By nightfall on December 24, 1974, Christmas Eve parties were in full swing across the frontier city of Darwin.
People knew of a cyclone tracking south from the Arafura Sea, but only weeks before residents had made bothersome preparations for Cyclone Selma, only for it turn around and go away.
This would be much of the same. And besides, it was Christmas.
By morning 66 people were dead or dying, hundreds more were injured and all but 500 of Darwin’s 12,000 buildings were damaged.
Darwin had been obliterated.
It is well documented the anemometer at Darwin airport broke when gusts reached 217km/h at about 3am Christmas morning.
It is possible wind gusts topped the necessary 272km/h to take it to category 5 but no-one will ever know.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s fledgling equipment picked up the low which would become Tracy forming south of Indonesia’s Aru Islands on December 20. It issued its first cyclone alert at 4pm the following day.
Considering there were only two or three satellites orbiting Earth in 1974, transmitting images a couple times a day (there are now as many as five satellites capturing activity every hour or even half-hour), the early work from the BOM and Darwin Tropical Cyclone Warning Centre team was commendable.
What no one could predict in 1974 was Tracy’s deadly course.
By the morning of December 23, Tracy had reached the northern tips of the Tiwi Islands. It was not until 12.30pm forecasters noted it had turned towards Darwin.
Tracy’s gale force winds extended 80km to 100km in diameter, making it a “midget cyclone” in meteorological terms.
The eye tightened as it approached Darwin until it was just 6km in diameter.
Forecaster Dr Greg Holland, who was in the eighth floor of the Smith St building housing the Bureau of Meteorology that evening noted in the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Journal the entire gale force wind region of Tracy would have fit within the eye of severe tropical cyclone Kerry (1979 in the Coral Sea).
Tracy’s severe damage was limited to an area about 50km inland, and slight damage about an extra 20km or 30km inland.
Had Tracy hit Geelong, Dr Holland says, “the entire damage would have extended less than one third the way to the Melbourne central business district, which would have experienced little more than a windy day. By comparison the damage from super typhoon Tip (1979 in the western North Pacific) would have covered Victoria and Tasmania and extended into NSW and South Australia.”
Tracy had packed its fury tight.
Close to 25,000 people were flown by air to southern capitals in Australia’s largest ever evacuation effort and Darwin’s 1974 population of 47,000 became a little more than 10,000 in a matter of days.
Many survivors never returned.
DOG’S PREMONITION SAVED THE FAMILY
FRIGHTENED, shocked and clutching two young children – one stricken with measles – Fay Karamanakis was stumbling into the makeshift evacuation centre at Wagaman primary school when she heard the ear-piercing shot.
It was from a shotgun, held by a police officer, and directed at Blackie, the family pet who only six hours earlier saved her family from death.
It is no myth dogs were shot by authorities in Tracy’s aftermath in an ostensible bid to control disease, even though many Territorians have spent years in denial. Blackie was one of the first to go.
Fay still finds it hard to talk about that day, but her recall is vivid. Blackie had been sitting on the veranda earlier in the day, far from himself. Fay assumed it was the gathering storm clouds and impending thunder.
As the weather intensified, Blackie became more frantic and began scratching the door
and yelping.
“When I went to get a towel to dry him up he runs straight to the baby’s bedroom,” Fay says. “He grabbed the baby’s sheets and pulled them and the baby knocked her head on the metal cot and started screaming.
“I grabbed the baby and I thought ‘you naughty dog, how could you do this?’ My four-month-old was blue from the impact and crying.”
As Fay comforted the baby, Blackie ran to three-year-old Katie’s room next door and grabbed her by the pyjamas, pulling her onto the floorboards where she landed heavily.
Fay thought Blackie had gone mad.
“I remember holding both screaming kids in my arms thinking this stupid dog was going to make me give the baby measles ... I was crying with the kids,” she says.
Blackie was turfed outside until her husband John, feeling sorry for the lunatic canine, let him back in.
At once, Blackie began trying to nudge the family out the front door.
“John said ‘this dog is telling us to go’, so this time we went downstairs.”
They took shelter in the granny flat below the elevated house with another couple.
Within seconds, the top of the house, where they had been only moments earlier, began to peel away.
“The entire house collapsed from above and fell onto one side,” Fay says.
“We were shocked, everything was flying around. The noise we hear in the cyclone exhibition at the museum – that noise was happening at around 11.30. But after the eye it was nothing like that … it was worse. We had a car, boat flung on top of our house in the wind – can you imagine all these things hitting the roof?
