Warning (15 page)

Studies done after Cyclone Tracy,
¹⁶
and others on the psychological impact of cyclones
in general, show that women often suffer a greater amount of psychological trauma
after a disaster. This could be seen to support the belief that women were inherently
less able to cope. I would argue, however, that part of the explanation was the way
women were denied the right to share in the satisfaction that came from rebuilding
their community. Instead they had to deal with ‘Cramped accommodation with distant
and sometimes incompatible relatives, constantly changing addresses, doubt about
who would pay for dental, optical, physical and emotional care, and loss of contact
with other evacuees.'
¹⁷
Since the 1990s serious work has been done to consider the
different experiences of women and men during, and after, a disaster. In the World
Health Organization's Gender and Health Report it was observed that after Hurricane
Andrew hit the US in 1992, ‘while men would build roads and houses the role of putting
lives back together was the women's'.

Women were denied that role in Cyclone Tracy and it's important to note that men,
as well as women, suffered as a result.

Hedley Beare was one of several senior men who conducted himself with extraordinary
commitment and grace, while being exposed to horrendous stress. After his family
were evacuated he thought:

‘That could be the last time I see those four', because there was no certainty we
would survive the emergency, and we were very conscious of the lack of amenities…You
could smell the panic in the northern suburbs—there was a sort of stench which began
to rise. We got—I reckon it was about the third day you sense a sort of terror taking
people over, because the food was rotting, and somehow their world was rotting, and
they felt that they might die.

It's quite a shock to realise that Beare thought he might never see his family again:
not because they'd come to harm, but because he would. It really did feel like the
end of the world for many of the men left behind. Fear of death was just one of the
stresses that tended to lead to emotional problems after the cyclone. Beare slept
one and a half hours a night for ten days, and was in a state of collapse when he
finally got onto the first commercial flight out. He remembers his enormous gratitude
towards the men who supported him, men that ‘did the little personal things…That
were family like.' In particular he mentions Doug McKenzie, the man who took over
the care of the Beare family's dog, Muffin. ‘I mean, you've got no family there,
you sort of put your affection on it.' Beare's daughter, who'd had glandular fever
at the time of the cyclone and was evacuated to Canberra, had health problems for
the rest of her relatively short life. She eventually died of leukaemia. Beare believes
the cyclone contributed to that. For all these reasons, for many more still, Beare
remained traumatised by the ten days of the emergency. When he was interviewed twenty
years after the cyclone he still struggled to talk about what happened. ‘It affects
me too deeply. It's traumatic for me, and it's still in my system.'

He wasn't alone. Vicki Harris's husband turned yellow a few months after Tracy and
the doctors diagnosed shock. There were cases of psychosomatic paralysis. Frank Thorogood
recalls that all the skin on his hands peeled off when he got back to Canberra. Men
who may already have had drinking problems found their consumption of alcohol escalated.
There were early retirements in the years to follow. Cedric Patterson, who was fifty
when Tracy hit, went on to have medical problems.

I was faced with a lot of traumas of rebuilding, as well as working hard at a particular
time. And I really think that's one of the reasons that I was retired out of the
department early, because I had reached a point where I think I was sort of going
up and down in the one spot.

Meteorologist Peter Harvey retired from the public service in 1987, at only fifty,
having been on sick leave for two years. He had an anxiety condition and high blood
pressure, and believed his experiences during the cyclone were partly responsible.
Driving a woman in labour to hospital the day after the cyclone was just the start
of it. The meteorology bureau where he worked started to run limited services on
the Friday after the cyclone; it was up and running by the following Monday and Harvey
had to keep things going there for months afterwards. He started getting chest pains
in '75 and '76 as did several of his friends. ‘In retrospect it is a classical stress
symptom.'
¹⁸

Anne Petterson, a former administrator with the Red Cross and then a Welfare Rights
Officer with the Welfare Council, wrote in the Giese Report that ‘there should have
been some assessment as to people's capability of handling the situation. I don't
know how but it would have been better if very stable women stayed behind to hold
things together here.' Men were deprived of the social support their families could
have offered. The refusal of women, and the emotional world they were seen to represent,
is directly related to the intense distress many men suffered both at the time and
in decades to come.

