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Sergeant Kevin Maley and his family were on the first plane out at four on Boxing
Day morning. When their home disintegrated around them, both parents and the children
had been thrown fifteen metres to the ground. Maley required two hundred stitches,
his wife broke her back and his daughter, Fiona, had severe leg injuries. They were
among the hundreds put on planes, often in the clothes (what was left of them) in
which they'd weathered the cyclone and not much else. They had identification tags
tied to them if they were injured. Some were still covered in dried blood. A baby
was born during a stopover in Brisbane, while the passengers waited in the Ansett
terminal. In Adelaide that Boxing Day, according to the
Advertiser
, ‘more than 400
haggard survivors of the Darwin cyclone poured into the airport terminal…The evacuees
were nearly all women and small children. Many of the women were pregnant…bare-footed
and shivering and clutching plastic bags and small boxes holding their entire belongings.'
One man I spoke to was fourteen during Tracy. He remembers he was separated from
his family and flown out alone. When he got onto the plane he was given a newborn
to nurse for several hours. He'd never held a baby before and had no idea what to
do. He is more disturbed by that memory—the responsibility and his helplessness—than
much of what went before.

Quite often the planes used were military planes that were not intended for passengers.
They were uncomfortable, they had no catering and no toilets. People ended up urinating
in their seats—if they had seats. Julia Church remembers being strapped to the floor
of a Hercules with her legs stuck out in front of her. It was incredibly crowded
and there were babies crying everywhere. Once they were tied in, the army blokes
stood and threw fruit to them for the flight, as if, Julia said to me, they were
monkeys. Some crews fell asleep while flying; in those days there was no such thing
as fatigue management.

Pilot Terese Green provides a vivid description of landing in, then leaving, Darwin.
She went:

with the sole purpose of picking up the Ladies about to give birth from the DRW Hospital…We
left at 13.24 with 40 last stage pregnant ladies (much to our horror) 2CC, 2 Nursing
Sisters and one doctor, 2 cats in cages (they belonged to the hospital) and my memories
are the total carnage, a DC3 firmly implanted in the Base Commander's house, and
the fridge in the water tower (30MTRS up). It was all downhill from there. Two ladies
were in labour, so we went straight to Isa, no joy there, they were already packed
from those who went by car, so running out of hours and ideas, I called up Mackay,
and pleaded (no, threatened) that we needed help, and finally got in there vastly
relieved, as the noises up the back were becoming terrifying to say the least.

In the short term Green ended up at a pub in Mackay to recover. In the longer term
she ended up with the cats that had been on the flight that ‘both lived to a great
age and cost a fortune in Vet bills'.
²

Colleen D'Arcy was evacuated with her seven children and, like many others, she struggled
with a lack of information. She eventually found herself in Alice Springs after travelling
to both Sydney and Brisbane. Bernard Briec was sent out after three days, with his
siblings and some family friends. His mother and father stayed behind for a bit longer.
‘You had to wait in alphabetical order, till your names were called, and all this
sort of stuff. The men who worked at the airport said: “Forget about that, it's not
working like that, it's chaos, it's mayhem. It's basically whoever's there gets on
the planes.”' But he was cheerful once he was on the plane and was well looked after
by the friends he was travelling with. His memories of that time are not painful.
His family planned to stay in Adelaide permanently, though after a few months their
love of Darwin compelled them to move north again.

Katrina Fong Lim, the daughter of Darwin legend Alec Fong Lim, is the current lord
mayor. She was in Sydney during the cyclone and her father, concerned the Darwin
schools wouldn't open within the year, enrolled her and one of her sisters into a
high school in Sydney for 1975. They were called ‘Darwin refugees'. She remembers
the shock of having to wear school uniforms, as well as the fact that she and her
sister were the only two Chinese girls enrolled in the school. It was here she experienced
racism for the first time—in Darwin she was unaware of such matters. She also remembers
that an older sister went to Adelaide to complete her education and never really
returned home at all. Many families were fractured in this way.