“When the eye came over us we thought it was over so we kissed and hugged, but minutes later it started again and the big noise – well it was twice as bad. This time missiles were going everywhere.
“ We thought it was the second coming of Christ ... we started confessing to each other and praying as we thought we would pass over. We accepted we were going to die ... the fear was that bad.”
From next door came the screams from their neighbour begging for help. From underneath came the water.
“I had to hold the girls’ heads up so the water wouldn’t drown them,” Fay says.
“The men tried to open the door and see what was going on but the vacuum of the water building inside and the force of the cyclone wouldn’t let us.”
About five minutes later, the cries stopped.
The young mum next door and her two toddlers had been crushed to death when a wall fell on them as they sheltered under a bed.
The woman’s Navy officer husband found his family when he returned from duty early that Christmas morning.
“If she had just chosen to go into the kitchen or dining room she would have been fine.
But the whole wall came down and crushed the poor woman and her kids,” Fay says.
“We saw him in the shelter the next day, crying over his kids ... I remember they had their bodies in wheelbarrows.
“That poor man was just shattered.”
Darwin had been absolutely obliterated.
Fay remembers “eerie grey mist” hanging in the air as they left their ruined home and the thought they must be on another planet – “waiting for the aliens to come grab us; nothing resembled anything human.”
And there was Blackie, who after sheltering under a car all night raced straight to the family. He had not wanted to come into the granny flat, but he was fine.
Police front-loaders helped the family slowly drive the short distance to the school.
“As I walked into the shelter I heard a bang. I turn around to see what the bang was – and I saw my doggie had been shot … that was devastating. Devastating because he had saved our lives.
“There was no pre warning – they thought he was stray because he had run after the car.
“I just remember running over to (the officer) and screaming ‘why did you kill my dog – this dog saved our lives ... why did you do that, why?’ I am sure now they didn’t want to do it either. But you can’t get over something like that.
“There was a big pit behind the school where they threw him along with all the food that was going off.”
Fay, who plans to release her story in memoirs, still lives with John at the same address in Wagaman. She moved back to Darwin four months after Tracy.
TRACY KILLED MY FATHER
RAYMOND Ian “Happy” Hampton is one of Tracy’s 66 fatalities.
Thrown by winds from his elevated Wanguri home, he was found Christmas morning by his family close to death inside a car.
His wife was seriously injured; his daughter Deborah Hampton, 12 years old that day, escaped with just a broken nose.
Happy died from injuries on Boxing Day, aged just 34.
Deborah has never spoken of it until now but her father’s death must not be in vain, she says.
Forty years of relative atmospheric peace has created complacency; people need to understand a cyclone’s fury and be armed with a plan.
Deborah remembers the night like “it happened yesterday”, even recalling a sense of anticipation among some of the teenagers at Casuarina High School in the days preceding the cyclone.
“My (13-year-old) sister and I were actually feeling a bit ‘excited’ that maybe we were going to go through a cyclone. ... We felt it was going to be a great adventure. Everyone at Casuarina High school had been talking about it too,” Deborah says.
To a degree, the Hamptons were prepared that night, maybe more than most, but no one expected what was to come.
“If my parents were worried, they certainly did a good job of maintaining normalcy,” Deborah says.
“Louvres were taped, bathtub filled with water, torches, batteries and all of the then known cyclone kit essentials had been set up.
“We certainly weren’t scared. How wrong we were.”
Shortly after 10.30pm the family and close family friend Ray Sharpe, who had been visiting for drinks on Christmas Eve, knew the situation was turning critical.
Soon after, the roof tore away.
“As we were making our way from the lounge room into the bathroom, louvres started to explode, the walls of the lounge room literally blew away followed by the floorboards,” Deborah says.
“When I saw our lounge and TV get swallowed up and disappear like something you see in a horror movie ... I couldn’t believe my eyes. Horrendous.
“My cat had a litter of kittens, and I recall seeing them being sucked away like when you open the door of a plane. I of course tried to run after them to save them, but my mother yanked me back as we stumbled to get to the bathroom.
“We were running for our lives.
“I remember the noise of the wind, we basically had to yell at the top of our lungs to speak to each other, even though we were within inches apart. Bits of stuff hit your skin, and you were sure that when daylight came you would be covered in cuts, or worse.”
They tried to flee but were trapped inside the bathroom because the air pressure held the door closed.
As the outer edge of the cyclone’s eye brought the most destructive winds, the house began to disappear.
