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As soon as she could, Maggie and Gary ‘took Warmun ochres and as many familiar painting
materials as we could up to Kununurra.'
¹⁴

It was almost a year later that the community got back to Warmun to find there were
positives to be taken from the disaster. Mary Thomas, painter and Gija elder, said
at the time: ‘The floodwater came and washed all those bad things, you know, problems
we had.'

THE WILD NORTH

THERE WERE men in uniform and men in civvies. There were Hawaiian shirts and undies,
bathers, police caps, and men wearing dresses. What you wore became a contentious
question in the crazy days after Cyclone Tracy. Neville Barwick, who headed up the
Darwin Reconstruction Study Group, arrived six days after Tracy to find a colleague
who'd been left with nothing but his life and his underpants. He was still in his
Y-fronts, helping out around the office. Air Commodore Hitchins ran into problems
when he was getting about in the old shorts he'd been wearing on Christmas Day. ‘I'd
quite forgotten that I'd got into an airforce aeroplane looking like an out of work
fisherman which I probably was, and here was this very keen young airforce wing commander,
dead keen to get going and he couldn't understand why this scruffy character kept
getting in his way.'

Major-General Stretton tended to dress down in what he thought was Darwin style.
According to Frank Thorogood:

[Stretton] took the view, that had he turned up in his major-general's suit, that
would not have created the image that he really wanted to have. So, I believe that
the shorts, the Florida shirt and the floppy hat was entirely consistent with the
role, because everybody else in Darwin was dressed pretty much the same. On the other
hand, I was dressed in shoes, long socks, shorts, khaki shirt, badges of rank—medal
ribbon—as a uniformed Army officer. And I really gave him, by that appearance, the
prestige and the status that he needed…he always wanted to represent himself as the
Civilian Director-General of the Natural Disasters Organisation. Now that's the
term that he used often—the Civilian Director. He kept saying, ‘it's under civilian
control'.

Uniforms were tied up with authority, in a town that resented it—especially if it
came from outsiders.

When the interstate cops began to arrive—232 police came from the Commonwealth and
another 151 were provided by states around Australia—Bill Wilson remembers that:
‘They had clean uniforms, pale blue uniforms…We were filthy, didn't have proper uniforms.'
The interstaters' uniforms didn't stay clean for long, though, and some took to wearing
shorts and singlets while keeping a gun on their hips. The local police were also
casually dressed, though they had more excuse since in many cases their uniforms
had literally blown away. Whatever the reasons, this all made it increasingly difficult
to figure out who was a policeman and who was not.

One compelling reason for bringing in reinforcements, uniform or no, was a fear that
the local police wouldn't cope given what they'd all gone through. Wilson has some
sympathy for this view, having recognised the great shock that he and others were
attempting to manage as they went about their business. As well, many had been trying
to survive on little or no sleep for three or four days at a stretch. More than one
man slept for close to twenty-four hours straight when finally given the chance to
rest. There was also the concern that Darwin was going to become a looters' paradise.
Wilson elaborates: ‘There was some suggestion that there was a fear of lack of control
in town; they needed more police than there were to keep order if things got out
of hand.'

Cedric Patterson remembers a certain edginess: ‘People with shotguns sitting in their
shop windows and doorways.' There is a photo taken at the end of 1974 that illustrates
his point: a man sitting outside the remains of his shop on the Stuart Highway in
Darwin, holding a shotgun. This sense that their town was being descended upon was
in part a response to the fact that people had lost almost everything they owned
and feared for their few remaining belongings. The man with the gun was, in a sense,
warding off his sense of devastation.