With a teenager's keen eye for bullshit, Julia Church recognised the patronising
attitude of people who came out to greet them when they landed. They talked slowly,
explaining obvious things like how escalators worked. On the plus side, she remembers
the Salvation Army gave them seventy dollars each—and there were trestle tables of
free clothes to riffle through, which was fun.

After Janice Perrin's mother got to the hospital she was told she could be treated
there, or evacuated. She chose evacuation. After that, Perrin remembers, ‘We didn't
see her again. None of us saw her again.' A few days later Perrin and her children
were also evacuated. ‘Warren drove to Nightcliff High and then we listed our names
and they had just a big sign and wherever you wanted to go, you went to that sign.
So if you wanted to go to Sydney you went to the sign that said: “Sydney”.' The airport
was crowded and Perrin ended up in a fight.

I moved my feet, which upset the case and upset the bag on top and I bent down to
pick up the bag that I'd upset and they all attacked me. They just all flew at me.
And I had very long hair which was plaited and they pulled my hair and they kicked
me—it was really quite frightening.

Things got so out of hand that some Commonwealth police came over. It turned out
that the family thought that Perrin was trying to steal their bag.

From then on it was very nice because the Commonwealth policeman then took me and
the two children into a little room at the—behind the airport desks and he gave me
a brandy and patted my arm and [
laughs
] I had a whole seat to myself and then when
the plane came in, he took me out to the plane with the kids and put me on.

Getting a seat to herself was no mean feat—Perrin was on the jumbo that broke the
world record for the number of people on board—715 people on a jet configured for
365. She'd wanted to go to Canberra because she had relatives there but ended up
in Sydney. When she arrived she was greeted by a man from Rotary, given some money
(eighty-four dollars) and taken to a room with clothes piled up on tables so she
could dress herself and her children properly. The man then invited her family to
stay. Soon after that Perrin called Adelaide Red Cross to see if they could help
her trace her mother. By this stage she was becoming concerned that her mother's
punctured lung had killed her. She was eventually found in hospital in Perth: alive
but not well.

This happened time and time again. So frantic was the rush to get people out that
they didn't necessarily end up in a state or town where they had relatives. And then
it was hard to get messages back to family to let them know where they'd ended up.
Those in Darwin who had access to phones were uncertain whom to call; those evacuated
could only get through to Darwin on a few lines, and they would have to leave a message
and hope it would be passed on. People hung out at the various interstate airports
for days on end in the hope of spotting friends or relatives on incoming flights.
There was no other way of knowing if someone you loved had made it out.

When Howard Truran was interviewed about his experience fourteen years after the
event he still remembers that, although he wanted his wife and kids evacuated because
he was so worried for them, the experience was extremely traumatic.

I wanted to get 'em out because everything was new to us; we didn't know what was
happening. And then there was rumours that there was typhoid around, and [there was]
no power, no sewerage, no nothing…[Getting them on the bus] was very heart wrenching.
Therese was very upset and I was upset, and the kids. You just piled them on the
bus; you didn't know when you were going to see them again: [there was] all this
devastation around, and women crying and people on the bus and everybody [was] upset,
and then just see the bus disappear.

He remembers that:

the evacuation points were shocking: there was all the toilets of the school—you
can imagine—(they) were all backed up; the stink and the stench; screaming kids;
people sitting around in shock; people injured, in bandages; no clothes, except what
they could find or get from their houses. It was a shocking state.

Bill Wilson says, ‘the evacuation of people from Darwin was handled extremely well'
but then goes on to describe traumatic scenes such as the one that Truran endured.

Certainly the police families that I took out, we had two twenty-one-seater buses
full of people from the police barracks that we put on, took out. A lot of them,
tears were streaming down their face, not knowing when they were coming back to Darwin,
not knowing when they'd see their husbands again. It was really traumatic stuff,
leaving everything they knew…It had an impact on those of us left behind because
(a) you threw yourself into your work, which was a good thing, but (b) people were
lonely. It was a very lonely existence…it was probably a week before I managed to
get onto Pat.