DARIBAH NUNGALINYA

ONE JUNE when I was visiting Darwin to work on this book, I drove down to Kakadu.
The highway was lined with a willowy and delicate pale lavender bush, and another
bush, stark and long-limbed, with large bright yellow flowers. There were lots of
little fires spotted alongside the road—an alarming sight for a Victorian—but they
were under control. Kakadu is home to one of the oldest continuous living cultures
in the world and its rock art chronicles that span of history—including the ice age
of fifteen thousand years ago and the time when the thylacine lived in the north,
some six thousand years ago. And while I had heard about these paintings, nothing
could quite prepare me for what it felt like, after two hours of sweaty walking,
to come across an overhang and the two-hundred-year-old painting within it: of a
ship with tall white sails. Such depth of history is a stark contrast to white people's
recent arrival in the Top End, which feels like a wound ripped through the land and
the culture. This wounding, many Indigenous people believe, was one of the causes
of Cyclone Tracy and many disasters before and since.

The specific factors that Indigenous people believe caused the cyclone vary, depending
where people came from. However they all touched on this notion of the desecration
of the land, and an associated warning to Aboriginal people to reinvigorate their
cultural practices. Cyclone Tracy was believed to have targeted Darwin because it
was the centre of European culture up north. Some said Cyclone Tracy was brought
on because the Mirrar people were unhappy about exploration taking place for the
Jabiluka uranium mine. They didn't want vehicles getting in there during in the wet,
so big storms were sung up. When Echo Cole was asked about this he was circumspect.
He didn't know, he said, but he acknowledged: ‘In past history that I know of, our
people do sing up for rain.' A report on Indigenous experiences of Cyclone Tracy
was finally written in 2011. It noted that, while cyclones are viewed as negative
events by many,

Australian Indigenous people positively view cyclones as creative entities that bring
renewal but act negatively as a punishment when improper engagement with the natural
or supernatural work had taken place. Other extreme climatic events such as flooding
and lightning-induced bushfires are similarly viewed as elements of a breathing landscape.
¹

History is never just history. Weather is never just weather.

The Larrakia themselves believed that Tracy was created by the anger of Daribah Nungalinya
or ‘Old Man Rock' who sits in the sea, out from Casuarina Beach. He is the body of
a powerful ancestor and as such must not be damaged in any way. Daribah Nungalinya
is responsible for earthquakes, storms and cyclones and the monsoon that comes rolling
in from the Timor Sea over the rocks before it reaches land at Darwin's northern
suburbs.

Principal Keith Cole of Nungalinya College recalls that some Larrakia believed that
the sixteen-ton granite boulder that stood in front of his college had been taken
from ‘Old Man Rock' though he insists that it was not. (He said that the rock had
come from Mount Bundy mines and this explanation was accepted.) Cole had genuine
sympathy with the Larrakia's way of seeing the world, comparing it with what he called
Old Testament thinking.

The whirlwind, or in our terms, the cyclone, can be a vehicle of God's judgment or
indicative of His sovereign power… The cyclone said to me, and many others have told
me that the cyclone said to them, ‘There is a God. He is Almighty, He is all powerful,
and His fury is seen in the storm.'

In the early seventies there was a steady improvement in and recognition of Aboriginal
rights. Lionel Murphy, then federal attorney-general, was keen that Indigenous people,
particularly elders and their councils, be encouraged to make decisions regarding
their own communities. Indigenous justices of the peace were being trained in remote
areas. It was also a time when protocols regarding the treatment of Aboriginal people
in court were being revised and the right of communities to enforce their own system
of law was being given serious consideration. Clem O'Sullivan, the crown law officer
for the Northern Territory and its first director of law, remembers that this was
a process that ‘accelerated considerably under the Labor government and the change
in 1972…It was an interest close to Lionel Murphy's heart.'
²
The Whitlam government
had begun drafting the
Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act
though it
would not be passed until 1976. This was also the era in which missionaries lost
their power, and Indigenous people were allowed to speak their own language again
(though of course many had been speaking it, secretly, all along).

