WATER was restored to Darwin in days and electricity in weeks.
By the first day of 1975 the evacuation was slowing and emergency phones had been connected around the city.
Within a week, residents could again buy beer and groceries.
Naval ships and aircraft left Melbourne and Sydney early on Boxing Day to assist with the clean-up, while the army flew in specialists to assist with rations, equipment and stores.
Darwin had regained a basic semblance of a functioning town and those left were eager to rebuild their lives, even if their loved ones could not yet negotiate the permit system, or their neighbours had left never to return.
The Darwin Reconstruction Commission was formed on December 31 to determine how the new Darwin would look.
In his book Returning To Nothing: The Meaning Of Lost Places, author Peter Read notes that residents, who by mid-February had reoccupied some 35 per cent of Darwin’s blocks, “listened in alarm as Dr (Rex) Patterson, Minister for the Department of the Northern Territory, proclaimed that the new Darwin might not the ‘Darwin of old’.”
Early plans from the DRC suggested wiping Coconut Grove off the map and turning parts of residential Fannie Bay and Nightcliff into parklands.
Roads were to be re-routed, schools moved and new housing to take the form of concrete bunkers.
Storm surge zones covered much of the northern suburbs and they were black-listed for redevelopment. The government was to acquire the land.
There were about 1200 objections to the plan and more than 20 community groups emerged in protest, the first started by then-Independent member for Nightcliff Dawn Lawrie.
“A barrage of politicians, advisers and consultants descended on poor Darwin like one of the seven plagues of Egypt,” she wrote.
“There was to be a new Darwin, a new grand plan, decided by experts without having to bother about the opinions of the bothersome citizens.”
The DRC was seen as a group of dispassionate southern planners who failed to comprehend residents’ desire, and need, to rebuild.
The groundswell from those desperate to protect their land and the Darwin they loved meant, according to Read, by the end of February 1975 “the first plan to obliterate the northern suburbs had itself been obliterated”.
By August residents were allowed to rebuild on previously blacked out blocks, but had missed much of the dry season more favourable for builders.
In Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy Sophie Cunningham quotes Ray McHenry, the director of emergency services, as believing the DRC should have stood firm on surge zones.
“It’s only a matter of time – whether it’s five, fifty or a hundred years, there will be a cyclone in Darwin, which will wipe out the people in that surge area; it’s as plain as the nose on your face,” McHenry said.
When the DRC wound up in April 1978, it had built 3000 new homes, most of them in the northern suburbs. According to Read, “Darwin remains the only example of insider success, not by a homeowner, suburban action group or threatened town, but by a whole city”.
Australian Bureau of Statistics show Darwin’s pre-cyclone population was 46,700. In 1975, it was estimated at 25,700 and by 1976 was 44,200, although many of these were construction workers assisting with the rebuild. Many Darwinites of 1974 have never returned.
CAN DARWIN TAKE ANOTHER TRACY?
DARWIN homes, and others in cyclone zones around Australia’s northern coasts, must be built to withstand mid-range Category 4 winds.
In short, in means another Cyclone Tracy would not level the city like it did in 1974, even if a more powerful cyclone made a direct hit, but we are not immune to catastrophe.
Troppo Architects co-director Adrian Welke warns it would be “fanciful” to blindly assume the building codes enacted after Tracy would be enough to protect lives and property.
He says vegetation in and around Darwin has increased since Tracy, which on one hand can help protect buildings from wind and debris, but also act as missiles and wrecking balls, cutting through homes and blocking roads as people seek shelter.
But perhaps the greatest danger should Darwin greet another Tracy is the ocean.
Tracy arrived on a receding tide, meaning the storm surges did not reach their deadly potential.
Much of Darwin has been rebuilt in storm surge zones, including areas of Fannie Bay, Coconut Grove, Nightcliff, Rapid Creek and Stuart Park.
“If there was a cyclone surge there’s probably nothing much you can do to design a building to resist that sort of force,” Mr Welke says.
“Wind pressure is one thing but to have a cyclone surge where you have water and debris and everything coming with it.
“Those areas still remain at risk and if there was a surge I certainly wouldn’t be sitting in any of those buildings.
“They are vulnerable to forces no structural engineering could really resist.”
A CHANGING CITY
ADRIAN Welke arrived in 1979, a year after the Darwin Reconstruction Commission disbanded, to find a bunker mentality in place of old Darwin.
Many of the Commonwealth D and C Series elevated homes built post-war for Darwin’s burgeoning public service had been blown away.
In their place were homes with thick concrete walls and little ventilation, so strong that another Tracy would barely make them quiver.
“They were certainly a response, a pretty huge response, to what Cyclone Tracy had done to Darwin,” Welke says.
“They were also primarily designed by people who lived down south who had no idea about what the tropics are like. But there was nothing in the code that said the buildings needed to be built like that.”
The Troppo team recognised “a significant public questioning” about what had happened to the fabric of the city and set to work.
“The fact (homes) blew away was not a consequence of how they were designed ... they fell apart because they were poorly built, poorly designed structurally,” he says.
“The early buildings we did were about rediscovering those older principles, but building within a structural framework that was going to ensure they were going to remain there if another Tracy or even more significant cyclone would hit Darwin.”
Some of the early work from Troppo can be seen in jungle-like streets of Coconut Grove.
Like the old public service homes, they are elevated to catch the breeze and are now a fixture of Darwin’s north.
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.