twelve warnings or so. Three weeks before Tracy there were warnings that the city would be hit by a cyclone called Selma, which petered out at the cost of a few trees and some minor injuries—Beth Harvey almost miscarried when Selma’s sirens started up. This made it even more likely than usual that people wouldn’t fuss much about this latest alert. As Kate Cairns, a woman who’d lived in Darwin for four years, put it, ‘We’d been told to batten down so many times before and nothing had really happened and—you can’t live in a battened-down situation.’15 Others commented that there were so many cyclone warnings it was like ‘crying wolf’. When Dr Ella Stack, who would become mayor within a few months of Tracy, spoke to the 7.30 Report, she put it this way: ‘In the ten years ’64 to ’74, there were twenty-five major cyclones in our area—twenty-five that were named. So it’s not that you get blasé about it, but, you know, they so rarely strike that you’re most surprised when they sort of hit you.’

  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 hospit
al, 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