Wayne Walsh was a hippie backpacker from Canada when Cyclone Tracy changed his life forever

HUDDLED behind a Fannie Bay fence, strobe images of furniture and fridges cutting in slow motion through the darkness, 23-year-old Canadian hippie Wayne Walsh played Russian roulette with Cyclone Tracy.

“I was shaking like a leaf.” Canadian Wayne Walsh survived Cyclone Tracy.

HUDDLED behind a Fannie Bay fence, strobe images of furniture and fridges cutting slow motion through the darkness, 23-year-old Canadian hippie Wayne Walsh played Russian roulette with Cyclone Tracy.

He had run 100 metres to that fence from his smashed Elizabeth St home, through twisted tin and wind gusts probably topping 250km/h — we will never know for sure, the Darwin airport anemometer busted at 217km/h.

He found a sense of comfort in choosing his spot to die. It was all that Tracy allowed him.

He watched the luminescent hands of the duty free watch and waited for the fatal blow.

“Play Russian roulette every minute for three hours,” Mr Walsh, now 62, says.

“Holding the pistol to your temple, you spin the chamber and pull the trigger every minute. My second hand sweep on my watch was that symbolism. That was my state of mind.”

Someone approached out the gloom, the first human he had seen for three hours, and the strangers, one stooping, one rising, met on their knees to embrace.

“I was shaking like a leaf.” Canadian Wayne Walsh survived Cyclone Tracy.

The man was Japanese, about 400 pounds, a “sumo wrestler”, Mr Walsh says.

They didn’t speak.

The man covered him, protecting him from the bullets of debris.

“I was shaking like a leaf and this giant man on top of me was bouncing,” Mr Walsh says. “That’s how cold and how scared I was.”

A “reassuring” tug on Mr Walsh’s arm told him it was time to run.

He came to a car topped with a palm tree and found his sumo wrestler, who had dashed ahead, sitting in the front seat with others inside. All, including an Australian, were speaking what seemed gibberish to Mr Walsh and he figured he had gone mad, too traumatised now to comprehend language. They were speaking Japanese.

Just hours earlier, life was good.

Since arriving in Darwin early December Mr Walsh had found a labouring job and on Christmas Eve had picked up well-paying overtime work.

He had $1000 in his pocket as he walked the five kilometres home from work that day.

Even better, a “beautiful buxom blonde” in a mini moke had given him a lift home and invited him to spend Christmas with her the next day.

He would never see her again, nor the money he stashed under his mattress, nor the Japanese man who protected him.

Days later he would find his passport in a tree.

READ: CYCLONE TRACY SURVIVOR’S STORY

As Tracy approached, Mr Walsh felt excitement. He mused there would be plenty of work should a few buildings be damaged.

Now, the ABC radio warnings, dismissed by so many because of the fizzer that was cyclone Selma just weeks earlier, are stains on his mind. He remembers the broadcasts’ accompanying sirens most.

He had taken shelter in a closet and, unaware of what was to come, even managed to fall asleep, missing the calm of the eye that drew his housemates outside.

When the winds returned, stronger than the first, his friend Gus also took shelter in the closet.

To this day they argue about who was the pilot and copilot of that closet as it flew horizontally about 30 metres before making a miraculously soft landing.

Mr Walsh has long been back in Canada, where he lives in Fredericton and works as a geomatics engineer.

He has two adult children and a wife, but Tracy is never far from his mind.

“I wouldn’t talk to people about it for about two years, I had to be drunk,” he says from Canada.

“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is probably something that I had. I would not wish this on anyone. Unless you were there, people just have no idea how horrible it was.”

For nearly 100 days after Tracy, Mr Walsh and an eclectic mix of hippie backpackers barbecued for those who remained — about 10,000 of Darwin’s near 50,0000 population — at Darwin High School and slept in classrooms upstairs.

Mr Walsh also joined volunteers tasked with removing rotting meat from packed Christmas-time fridges and freezers.

At one house, a man vomited three times into his gas mask before deciding he could no longer carry on.

Numbers have varied wildly over the years, but experts have settled on a death toll of 66. Darwin was destroyed, evacuated and rebuilt.

“The resilience of the NT”, Mr Walsh says.

The NT News will publish a special 40th anniversary supplement and web feature in December. Send your stories to [e-mail]