Indigenous people today comment that there was less racism back then than there is
today and that Darwin was a friendlier place. But there is no doubt that one of the
fault lines that yawned wide after the cyclone was race. General Stretton was alert
to problems of racism, though his commitment to evacuation as the way forward offset
some of his good intentions: ‘It did not take too long for racial problems to emerge.
I was approached by some leading citizens of Darwin with the request that, because
of their propensity to spread disease, all Aborigines should immediately be moved
out of Darwin irrespective of their wishes in the matter.' Stretton refused, saying:
‘The Aborigines would enjoy the same priority as every other person in Darwin.'
They were given three options. They could be evacuated south, fly back to ‘reservations',
or could remain in Darwin. ‘Those aboriginals evacuated by air to capital cities
were moved in accordance within the overall priorities except the head of the household
was allowed to move with his family…Other aboriginals in the city and certain fringe
communities were also assisted.' As it turned out, Indigenous families often were
separated, much as white families were, which suggests that Stretton meant that those
who lived traditionally were allowed to stay together as a unit but others were to
be treated like everyone else. Other than the general pronouncement above, Stretton
notes that the community at Delissaville—on the Cox Peninsula near Mandorah—was looked
in on. That community was not evacuated, but nor did it want to be.

It was the job of people like welfare officer Michael Ivory to work with local Aboriginal
people. He remembers that the day after the cyclone many of them had got themselves
to the shelter at Ludmilla and from there he organised for some to go to Melbourne
and some to Sydney, even though: ‘They were blackfellas who'd never been out of the
Territory in their life.'
³
Serious efforts were made to house Indigenous people within
the Territory rather than interstate, so as to avoid extreme dislocation. Ivory again:
‘There was a lot of Aboriginal people that had to be catered for, who wanted to go
home, so we had to organise transport for them, such as it was. Normally it was by
road.' Clem O'Sullivan remembers that he flew in to Darwin on 29 December on a chartered
DC3 that had been used earlier in the day to move people to a community on Elcho
Island. In the very fine twentieth anniversary feature run by the
Northern Territory
News
, Barry Medley remembers that his employer, Perkins Shipping, delivered essential
supplies to coastal Aboriginal communities and Mr Medley said it was crucial the
job was done. ‘We had to feed all the people on the islands so I stayed to give people
a hand.' Bill Wilson also remembers evacuating Indigenous people out a day or two
after Tracy.

All the people interviewed for the Haynes Report on Indigenous experiences of Cyclone
Tracy felt they were treated well in the days immediately following the cyclone and
during evacuation. They were given food for free, and were not expected to pay for
things and were generally treated as well as any non-Indigenous people.

I remember standing up in the line [for a $200 payment]… And the guy that was standing
in front of me was a well-known and quite wealthy businessman…I remember then thinking
to myself, ‘We're all equal. Everybody's equal, you know, we've all been hit with
the same thing.'

In
Returning to Nothing
, Peter Read notes that:

the Bagot and Kulaluk Aborigines seem temporarily to have benefited. They had few
material possessions. They belonged to the Darwin region as did few others; most
of the land precious to them was already inaccessible because of buildings and fences…The
barracks which the army had built on the most sacred site of the Larrakia people
was in ruins.

Which is not to say that things were good—they weren't for anyone, black or white.
Severe dislocation was caused in the camps which, according to Bill Day, ‘were bare
and the people scattered'. People from One Mile, the camp closest to the centre of
Darwin ‘had moved into two old classrooms behind the Cavenagh Street Woolworths store.
The bare concrete rooms were unserviced but drier than any of the precyclone shelters
in the camps.'