A journalist who joined police on looting patrol one night described the atmosphere,
‘A man, smelling strongly of alcohol, staggered past in the lights. He clutched a
high velocity .22 rifle…“I've shot four dogs tonight,” he slurred. “I got thirty
or forty of the bastards yesterday.”' It's impossible to know of course whether this
is true or just the ravings of a drunk, but it gives you a sense of the madness that
had descended on some quarters of the city. Shortly after this the man waved his
rifle at police and had to be disarmed.
¹

But many believed, like Colonel Thorogood, that the entire issue was exaggerated.
‘There wasn't a lot of looting in Darwin and I don't think there was ever a law and
order problem of any consequence.' It would seem he was right: two weeks after the
cyclone only fifteen people had actually been arrested for larceny and possession
of stolen property. Richard Creswick didn't ‘think there was any concept of looting
as such because everything became a shared facility'. Kate Cairns also talks of sharing
rather than looting, of ‘using something that worked'. But she continues, ‘when the
person whom it belonged to returned to Darwin…it was given back—perhaps not in all
cases—but in lots of cases it was. So what's looting?—I don't know.' She was, however,
nervous that not everyone would share her relaxed definition. She remembers that
although her neighbours told her she could grab stuff from their place after they'd
gone, she didn't do so because she was scared she might be arrested.

To be clear, it is absolutely the case that goods were stolen for resale. Lists presented
to the Supreme Court in the wake of various arrests include multiple TV sets, cartons
of pantihose and what now seems like an amusing surfeit of banana lounges. But definitions
can blur. Is it looting if you break into a pharmacy in the centre of a ruined city,
and take the asthma medication you need or some nappies for your child? Is it looting
if you take food, which will perish anyway, from a grocery store? What if it isn't
medication or food but beer that you are desperate for? What if you take furniture
to put under the remaining floorboards of your house? At what point do you draw the
line? As Bill Wilson asked, ‘Where does looting start and finish, and survival start
and finish? If you're walking along and you're cold and wet the morning after the
cyclone, and you see a raincoat draped over a fence, do you take it, and is that
looting?'

Police commandeering was considered legitimate. Wilson has vividly described his
attempts to drive around the town to try and help, the morning after the cyclone,
only to have tyre after tyre shred.

We had four flat tyres because of the debris on the road. I think it took us fifteen
or twenty minutes to drive from Mitchell Street to Daly Street…At that point, there
was a garage on the corner…We broke into the service station there, and got whatever
wheels and tyres we could find, and managed to replace all the tyres…In fact we left
a note and said: The police have requisitioned…whatever number of tyres it was and
left it on the counter in there, which we thought made it okay…Later on we were told
in fact that this was quite legitimate; that you could do what you want, provided
it was recorded.

In a later interview he acknowledged that:

official commandeering…was a form, I suppose, of looting…A policy was made quite
quickly that legitimised this, and recorded it for future reparation to the owners
of these places…for example, if an evacuation centre needed a generator, and there
was one somewhere, then it would get taken and put into use. It wasn't for people's
personal gain. I think that if it was for community gain it was acceptable; if it
was not for community gain then it was unacceptable.

After reading many hours of interviews with Wilson I decided I had to meet him. I
was impressed by his ability to remember emotional detail, among other things, and
found I liked the man—despite never having met him. I tried to track him down in
Darwin but, like most of the people I ended up interviewing, he no longer lived there.
These days he lives in, of all places, Beechworth, a hilly and sometimes cold Victorian
town not many hours from where I live. Aged seventy-one when we met—he was thirty-three
during Tracy—he was, despite his age, still a big man as coppers often are. He'd
long stopped being a policeman and in his fifties became a historian, then a lecturer
in history and politics at Charles Darwin University. After that he'd become a senior
advisor in Support and Equity, and you can see all these things in his Tracy interviews
with Francis Good if you look for them. An eye for historical detail combined with
real compassion. I wondered about many things, including the perhaps incidental detail
of whether people actually followed up on these reparation slips. He told me that
quite a few businesses did. It was an honour system that, to all intents and purposes,
worked.