“The bathroom walls were coming apart at the seams, and one by one got blown away until all that was left of the entire house was floorboards,” Deborah says.
“Nothing to protect us or to latch on to. My family and I were left holding hands in a skydiver formation, until we couldn’t hold on to each other any longer and one by one we lost our grip and got blown asunder at 200km an hour.
“As I got flung through the air, I remember seeing bits of planks of the floorboards following me, and I truly thought that this was it, and that I would die.”
Deborah and her sister survived the fall and found an upside-down wardrobe wedged in mud. They climbed inside and sheltered for the rest of the night.
“I was the first one of us to crawl out of the wardrobe and the first words I spoke on Christmas morning were ‘the neighbourhood’s gone’,” she says.
“My sister didn’t believe me, and when she looked out she was also in shock. It looked like we were in a war zone. The whole neighbourhood was gone. Flattened and unrecognisable.”
Clutching each other, the young girls searched desperately for their parents.
“My mother was calling out our names at the top of her lungs, and we found her clinging to a pig wire fence, and could see that she was injured, having been struck by a piece of corrugated iron.
“Our dad couldn’t be found straight away, and when we did find him, he was found in the car under the house where it always sat, critically injured.
“An ambulance was called by one of our neighbours and he was taken to Royal Darwin Hospital. He never regained consciousness and slipped away from us on Boxing Day.”
The girls and their mum Joy were evacuated to Sydney on a Hercules. They weren’t even allowed to stay to bury their father and husband.
“Mum never fully recovered from her injuries (and had) to retire from her government job,” Deborah says.
“I am recounting this story as I don’t want my father’s death to have been in vain.
Please, please treat all cyclones as the dangerous entities that they are. They can and do kill. This cyclone season, be prepared.”
“EVERYONE MUST BE DEAD”
YOUNG parents Sandra and John White looked outside the toilet louvres of their battered Wagaman home on Christmas morning and assumed the worst.
“’My God, everyone mus be dead’. These were my first words. Followed closely with ‘what on earth do we do now’,” Sandra says.
“When I saw the total devastation all around us I couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly have survived.”
Earlier, the couple had wrapped up the last of their Christmas presents for their two young children and headed out to a Christmas Eve party, oblivious to the looming destruction only hours away.
“There had been cyclone warnings for a few days and the weather was very wet and windy but not having experienced a cyclone before and thinking everything would be OK, we still decided to go to the party,’’ Sandra says.
“During the evening the weather got so bad we decided to go home. We went to bed but just couldn’t sleep because the howling of the wind and noise of the thunder … even though that was nothing compared to what was to come.”
When Tracy’s full vengeance hit at 1am, the frightened family found themselves huddled inside the only room left standing – the toilet.
“We sat on the floor with our backs braced against the door and we wrapped our arms around (son) Mark and (daughter) Karen to protect them as best as we could.”
Sandra recalls wearing nightclothes so the family had no protection against the louvres smashing all around them, with pieces of broken glass flying into their faces.
“We were sitting in water and glass and were shivering from cold and fear so we huddled together as close as we could.
“It is impossible to describe the noise of the houses smashing and crashing around us ...
“I have never been so terrified in my life and hope I never will be again.
“I am not a religious person but for some reason I did pray that night and surprisingly I managed to stay calm for the sake of the children.”
During the 20-minute respite that was the eye of the cyclone, John made the decision to race outside and find shoes and blankets for the family.
“We had no option but to sit and wait not knowing when it would pass and not knowing whether we would be dead or alive or perhaps severely injured when she finally decided to leave us.
“After six long terrifying hours it was an indescribable relief.”
“There were lots of people in the same situation and in a way it was comforting to know that you were not the only ones, who somehow, having survived the cyclone now had to survive the aftermath,”
John says that at this stage, there was still worry of what was to come.
“I think it is sufficient to say that everyone in Darwin at the time must now know what sickening fear is,” he says.
“Our next-door neighbour came over the next morning to see how we survived. As he came through the rubble he was shaking and looked as white as a ghost. I commented on this and he said ‘go take a look at yourself’.
“I was shocked by the vacant mask-like face I saw.”
Sandra and John both say there was never any doubt in their minds that they would rebuild their lives in the broken city.
Three months after being evacuated to Adelaide, the family towed a caravan back to Darwin and lived in it for 18 months as their home was completely rebuilt.
We had nowhere else to go … this is where our lives were,” they say. The couple still lives in Wagaman today.