There are claims that, once they were evacuated south, Aboriginal people didn't
tend to be offered the level of support that white evacuees were given, and sometimes
encountered a kind of prejudice. Bonds of community are strong in Darwin and at
times like this that could offset problems caused by racism. Chips Mackinolty reported
that one Aboriginal family flown to Far North Queensland was separated from non-Aboriginal
evacuees and put on the back of a cattle truck to be sent to Yarrabah Reserve, after
Queensland authorities refused them permission to stay with relatives.
⁴
According
to Maria Tumarkin, Mr Doug Scott, then the director of the Foundation for Aboriginal
Affairs, ‘had so far only been able to house two families out of sixty stuck in Sydney.
“Some real estate agents have been sending Aboriginal evacuees to uninhabitable houses.
Most of the seven to eight hundred Darwin Aborigines originally evacuated to Sydney
have already escaped the city.”'
⁵

However not everyone reports having a rough time. Stephanie Nganjmirra Thompson remembers
that she and her siblings were sent to Melbourne and put in a hostel down there,
before being flown up to Oenpelli in Arnhem Land where she stayed with her uncle.
She has no memories of being treated badly. One couple expecting racism were happily
surprised. They'd driven to Katherine and when they got to the relief centre and
explained they were half-caste and quarter-caste (so that a white person didn't accidentally
take in someone of colour) were treated with nothing but respect. While the population
of Bagot Reserve dropped from 518 to 63, demountables arrived quite quickly to replace
the homes that had been destroyed, and they were connected to electricity before
many other homes in Darwin.

How Indigenous people felt about being taken, once again, from their land was a different
matter. Many of them had been displaced several times over, and to be removed once
again was deeply traumatic. This was especially the case if they were Larrakia, and
they were being removed from their traditional lands. ‘This is our coast. And you've
got to be back home on your home ground.'
⁶
Bunji
, a land rights newsletter edited
by Bill Day, stated in January: ‘The people of the dreaming cannot be chased from
their land by a cyclone…We need them back in Larrakia country as soon as possible.'
⁷

Lorna Fejo found being evacuated very painful. ‘Oh it was really devastating…We had
no home; we had nothing, but we still was determined we wanted to stay in Darwin.
But we were more or less ordered: “Get out of Darwin. Go!”'
⁸
Fejo was put on a bus
to Mount Isa but ended up further south. She finally found a way to return to Darwin
(illegally, and without a permit) despite being told in Adelaide that Darwin was
‘finished'.

Indigenous people in general were much more likely to return after evacuation—or
try to—and they were likely to return more quickly. Most wanted to be home within
two months, whereas non-Indigenous families were often away for six months or more.
Around half the general population returned after the evacuation, but most Indigenous
families did, with the exception of a few families who stayed on in either Katherine
or Alice Springs.

It seemed that Indigenous people were treated increasingly poorly in the months (rather
than weeks) after Tracy. For starters the restoration of Aboriginal settlements
dropped lower and lower down the list of priorities. In January a meeting of sixty-five
homeless Aboriginal people was held outside the classrooms the One Mile community
had moved into, and that meeting expressed concern that no Aboriginal representatives
were on the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Reconstruction Commission. There was
also a concern that politics were being played with some aspects of the emergency,
in particular that the permit system was being used to keep Aboriginal people out
of Darwin on a permanent basis. The checkpoint set up on the highway at Noonamah,
sixteen kilometres beyond the large camp at Knuckeys Lagoon, was particularly contentious
with people being told they could only return when they had decent accommodation—which
was farcical given that many Knuckeys Lagoon residents hadn't ever had adequate housing.
The community there had been engaged in a dispute over title for several years, and
their tent dwellings were an interim measure indicating the undecided legal status
of the land. On 28 January, the Gwalwa Daraniki Association (
gwalwa daraniki
means
‘our land' in Larrakia), were reported as encouraging members to drive through the
road blocks as a form of protest.
⁹
‘Blacks to Challenge Road Blocks' blared the headline
in the
Northern Territory News
.