These issues become more complex when you consider that the city, or what was left
of it, became for ten days or so a cash-free economy. Kate Cairns again: ‘It was
a cashless society—I mean if you wanted something there was always some way of getting
it, you know. It was quite strange really.' Colleen D'Arcy remembers going shopping
on Christmas Day—the only person I've come across with such a recollection—at a little
shop in Westralia Street. ‘I thought that was rather wonderful to think that—business
as usual, after the night before,' however she soon found that, ‘except for going
down to Westralia Street, and the supermarket being open, money was of no use whatsoever.'
Local businesses got into the spirit of the occasion. Antonio Milhinhos, the owner
of a small supermarket in Nightcliff, gave away his entire stock to cyclone victims.
The owners of W. G. Chin's in Smith Street gave away most of their goods as well.
These were pragmatic gestures, as so much stock was water damaged, but they were
also heartfelt. It would be three weeks before shops were operating again. In the
meantime food was provided at the still-standing schools, such as Darwin and Casuarina
High.

You could survive on free beer alone until 3 January when local businesses began
to object to the lack of opportunity to sell anything. More broadly speaking, some
of the people who were evacuated around Australia were provided with free food and
board for months afterwards. Not everyone was convinced all this free stuff was a
good idea. Keith Cole believed that the time during which people were given things
went on for longer than was useful. ‘We were being conditioned into getting things
for nothing, and the more we got, the more we expected and wanted.' Mayor Brennan,
ever alert to hippy and communist activity, felt even more strongly on the subject.
‘It was a hippy's delight, this whole darn thing. They got fed for nothing, they'd
go round and get clothing and all of that.'

This question ‘what is looting' was not just an abstract one—a man's life could turn
on it. Robin Bullock thought the whole debate had ‘an element of hysteria' to it
and pointed out that ‘there can be a fine line between someone needing something
and someone not needing it, but the person needing something being caught up in the
accusation is a terrible thing to happen'.

Malcolm McKenzie, who operated the Rapid Creek betting shop, remembers that his son's
boss was out in Nightcliff out of curfew,

down at the Seabreeze Hotel, which was a very nice place. For some reason we don't
know, he was moving around when the curfew was supposed to be on, and someone thought
he was a looter and allegedly fired a warning shot, but unfortunately the warning
shot turned out to be a fatal shot, because they shot [him] dead.

I haven't been able to corroborate that statement. Police Commissioner McLaren certainly
denies it. ‘No person was ever shot, no looter was shot at…there wasn't even a shot
fired in the direction of a looter.'
²
Deputy Mayor Ted D'Ambrosio does, however,
remember firing a warning shot at someone.

The truth can be hard to get to. There were rumours of looters being lined up and
shot, then pushed off the pier and, while I found no evidence to suggest that this
actually happened, I was struck by the fact that the story is not dissimilar to images
that were to emerge out of East Timor a few months later, during the Indonesian invasion:
the way, for example, that journalist Roger East would meet his end. East was on
the personal staff of the head of the interim Darwin Reconstruction Commission,
Sir Leslie Thiess: he came to Darwin shortly after Tracy, then headed further north
to Dili, to help Fretilin. He was shot and thrown off the pier at Dili Harbour after
the invasion. A few months later the displaced people of East Timor started to land
on Darwin's shores, and it's interesting to see the way in which stories and memories
morph.

Another ongoing meme of the cyclone was that Greek men dressed as women in their
desperate bid to be evacuated. This rumour flourished immediately after the cyclone
(and was later reinforced by the TV miniseries
Cyclone Tracy
), though in the hundreds
of interviews I read, only one man, Tom Pauling, actually claims to have seen a man
dressed as a woman. Everyone else repeats variations, including a version, described
as a ‘wild rumour' by Peter Harvey, that the men dressed as women were Chinese not
Greek. Whatever the race of the men it's a rumour which suggests that women were
the lucky ones, and that only the weakest of men thought to emulate them. The humiliation
and mockery that's embedded in such stories says something about the status not just
of Greek men but of women in Darwin in 1974.

There was, however, one particularly persistent story that does seem to have been
more than a rumour: that the interstate police weren't so much a solution as part
of the problem. Most contentious of all were thirty-eight policemen who arrived from
NSW, particularly a small group who were based in Kings Cross, who many described
as heavy handed and inclined to violence. Tom Pauling: