SURVIVOR stories are woven with common themes; the unpreparedness, the jet engine-like sound of winds and the lingering smells of sewage and rotting meat.
They speak of the calm of the eye and the surprise onset of wind, even stronger than before, when Tracy’s hell returned.
Most distressing, upon seeing the destruction left behind, they speak of believing everyone else must have died.
But even as sunlight framed the true extent of devastation, would-be lone survivors found their worst fears unfounded.
From the wreckage came friends and neighbours, equally surprised to see so many others making their way to new shelters.
That the death toll didn’t stretch to thousands was a miracle of timing.
The darkness of night kept people in shelter instead of trying to rescue outdoor items and running the gauntlet of debris travelling at more than 200km/h.
The tide was running out, saving coastal suburbs from cyclonic surges, such a factor in Hurricane Katrina’s staggering death toll of more than 1800 people.
All told, of Darwin’s 12,000 homes only 500 escaped serious damage. More than half were completely obliterated.
It meant most of Darwin’s 47,000 residents were homeless. There was no power, no running water and bodies and Christmas feasts were rotting fast in the tropical heat.
An emergency response meeting on Christmas afternoon discussed disease, the potential for more devastating weather (the Bureau of Meteorology systems had been wiped out) and the impaired psychology and morale of the citizenry.
It was decided the city would be evacuated.
The first commercial flight evacuating Darwin refugees was early Boxing Day.
In the next three days there were 102 flights airlifting 20,000 people to southern capital cities.
The RAAF also leant a hand, flying out 2860 people to January 3.
On December 28, there were 7500 available seats, but that amount weren’t willing to leave. It prompted Retired Major-General Alan Stretton, leading the Tracy response, to recommend everyone who left got a free return flight.
As a result, 8200 were evacuated by nightfall, making it the busiest day of the evacuation.
In total, about 25,000 flew from Darwin by air and 10,000 drove south on the Stuart Highway to the supportive towns of Katherine, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs and beyond.
Pregnant women and the sick and injured were priorities in the airlifts, then women and children, then the elderly, then married couples and, lastly, singles.
The refugees were greeted in the cities by government agencies and volunteers who helped them to family or whatever accommodation they could find, including nursing homes.
“The evacuees arrived mainly with only the clothes they stood up in, shocked and confused, alienated, euphora (sic) weeping, stress reaction and fatigued,” the final report of the Darwin Disaster Welfare Council said.
Darwin became a town of men flecked by the women who simply refused to leave or had somewhere safe to stay.
Emergency response committees tried to take a census of those who remained, but lack of communication made it difficult.
“Gradually we came in contact with them. We really only started to find out where people where people were on day five or six,” Ray McHenry, then-director of emergency services said in the report.
They were found congregated at undamaged homes or pubs. Then-Independent member for Nightcliff Dawn Lawrie, who is still angry at the way a select few were trying to control people’s destinies, questions the census figures.
“The good people of Nightcliff that I spoke to said they wouldn’t register. I said ‘Why not’, and the answer was ‘If we don’t register they don’t know we’re here so they can’t do anything to us’,” she says.
“The register was wrong.”
McHenry acknowledged there was “no doubt that there (may) have been trauma because of the way in which the evacuation was done”, noting some wanted to stay “but the priority was to get people out in a hurry”.
The most controversial aspect of the evacuation began when McHenry suggested to Stretton a permit system be implemented to control who came back to the city.
Stretton agreed and it was introduced on December 28.
“It is a fact that where accommodation was not available people were deterred from coming back to the Territory, though many of them found their way around the restriction,” McHenry said. “Whether the system was necessary or not was hotly debated. I don’t think there would be too many blokes who gave as much thought to the problem as I did.”
The permit system, finally scrapped in June 1975, has been credited with keeping unwanted people out of Darwin, but also blamed for marriage breakdown and unnecessary psychological damage as families were stopped from rebuilding their lives.
Dawn Lawrie even recalls, with much disgust, men were asked if they wanted their wives to return at all.
By March 1975, 25,732 were living in Darwin, far exceeding the estimated number, according to the DDWC report.
Men still outnumbered women two to one.
ANGER STILL BURNS
LIKE others, Dawn Lawrie wishes the whole mess of Cyclone Tracy forgotten – the 40th anniversary would best come and go with little more than a whisper.
Dredging the memories of that horrible night and the chaotic weeks and months that followed hurt like 40 years prior, but an anger burns equally strong. For this reason she speaks.
The then-Independent member for Nightcliff was at the airport taking names as part of the evacuation and assisting people on flights to the southern capitals.
Some people needed to leave, she says, but neither she nor the traumatised women and children she farewelled knew then just how difficult it would be to return and rebuild
their lives. “Time and time again, people said to me ‘we can come back, can’t we?’ I said ‘of course you can, this is your home’,” she says.
“No sooner had they all gone, they brought in this stupid, stupid rule you had to have a permit. I’m still angry about that. All it did was keep out the people who wanted to come back.”
The permit system, introduced to regulate people entering Darwin, she says hindered the city’s rebuild and the mending of traumatised minds.
“All the civil disobedience in me came to the fore, how dare they do that to people,” she says.
“I’d do it again today. I still harbour the resentment about the way this little clique could determine who could come back. I knew heaps of people, and they trusted me”.
On one occasion, Lawrie herself nearly fell foul of the permit system.
She had taken a quick trip to Canberra for a meeting and did not fill out the exit form on her departure.
It was not a case of absent-mindedness, Lawrie simply refused.
On her return, a Commonwealth police officer, who she knew, demanded to see her permit allowing her back to the city.
“I just looked at him and said ‘I don’t have a permit and I don’t need a permit’,” she says.
“He said ‘you have to have a permit. Are you refusing to obey a lawfully given instruction?’
“I looked him in the eye and said ‘It’s unlawful, it’s unconstitutional’, so we stared at each other and he said ‘All right then, you can go.’
“What are they going to do, lock up the local member? I walked out of this little room at the airport and there’s this whole group of Darwin people who had obviously been watching and they all cheered like mad.
“Don’t you dare ask me for a permit to come back to my own city.”
At the airport, the loading of passengers during the evacuation was orderly, but not without moments of drama. Lawrie recalls one man who dressed as a woman in an attempt to get on one of the early flights. He was promptly returned to “the very back” of the queue. There were also moments of genuine kindness from the airline captains, who overlooked at least one child’s air rifle, occasional puppy and kitten passengers and even a cockatoo.
“It was all some of these people had left and they (the captains) just smiled and said ‘of course’,” Dawn says.
“People were getting on with these wriggling bags going ‘meow’ and ‘woof’. There was a guy there who said ‘we can’t allow pets on the plane’ and I just looked at him.
“There were extra people on the planes, kids sitting on laps, there were wriggling bags and even a gun. They were lovely, so nice, so understanding. I’ll never forget that.”
On Christmas Eve 1974 the Lawrie household – Dawn, then-husband John and their three children Dianne, John Jr and Delia, were entertaining friends in their Nightcliff home.
Cyclone Selma had come and gone weeks before with only a few gusts of wind and, like the rest of Darwin, they were not anticipating what was to come. As the winds got stronger the company left and she began to worry.
“I said to my then-husband ‘I think this is really coming’,” she says. “He was dismissive: ‘No, it’s OK, don’t worry about it”. I had on the ABC and then it stopped broadcasting.
That’s the thing that frightened me. I said ‘we have to get out, they’re off the air’.”
Soon after, as the house began to disintegrate, the kids were bundled up and moved downstairs to the car. She discovered John Jr was missing and frantically began to call out his name. To her relief, he had already made it to the car, but the memories of those brief moments thinking her son had blown away still bring her to tears.
The car stalled in the howling wind and rain but out of the gloom another car, already full, came to their aid.
