Cyclone Tracy like ‘jet noise’ over Darwin, remembers Greg

IF you’ve been to the Cyclone Tracy exhibition at Darwin’s museum you may have stood in a small dark room there and listened to a recording of the storm that ripped the city apart on this day 44 years ago

Alawa resident Greg Novak poses for a photo in his backyard on Thursday, December 13, 2018. Novak was living in Stanowski St, Alawa during Cyclone Tracy Picture: Keri Megelus

IF you’ve been to the Cyclone Tracy exhibition at Darwin’s museum you may have stood in a small dark room there and listened to a recording of the storm that ripped the city apart on this day 44 years ago.

For Alawa resident Greg Novak, who went through the real thing on Christmas Eve 1974, the experience of museum visitors is “a taste” of what that night brought — “if you turned the volume up four times and kept it there for hours on end”.

“The noise was just incredible. It was like standing next to a jet aeroplane about to take off,” he recalls.

Destruction caused across Darwin, captured by Greg Novak in the days after Cyclone Tracy flattened the town at Christmas 1974.

Mr Novak was 22 and staying with his older sister and her family for Christmas at their Stasinowski St home when Tracy hit.

There had been warnings but like most Darwinites, he had gone to be at night, full of festive food, expecting little worse than a soggy Christmas morning.

The first indicator of the danger came when Mr Novak was woken by his sister about midnight because rain was flooding the loungeroom.

While inspecting the damage a loud noise drew their attention skywards.

“We looked up and the manhole cover had just gone. It was pitch black but I’ve got a vague recollection of seeing something like lightning and realising the roof must be gone,” Mr Novak said.

Destruction caused across Darwin, captured by Greg Novak in the days after Cyclone Tracy flattened the town at Christmas 1974.

Over the coming hours Mr Novak, his sister, brother-in-law and two young nephews moved around the house trying to find shelter as it disintegrated around them.

They tried the bathroom first, until the louvre windows shattered with the force of the winds and the door almost cut off Mr Novak’s fingers as it slammed shut.

Next, they clambered down the front steps in the darkness to a besser-block shed under the elevated house, but soon debris hurtling through the air began crashing into the shed, raining bricks on their heads.

“I had this vision of the house — which was on stilts — going sideways and pancaking on top of us and squashing us to death,” Mr Novak said.

“You could hear the house just getting torn to shreds … like there was an animal outside and it was going to kill us.”

Their last option was to crawl under a ute weighed down with rocks from a gardening project.

“The whole time we were screaming just to hear each other. It was ink black, you couldn’t see your nose in front of your face,” Mr Novak said.

Destruction caused across Darwin, captured by Greg Novak in the days after Cyclone Tracy flattened the town at Christmas 1974.

When dawn broke and the storm finally receded the devastation was shocking.

A neighbouring brick house “looked like a front end loader had gone through it” and another elevated home had been reduced to a “dancefloor” with only the toilet and bathtub left in place.

Winds which reached 270km/h had twisted metal power poles into “pig’s tails” and “there wasn’t a single leaf left on any of the trees”.

Tens of thousands of residents evacuated but Mr Novak remained with hundreds to help clean up.

So much food bought for Christmas feasts had gone to waste but, driving the streets in the aftermath, he spotted a group of men making the best of the ruined Christmas Day in true Territory style: “They were sitting in the rafters of what was left of their obliterated house, drinking beers out of an Esky — before they went warm I suppose.”

Lauren Novak is a News Corp journalist and Greg Novak’s daughter