Warning (13 page)

TRACY, YOU BITCH

THERE IS a photograph, taken soon after the cyclone, of a Holden with the words
Tracy,
you bitch
spray-painted across the bonnet. It seemed to capture the mood of the times.

The trend of naming cyclones and hurricanes began in 1887 with the famed Australian-based
meteorologist (and expert on all things spiritual) Clement Wragge. He used the names
of anything that appealed to him—from mythological creatures to politicians who annoyed
him. When Wragge retired in 1908 the practice was carried on informally and it was
at this point that the tradition became gendered: tropical cyclones (or hurricanes)
might be named after fishermen's mothers-in-law or naval officers' girlfriends and
wives. When formal naming resumed in 1963, female names were used exclusively—but
Tracy changed that, as she was to change so many things. Not only was Tracy herself
such a significant weather system that her name was permanently retired from use
for cyclones, she also changed the naming tradition itself. ‘Reeling from the enormity
of damage caused to Darwin by the “she-devil” Tracy, the then minister for science,
Mr William Morrison, “suggested that women would not have to bear the odium associated
with tropical cyclones”.'
¹
Since early 1975 cyclones have been named after both men
and women. (And recent research seems to indicate that more needs to be done on that
front. ‘Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don't
respect them,' claimed a
Washington Post
headline of June 2014, citing a US study
that suggested ‘people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions'.
²
)

Even if one puts aside any wrangling over the hidden—or not-so-hidden—meaning behind
calling a cyclone Tracy and Tracy a bitch, most people concede that Darwin has not
been a town that was friendly to women. According to one commentator, ‘The dearth
of women at Port Essington [an early NT outpost]…Reflects in exaggerated fashion
an Australian colonial problem…A new culture [built] from the old, the small, artificial
male societies which give rise to the Australian legends of sport, hard drinking
and mateship.'
³
Indeed almost all the women who went to Darwin in its early colonial
history ended up in early graves. By 1871 there were still only twelve adult European
women compared with 172 European men. Even in the decade before World War Two, the
white women of the Northern Territory were outnumbered three to one by the men. In
1941 all European women and children were compulsorily evacuated (while Aboriginal
children who'd been removed from their families into the ‘care' of the state or the
church, were left behind by all but the nuns who stood by them). Ted D'Ambrosio worked
as a civilian zone warden during the war, and remembers his biggest problem was ‘coping
with irate husbands who didn't want their wives to go and took it out on us. I had
so many bruises by the end of the evacuation it wasn't funny.'
⁴
Old-timer Tom Baird
says that ‘war did break up a lot of families and things like that—friends are scattered
everywhere; some went down to Perth, some went to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane;
you know, a lot of them went away and never ever came back; some of the real Territorians.'

The
Northern Territory New
s was not a supporter of women, then or now. ‘Girls: You're
Fat!' a headline from 11 February 1974, captures the general tenor. Things weren't
much better after the cyclone when the paper rose with aplomb to its task of patronising
the women, at the same time as providing some nifty disaster-inspired product placement.
Articles like ‘Undies for the girls' claimed that the women left in Darwin got ten
thousand dollars' worth of underwear, cosmetics, sunglasses and hosiery provided
by Kotex, Avon and Polaroid. ‘The committee said yesterday that most of the women
left behind were working in essential services, including nursing, often outdoors';
they had, apparently, requested these items. On 11 January the paper returned to
its tradition of a page-three girl (a tradition which appears to have been dropped
for a week or so) by including a bikini-clad girl from Miami. ‘It's a sobering thought
that when this lovely lass was horsing around at Miami Beach, Cyclone Tracy was at
work in Darwin.'