The five Lawries and their two dogs crammed in and the car drove slowly along Nightcliff Rd looking for shelter.
Out of the blue came a pedestrian.
“The driver stopped the car and said ‘We can give you a lift, hang on to the bonnet’, and this guy said ‘It’s all right, I’m looking for a party’. I said ‘you stupid bastard the whole place is blowing away’.
“He said ‘She’ll be right love’ and kept walking. As far as I know he was blown to East Timor. Haven’t a clue.”
The car made it to a nearby school and Lawrie sheltered her children underneath the kitchen benches.
“My overwhelming thought was ‘what have they done to deserve this?’,” she says.
“’What have they done. Leave them, let them live.’
“In the morning it was pouring rain still. I went out to see what had happened. I walked to Nightcliff Rd and looked around. I came back and said ‘Everyone’s dead. Everything’s blown away and everyone’s dead’.”
AT THE COALFACE
A MAN boarded an Ansett Airlines flight shortly, head bandaged and stained with what appeared to be blood.
He wanted out of Darwin and he wanted out fast – trouble was, he wasn’t really hurt.
“He got on the aeroplane and I got on afterwards and I said ‘You’re not going. There’s nothing wrong with you’, says Fred McCue Sr, Ansett Airline’s NT manager during the time of Tracy and the subsequent evacuation.
“He said ‘Oh I was hit in the head with a great big lump of steel last night’.
“I said ‘I don’t think you were. Would you like to take the bandage off so we can have a look”.
“He just said ‘You bastard’.”
It was one of only a handful of times someone tried to jump the queue down south.
Fred Sr, whose son has contributed to these pages for the NT News, recalls for the most part people were well-mannered and respectful of their fellow Darwin refugees.
“You could see that some people had been traumatised, no question,” he says.
“Quite a few of them actually, but there were very little signs of panic or people losing control. It was well done. “There were a couple things here and there ... but very few.”
Fred understands the impulse of some to try anything to fly out with their wives and children, or to simply escape their own living hell.
Fred’s family, like other families of airport men, had been evacuated early so he could concentrate on the task at hand.
Fred, now 84, headed a staff of about 90 Ansett employees during the evacuation. Most of them slept in the cargo hold.
“I was at the airport doing the very best I could to manage a situation that was obviously very strange and new ... how do you handle it?” he says.
“It was a bit curly on the first day because we were new to the game.”
The now-defunct airline’s evacuation began in earnest on December 27. It was in full swing by the 28th and finished by the 30th.
In that time Ansett lifted about 6500 of close to 25,000 people to southern cities.
“I must admit we weren’t quite sure where the aeroplane was going, whether it was Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, we weren’t always sure,” he says.
“ We tried to tell people ‘this aeroplane is going to Sydney’. The problem is with that, people are all lined up and there’s maybe three aeroplanes with space for maybe 600 ... I don’t think under any circumstances you can start saying ‘Anyone for Sydney? Anyone for Melbourne? Who’s going to Adelaide?’ You’ve just got to get those aeroplanes loaded and out of here.”
Making matters more difficult was the lack of navigational equipment on the ground or lights on the runway.
It meant most evacuatons had to be carried out in daylight hours so pilots could see where they were landing or from where they were taking off.
“The pilots were flying these aeroplanes without any navigational aides whatsoever and the weather was pretty crook most of the time, very squally, heavy rain,” Fred says.
“They’re coming through that just relying entirely on their flying ability. There was no-one to talk to them from the ground for the first two or three days. They did it all visually … it’s a credit to them. You’ve got to be a real flyer to do that.”
The first Fred heard the word evacuation was Christmas Day, just hours after his home had been badly damaged; its wallpaper bashed to the bricks by sand and car stripped bare to gleaming metal.
He and others on the emergency services committee met at police headquarters that afternoon to discuss the response.
“Dr Charlie Gurd, who was the director of health at that time, he’d been in the hospital working through the night,” Fred says.