Air Commodore Hitchins remembers that no proper records were kept on how many planes
left each day or where they went. He was ‘incensed at the pell mell, disorganised,
chaotic manner in which it was evolving'. Hedley Beare takes responsibility for the
fact that people were flown all over Australia, and often didn't end up in the city
they hoped to land in.

I was sitting with the chief of the Red Cross unit who had come up, and we had people
typing out—we'd found a few typewriters by then—typing up the list of people who
were going on the planes. I was getting very agitated, because I was saying: ‘We
can't do this, we're holding up loading people. If they're sitting for four hours
in an aeroplane, why can't they make a list once they're in flight?…' We sort of
unilaterally said: ‘No more lists. If they're out at the airport we put them on a
plane, and if a person wants to go to Sydney but they happen to be on a plane to
Perth, the infrastructure of organisation in the south will arrange for that.' We
just needed to have every seat filled.

Beare is being generous in taking the blame: his situation was impossible. Hitchins
is just one of dozens to state that Beare was a ‘hell of a nice bloke' and that,
with Ray McHenry, he did ‘a mighty job and a very difficult job'. Despite his admiration
for Beare, however, Hitchins took it upon himself to intervene, telling Stretton
he ‘thought it was high time that somebody, some suitably qualified person, was placed
in charge of this activity because it was becoming quite chaotic.'

Stretton's first response was, once again, that civilians should be left to sort
it out; however by 27 December (or 28 December—accounts vary) Hitchins was asked
to take ‘immediate control of the destinations of outbound aircraft'. Things improved
rapidly. People were flown to the right places. Injured people had medicos to look
out for them, rather than being left in the care of other traumatised passengers.

The decision to evacuate is the single most controversial decision taken in the aftermath
of Cyclone Tracy. Charles See Kee, the first man of Chinese descent to be employed
in Darwin's public service and a survivor of the World War Two bombings, has commented
that ‘all the mistakes that they made during the bombing of Darwin they made them
again after Cyclone Tracy…They panicked during the bombing of Darwin, they panicked
during Cyclone Tracy. I know that people were evacuated but I think a lot of it was
unnecessary.'
³
He found himself wondering, ‘If we have another thing in Darwin will
we do it again?' Beare, in contrast, suggests that the panic was a healthy thing.
‘In fact, the adrenaline of getting the city going again was the thing actually that
saved a lot of us.' But See Kee is right to draw a parallel with the evacuation of
Darwin in 1942; certainly the way women were treated after Cyclone Tracy created
a real sense of déjà vu for those who'd been forced out before.

In her book
No Man's Land
Barbara James describes the method of the wartime evacuation,
in ramshackle boats without proper provisions, as ‘crude and cruel in the extreme…women
and children were the ones who suffered most and were least considered'. Her mother-in-law,
Wendy James, was a child at that time and her stories are devastating: she remembers
the rage of her own mother, Pearl, that women were being forced out of the town,
and the threats that were used to get them to go. It was terrible to experience a
version of the same thing all over again thirty years later. Nellie Flynn, one of
longest-lived Territorians, a venerable old woman of pioneer and Aboriginal descent,
defied the evacuation orders in World War Two and defied them again after Tracy.
‘For three days after the cyclone the indomitable Nellie, then aged ninety-three,
hid under scraps of canvas in her roofless Rapid Creek home to escape being forced
to evacuate.'
⁴
She was finally discovered, and allowed to stay.

Ray McHenry remains a strong defender of the decision to evacuate. ‘Beware of academics
and the grandstand critics who want to ram the planning jargon down your throat and
criticise the decisions such as evacuation. See the problems of the evacuation system
through the eyes of those affected…' He argued that those critics, often academics,
came from outside the Territory.