Tom Pauling was a sympathetic man. A member of the Arts Council, he was particularly
sad that the Cavenagh Theatre blew away in the cyclone. He would go on to become
the youngest chief magistrate in Australia, and demonstrate a progressive approach
to Indigenous rights. He worked with Dr Yunupingu in setting up the Garma Council.
When he was interviewed in 1980, Pauling remembered how grim the Darwin of 1970
was for women:

A place of absolutely dull, bare, grey, fibro imminences called houses that were
occupied by government servants who were here for limited tenure of two years so
they never took much interest at all in their gardens. The houses were surrounded
by aralias and there might be the odd undernourished tree somewhere or other.

Richard Creswick's wife became intensely frustrated with Darwin when she arrived
in the early seventies. ‘The outlets, the social outlets for women were far fewer
than they are today, the cultural life was more primitive.' When Vicki Harris moved
there in 1972, she too was unimpressed.

It appeared to me to be very much a man's town in those days. It was virtually a
frontier type of place. There weren't very many shops; Woolworths was in town; there
was no Casuarina at that time. The shopping centre out there only opened just before
Christmas of '74…I found the facilities for women, particularly those that weren't
working, to be very limited.

David McCann, whose marriage broke down shortly before the cyclone, says that the
type of housing provided to public servants contributed to the problems many couples
were experiencing, and that ‘wives weren't coping'. Margaret Muirhead, wife of Supreme
Court judge James Muirhead and Chairperson of International Women's Year in the NT,
concurs. ‘The northern suburbs had always been a bit notorious about being so remote
and women were stuck out [there]. Their husbands went off to work, probably they
only had one car…'
⁵

Of course it was not just Darwin where women's rights were yet to be claimed, and
while change was underway there was still the distinct hangover caused by the discriminatory
legislation of decades (or centuries) standing. It was only eight years since the
ban on married women working in the public service had been lifted. (Bill Wilson's
wife Patricia had had to leave the police force when she married him.) Women in the
1960s were routinely expected to have their husband or a male guarantor sign for
a loan, even if they earned a wage. After Cyclone Tracy, when the women started to
trickle back under the new permit system, Darwin officials would go and ask a woman's
husband if he wanted her back before she was approved.

Many senior figures, Hedley Beare and Ray McHenry included, insist that women were
not forced to evacuate. But the women themselves found that the pressure they were
under to get out of Darwin amounted to the same thing. This coercion took different
forms. People were offered free fares back to Darwin to encourage them to leave,
but this did not guarantee they would be given permission under the permit system
that was introduced on 28 December. Dawn Lawrie, who worked with evacuees, recalls
mothers asking her if they could return to Darwin soon. Her answer was ‘Of course!'
and Lawrie was devastated when she realised that was not, in fact, true.

McHenry introduced the permit system because ‘the trickle of people wanting to get
into Darwin had become a flood'. It didn't help that at the very point they were
trying to empty the city, politicians, journalists and others were being let in,
which intensified the pressure on those who actually lived there. People were told,
bluntly, that they had no options. Bill Wilson described the general approach thus:
‘We're closing this place tomorrow, you've got nowhere to go, so you better pack
your bags and go.' Kass Hancock claims that a soldier pointed a gun at her for a
joke and said, ‘You know I'll use it.'
⁶
She didn't laugh. General Stretton, in his
regular radio interviews, was encouraging but none the less forceful. ‘I urge you
all to do what I said last night. If you want to take advantage of the offer of the
Government to come back here at their expense, register and get yourself on an aircraft
today or tomorrow.' He did go on to acknowledge, however, that some people had to
stay to clean up, and also that leaving was a personal decision.

Tom Baird's wife Evelyn told him, ‘Well, I'm going to put my foot down and say I'm
not going.'
⁷
She knew that a homeless existence for months on end down south would
be distressing, and she didn't want to be separated from Tom. Like all the men he
was working around the clock, but that didn't mean he wanted his wife gone.

You all worked like hell; there was that much work involved. There was very few women
around at the time—most of them all evacuated, but the few that were left behind,
they had a lot of work to do. My wife, they said ‘You'd have to evacuate her'…So
I took her into town and I said, ‘Is there any voluntary work that she can do.' They
said, ‘Try the hospital,' so she got a job at the hospital.