“I went to the meeting and Charles was there. He was the first one to say ‘look, we have no choice, we need to evacuate the population. It’s got to be done.’
“He’d spent quite a bit of time in Africa and he knew what possible consequences (existed in) a sub tropical situation without hygiene, without sewerage, without water, without electricity, without a hospital.
“No, he was right. There had to be an evacuation.”
THE LONG DASH HOME- Jim Toner’s story
ON Christmas morning 1974 my father, clearly agitated, awakened me.
Struggling against sleep in that little London house my first thought was that something in the kitchen had caught fire.
It was already Christmas evening in Darwin and news of its assault by Cyclone Tracy had rated a short mention on BBC radio.
My wife Mary had remained in Darwin while I was having an eye operation in London.
We had purchased a house in Casuarina on December 8 and she was settling in. Little did we expect it to be destroyed 17 days later.
Two days passed with no news and no chance of contacting Darwin. What had happened to her?
Then at 4.30am on December 27 the phone rang. Instantly awake, I found myself speaking with my boss in Canberra. He had just finished talking with Mary and was passing on her reassurance that she was unhurt.
My next problem was to join her without delay. Both eyes had been eased from their sockets on December 11 and the surgeon was most apprehensive. “Northern Australia?”
he said and pursed his lips. “My dear boy – the heat, the glare, the dust, the flies...”
I landed at Sydney on New Year’s Day. Unknown to me while I was flying over Asia, Mary was aloft over eastern Australia (with 499 other Darwin evacuees) in an RAAF Hercules, and she had landed at Sydney to be met by kindness.
A nun gave her $50 cash and a Salvo officer provided a woollen coat to supplement the cotton dress she had been travelling in.
She was allowed to sleep in a VIP lounge and at midnight a security guard brought her some Kentucky Fried Chicken and a VB. It was, after all, not only a New Year but her birthday.
I entered the Sydney concourse to find it crowded with people just as the PA system announced an imminent flight to Darwin. I galloped towards the departure gate.
Halfway through the milling mob I was impeded by someone clutching at my elbow.
Ears still popping from the descent I couldn’t hear what was being shouted at me, but on reducing my gallop to a trot and turning to examine the harassment found it to be my wife.
Christmas 1975 saw us in a new house on the same block and we have weathered cyclone warnings in the Top End ever since.
However, there appears to be a 40-year cycle for “big ones”, so I definitely won’t be leaving Mary alone on Christmas Day 2014.
A HOSPITAL OF DESPAIR
WHEN Darwin Hospital’s head of anaesthetics was tragically killed by flying debris in Cyclone Tracy, colleague Dennis Fitzsimmons took the reins.
About 500 injured people – many seriously – poured through the doors of the old Darwin Hospital in the days that followed Tracy.
Dr Fitzsimmons, a Queensland-trained and qualified anaesthetist, treated 16 people in surgery on Christmas Day, running back and forth between the two water-soaked operating rooms.
By all accounts the hospital, then located at Myilly Point in Larrakeyah, was well prepared – if not over-prepared.
Procedures and systems ordinarily put in place for the Christmas holidays – replenishing food and stocking additional blood for transfusions – had already happened in the days prior.
The threat from Cyclone Selma just weeks earlier meant the windows and structures had already been barricaded.
After Tracy, many doctors and nurses had themselves lost everything they owned but nearly all turned up to work that Christmas morning. Dr Fitzsimmons was one of them.
He spoke to the NT News from his Mackay, Queensland, home.
Having watched his Alawa family home disintegrate around him, Dr Fitzsimmons,, now 73, calmly got into his car and drove to the hospital just after 6.30am, unsure of what awaited him.
“I went straight through casualty and there were people everywhere,” he says.
“By the time I got there patients were already being triaged and the operating personnel had arrived.
“All the planning at the time was brilliant. It was all very well organised – I’d call it an organised chaos. It was the greatest natural disaster Australia has ever had and they were doing extremely well.