THE HARDEST JOB OF ALL
DECEMBER 17 has proved a fateful date in the life of Alex Carolan.
The Irish immigrant’s first port of call in Australia was Darwin on December 17, 1970.
On December 17, 1974, Detective Sergeant Carolan arrived in Darwin from Alice Springs and by Christmas morning, fresh from the desert, found himself dealing with the human toll of Cyclone Tracy.
Along with Darwin’s acting pathologist, Dr Jurgen Rode, Alex, then 28, was given the job of first identifying and then burying Tracy’s victims.
“We probably buried well over 30 people,” he says.
Like so many, he set out to enjoy Christmas Eve with friends. He dined at popular Charlie’s Restaurant on Knuckey St and has drinks at the Hotel Darwin on Smith St.
Around midnight, he and his companions, two women and a man, headed back to his accommodation at the police barracks on Cavenagh St for a few more drinks.
Before reaching the barracks they saw a series of flashes which signalled the end of the electricity supply.
It was 12.21am. Sgt Carolan remembers that clearly because the electric clock in the barracks stayed locked on the time for months following Tracy.
Despite the lack of electricity, Sgt Carolan and his companions enjoyed some games of pool by torchlight. One of the women became concerned about the approaching storm, so Sgt Carolan drove her home to Lindsay St in the inner-city area.
He got a taste of the storm’s mounting fury when an airborne rubbish bin shattered his driver’s side window.
Shortly after turning in for the evening, Sgt Carolan was roused by one of only two other officers in the barracks to be told the storm had removed part of the roof and it was time to take shelter in the laundry. By morning, with the cyclone gone, he headed to the Darwin Police Station, then located at the corner of Mitchell and Bennett streets.
As the morning wore on, Tracy’s true toll was becoming evident.
“By midmorning there were five bodies in the corridor,” Sgt Carolan says.
Acting pathologist Rode arrived at the station looking for an officer to assist in the task of dealing with an unknown number of dead.
Officer-in-charge of the Darwin CIB, Len Cossons, decided the unmarried Sgt Carolan should join Dr Rode.
He and Dr Rode took a police car and headed for the Casuarina Police Station in Darwin’s devastated northern suburbs. Darwin’s destruction meant it took the pair an hour to drive from the city to Casuarina. As the day wore on, a growing number of bodies arrived at Casuarina Police Station.
Although damaged, the nearby Casuarina Post Office was selected as a makeshift morgue. It was to become one of several temporary morgues in the devastated city.
Darwin’s absence of electricity meant corpses had to be dealt with quickly.
“We had all those bodies lined up on benches normally used for sorting mail,” Sgt Carolan says.
Police fingerprint officers and photographers worked in relay with Dr Rode and Sgt Carolan as they set about the task of trying to identify the victims of Tracy.
By the time the grim task got under way, the morgue had 18-20 bodies, including seven children under the age of 10.
Sgt Carolan spent the next two weeks with Dr Rode and they still remain in regular contact.
“He was a slave driver,” Sgt Carolan says, only half-jokingly. “The pathologist was smoking about 80 cigarettes a day and I was drinking about 20 cups of coffee a day. I had no sleep at all for the first two days.”
The process of identification was simple enough. The dead were photographed, fingerprinted and numbered.
Dr Rode also provided Sgt Carolan with details on an individual’s age, sex, race and physical characteristics, along with information on signs of trauma and the apparent cause of death. In cases of severe facial injuries, dental charts were made. “I had a book and Jurgen would call out the details to me,” he says.
“I also arranged for a digger to go out to McMillans Rd cemetery to dig about 30 graves. We had only a few coffins. So we wrapped most of them in blankets.”
In some cases the dead were recognised or were carrying papers, but they had no idea whom most were.
In these cases formal identification occurred later.
Some families were on hand at the cemetery to say goodbye to their loved ones, but generally it was only undertaker John McNamee, Dr Rode, Sgt Carolan and a minister of religion to ensure each burial was conducted with dignity.
Some burials occurred on December 26 and most were completed by December 28.
By the time of the burials the evacuation of Darwin had begun. Sgt Carolan believes the evacuation, along with the shock affecting most of the population, was the reason more were not on hand to say goodbye. Each grave was marked with the number given to the person’s body as part of the identification process.
He says while he does not feel he suffered any long-term psychological harm from the time he spent dealing with the victims of Tracy, it is an episode in his life which he thinks about frequently.
“I certainly think about it every Christmas time,” he says.
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.