Evelyn worked, like the men, until she literally collapsed.

Having maintained that women were not forced out, Beare goes on to say that some
‘people' had to be told to leave because they were too traumatised to make up their
own mind. ‘Bear in mind all of us have a reality coloured by the experience we'd
gone through, so often times you couldn't have expected rational behaviour out of
people…But it was true that some people wanted to stay…and had they stayed it would
have put a stress on the infrastructure of the city.' This sense of pressure contributed
to the fact that some people—men and women—refused to go to hospital to get serious
injuries treated for fear of being evacuated. On the flip side, others were very
keen to leave and there were near riots when people thought they would miss a bus
to the airport and have to spend another twenty-four hours in Darwin as a consequence.

Forty years later the rush to get the women out is hard to understand. It was clearly
driven by two things: a paternalistic sense of care, and the insulting belief that
women were of no use to the clean-up and, unable to cope, would become a burden.
McHenry: ‘I can remember [Hedley Beare], the education guy, coming and saying, “If
I can get my family out of here I will be able to concentrate in a meaningful way.”'
He talks of wanting his (male) workers to be able to give ‘their 100 per cent effort,
without the difficulties of a family sitting around on their backsides somewhere
or other getting all agitated with the fact that the husband wasn't available'.
⁸
The thinking behind the evacuation not only infantilised women; it also put men under
intolerable pressures, for months and years to come.

In an interview given soon after the cyclone, newspaper man Jim Bowditch said, ‘I
do think it was a mistake to rush the women out. I go along with the view that far
too many men who were left here were quite useless and contributed nothing.' Church
of England Minister (and founding principal of Nungalinya College) Keith Cole was
another who spoke out against the evacuation of the women—although the way that support
was articulated is shocking to the modern ear. He thought staying on would give ‘bored,
middle-aged women…something to live for and do'. Grant Tambling, a Country Liberal
Party (CLP) representative in the NT's first Legislative Assembly, was less mixed
in his messages: ‘I think that the choice should in future be given to the women
themselves to choose whether they feel they have a role to play.'
⁹

McHenry argues that those who felt they could cope with the situation got back to
Darwin quickly:

this question of people being able to cope with certain things [is] pertinent, both
to the evacuation process and the come back process. People who wanted to retrieve
their families did so progressively; they found accommodation from somewhere or other
and said, ‘we want you to come back'. Other people made a conscious judgment, ‘I
won't subject my family to this sort of living; they're better off down south.' Others…said,
‘I've got to have them back', and they were the ones who went and found accommodation
from somewhere or other or cleared their own houses under floorboards, got tarp and
God knows what.

McHenry, it should be noted, often used the word ‘people' when he meant ‘women'.
Dawn Lawrie argued that the focus on women's inability to cope with the rugged conditions
was a beat up.

There were tales in the southern newspapers of Darwin being no place for a woman
or children…Lies and damned lies. There was no threat to the women left in the town…
For a few weeks Darwin was virtually a town without children and I realised then
just what a dreadful act the Pied Piper had perpetrated on Hamelin. A town without
children is a dead town…
¹⁰

Road blocks were set up—illegal, some argued—which screened everyone trying to return.
If you didn't have a permit, you couldn't go home and you couldn't get a permit unless
you could nominate ‘reasonable' premises you could live in. Lawrie takes some pleasure
in recalling that there was one particular house that had weathered Tracy pretty
well. Subsequently a hundred people were nominated as living there, while of course
most were simply sleeping under a tarp in the ruins of a mate's house. Lawrie, the
independent member for Nightcliff at the time of Tracy, was to become a key figure
in the battle for citizens' rights in the months after the cyclone. She cut a dramatic
figure with her beehive and caftans, and of course the
Northern Territory News
loved
her. Lawrie is one of the few women to get a regular run in that paper under headlines
that didn't include the word ‘girls'. Her daughter, Delia Lawrie, is a member of
the Labor Party and the current leader of the opposition in the Northern Territory.