“Of course the hospital had all its electricity functioning and all its water on. Darwin Hospital had water running full flush right from the word go.
“As I got there ... I found out (Director of Anaesthetics Dr Paul Macklin) had been killed which was a bit of a shock at the time.”
As it turned out Dr Macklin had made it through the worst of the cyclone but reportedly went back into his house to retrieve something and was pierced through the temple by a piece of timber.
Dr Fitzsimmons remained in theatre and running between both operating rooms until about 10pm that night.
He says some of the more horrific injuries were suffered by people who had fled homes in Tracy’s peak.
“My memory of individual patients at the end of that was blank, because each patient that succeeded the previous had a similar story – but they were equally miraculous.
“Major surgeries we had were those whose houses were disintegrating and they had to leave – they were the ones that were injured.
“They were moving around and there were roofs falling off and all these missiles ... (it’s) as happened to the anaesthetist.
“I was dealing with major injuries to upper and lower limbs as well as penetrating injuries of the abdomen and lungs. At the same time there were many orthopedic injuries”
The surgical team treated 16 patients on Christmas Day before medical teams of doctors, nurses and health inspectors arrived from the south to assist the Darwin crews the next morning.
“I’d say we probably finished the last major surgery at about 10pm.
“Psychologically it was stressful. But you just didn’t realise it at the time.”
Darwin Hospital moved to its present location at Casuarina in 1980 before becoming Royal Darwin Hospital in 1984.
THE GENERAL
MAJOR General Alan Stretton held absolute power in Darwin for six days following Cyclone Tracy.
The press dubbed him the “Churchill of Darwin”.
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam said of him: “Whenever people speak of the spirit of Darwin, the name Stretton will be associated with it.”
Stretton’s efforts in Darwin saw him named 1975 Australian of the Year.
But he was a polarising figure.
Less charitable assessments of Stretton include his failure to acknowledge the gains already achieved by the people of Darwin before his arrival on Christmas night following Tracy.
These, it has been claimed, laid the foundations for the great strides made in Darwin in the days immediately after the cyclone.
Others who worked alongside Stretton over that period say he was exactly what the devastated city needed.
To his backers he was the clear-headed and dispassionate outsider given to decisive action and was a natural leader.
Stretton had certainly learned all about leadership before arriving in Darwin.
He served in World War II and the Korean War. In 1960 he commanded Australian forces fighting communist insurgents in Malaysia. And in 1969 he was appointed Army Chief of Staff in Vietnam.
Stretton was selected as director of the National Disasters Organisation on its formation in 1974.
Stretton arrived in Darwin at 10.20pm on Christmas night along with minister for the Northern Territory, Dr Rex Patterson.
Acting prime minister Jim Cairns had directed Stretton to take control of disaster relief operations. It later became evident he had no legal basis for the authority he claimed he commanded.
Nonetheless it was Stretton who oversaw the evacuation of about 35,000 Darwin residents.
He headed the counter-disaster activities which focused on health, the restoration of communications and water supplies.
Not surprisingly he also clashed with civil and judicial authorities.
Then at 1pm on December 31, as the last few evacuation flights were preparing to leave the devastated city, he handed over control to the civilian administration headed by Ray McHenry.
McHenry himself would go on to be known as “El Supremo”.
Stretton’s departure was the lead story in the first full edition of the NT News published following Tracy.
The story, datelined Canberra, reported that acting prime minister Cairns had authorised that Stretton hand over the administration of Darwin to “normal authorities”.
According to the report, Stretton had advised Cairns that Darwin “was functioning in an orderly way”.
Alan Stretton AO, CBE, died in 2012 aged 90.
Here’s what you can expect with tomorrow’s Parramatta weather
As summer moves towards autumn what can locals expect tomorrow? We have the latest word from the Weather Bureau.
Here’s what you can expect with tomorrow’s Parramatta weather
As summer moves towards autumn what can locals expect tomorrow? We have the latest word from the Weather Bureau.