Incredible tale of survival told in Sky News Cyclone Tracy doco

A mother has recalled her and her toddler’s tale of survival during one of Australia’s worst natural disasters in a special Sky News investigation, Cyclone Tracy: 50 Years On, premiering at 8pm AEDT on Wednesday night.

The luggage tag strapped around her ankle was all that identified two-year-old Brenda Brocker when she arrived at the Brisbane airport.

She had been rushed on to a Hercules aircraft and evacuated from the ruins of Darwin after Cyclone Tracy had flattened the city on Christmas Day, 1974.

Brenda’s mother, Freda, had been seriously injured when her neighbour’s house was picked up by Tracy and crashed into her home.

“It smashed the toilet, maybe that’s what did my leg, I don’t know, but I had Brenda – I was nursing her and she was thrown into the mattress there and I just ran, I got under another mattress but I panicked of course, then I ran out and (my husband) Nick had picked up Brenda, a screaming child, wondering what was happening, and I ran out and I fell in the mud,” Freda said.

“We got into one car and then the windscreen went in that car, so we got in the other one, there I was down on the floor with Brenda and Nick and then I discovered that my leg was badly cut so he tore my dress and put a tourniquet on it.”

Freda Bocker in Sky News Cyclone Tracey doco

The family spent the next five hours sheltering in that car as Tracy wiped out almost everything around them.

By the time the sun rose on Christmas Day, 66 people were dead and more than half of the city’s 47,000 residents were homeless.

Freda would be one of the first of the injured to be flown out of Darwin as authorities undertook the biggest peacetime evacuation in Australian history.

But even getting to the airport was a mission.

“The ambulance is going along, up and down, well it was a very rough trip because it was up and down gutters, everything I imagine, they had to move things out of the way,” Freda said.

Cyclone Tracy - Causarina area. Picture Supplied

As she was loaded into the Hercules, she presumed her daughter was staying behind with her husband. Little did she know, two-year-old Brenda was on the same plane.

“(Nick) handed Brenda to the captain, Captain Charlie, of that plane. I didn’t know she was on the plane, I had no idea,” she said.

“She’s got a tag around her leg, because, well, that’s the only way they would have known what her name was, because there was nothing else, so they put this luggage tag around her leg with her name on it and she was handed to the Salvation Army family, to Beula Harris at the time was her name.”

Brenda Brocker is handed to a Salvation Army representative as she is evacuated from Cyclone Tracy. Cyclone Tracy 50 Years On, Sky News Image

Freda’s story is one of many recounted as part of a special Sky News documentary, Cyclone Tracy: 50 years on, which premieres on Wednesday night.

Antony Bullock, who was 12 years old when Tracy hit, has recalled watching his home in Darwin’s northern suburbs being blown away before his eyes.

His father had ordered the family downstairs to shelter in the toilet.

“Unbeknownst to me that downstairs toilet was locked because I had a brand new push bike in there,” he said.

“Dad goes ‘the key, you’ve got to get the key to downstairs’, so I had to go back into the kitchen and it was pitch black, the house is shaking.

“As I grabbed it, I turned around and that bottom end of the kitchen just exploded out, just disappeared and all I could see was the flash of lightning and just bits of debris going everywhere.”

Antony Bullock.

He remembers his father grabbing his hand as they tried to rush down the outdoor staircase.

“As we took one step, we just disappeared,” he said.

“Something just picked us up off the stairs and before we knew it we were on the lawn, 5-10 metres away from the veranda.”

Tracy destroyed about 80 per cent of Darwin’s houses. It also cut off most of the city’s critical infrastructure, making it almost impossible for people from interstate to contact loved ones and check if they were OK.

Alan Haines.

Alan Haines had been at midnight mass with his sister when Tracy struck.

They survived the night in the nurses’ quarters at the Darwin hospital. But it would be more than a week before their mother in Adelaide knew they were alive.

“She’d actually written a letter to us,” he said.

“I don’t have it anymore, but it was a mother’s plea to her children, ‘please God we’ll all be OK’, and we were.”

Cyclone Tracy: 50 Years Onpremieres Wednesday 27 November at 8.00pm AEDT on Sky News. Stream at SkyNews.com.au or download the Sky News Australia app

Originally published as Incredible tale of survival told in Sky News Cyclone Tracy doco