Warning (2 page)

Quotes leap out at me as if highlighted whenever I read. ‘We speak about the weather
/ because in truth it tells us what is within us,' Kevin Brophy told me, in a poem.
Then, from Patrick White's
The Eye of the Storm
: ‘If only you could describe your
storm; but you could not. You can never convey in words the utmost in experience.
Whatever is given you to live, you alone can live, and re-live, till it is gasped
out of you.'
⁵

In Alexis Wright's
Carpentaria
it is the dogs who bear witness to the ruination of
human civilisation:

He was met by the bony, hollow-ribbed, abandoned dogs of the town that had run to
the hills and back again after the cyclone. Now, having appeared from nowhere, they
roamed along streets that no longer existed, searching for their owners. They did
not bark or howl. The shock of the cyclone had left them like this: speechless, dumbfounded,
unable to crack a bark. Unable to emit a sound out of their wide-opened mouths.

But perhaps my biggest motivation is the fact that the human race is transforming
the land, the seas and the weather. There are signs of that all around us, and in
a country that already tended to extremes of drought, flood and bushfire we are now
facing a world where there will be more calamities more often and larger numbers
of us will be affected. There is a line in the Yolngu language of northeast Arnhem
Land,
Wä ngam ngarra marrtji buma ngarra dhuwal
, which translates as: ‘I create different
places as I travel.' In another version, the line is: ‘I make this place as I go'
and it is true, we are doing this: we are making this place as we go. I want to understand
somehow, what it is we are making.

WARNING

THE SKY at the Top End is big and the weather moves like a living thing. You can
hear it in the cracking air when there is an electrical storm and as the thunder
rolls around the sky. It's a kind of call and response cycle which brings to mind
a story—that cyclones are crocodiles thrashing and fighting through the air: roiling
storm clouds moving with intent. It's a dance of sorts, a constant movement between
cold and hot air, between high and low pressure.

Cyclones need sea temperatures of 26.5 degrees Celsius or above to form, because
that's the temperature at which water vapour turns to cloud. This means that cyclones
tend to form towards the equator. Systems that form on the north side of the equator
spin anticlockwise and are called hurricanes. Those that form on the south side spin
clockwise and become cyclones. If the cyclone forms in the tropics it becomes known
as a tropical cyclone. When a low-pressure system moves into this area it begins
to warm, causing it to rise, pulling clouds into it as it lifts. The system becomes
denser and denser with moisture. The faster the air heats, the quicker it rises and
this creates an updraft. It is the air rushing in towards the middle, sucked in by
the updraft, that forms the devastating winds of the cyclone and it's this central
column that becomes the eye. The more extreme the temperatures—the hotter the high
air, the colder the low—the more unstable the system: the higher the velocity of
the winds, the wilder the rain, the greater the rotation of the clouds. The energy
of the rising air produces enough momentum to move a weather system but how fast
it might move, and what path it might take, are hard to foresee. This was certainly
the case with Tracy. But of course sometimes a system loses momentum altogether and
dissipates. All these elements make predicting cyclones a difficult art.

Tracy—unformed and unnamed—began her life in the northern hemisphere, which had had
its coldest winter for a decade. Freezing air had massed low over Siberia in early
December and then this low-pressure system had moved heavily, slowly, towards the
equator. Some time on 19 December, northeast of Bathurst Island, above the warm Arafura
Sea, the dance between temperature and pressure began in earnest.

By 21 December the low-pressure system was only 220 kilometres away from Darwin,
but then it stopped moving and sat, heavy in the sky, brooding. It was officially
powerful enough to be described as a cyclone and it had a name: Tracy. Early on Christmas
Eve Tracy suddenly turned ninety degrees southeast, towards Darwin. This took some
by surprise and led others to assume it would make another dramatic turn before it
actually hit the town.

Judging a cyclone's movements was such an inexact science that early on Christmas
Eve Ray Wilkie, who was thirty-nine years old and the Director of the Bureau of Meteorology,
was worried he was making too much of things. ‘I could see on the bunting on the
service station, a little bit of wind just moving them. That's how gentle it was.
And then this slight bit of high cloud coming in, just a bit of high cirrus.' Tracy
was so small and slow moving ‘you could have walked a quick walk and kept up with
it'.
¹
And it stayed small. At its height Tracy's eye was twelve kilometres wide and
the winds spiralled out for about forty. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina was a massive
644 kilometres wide when it made landfall in 2005. But the fact Tracy was slow meant
that once it hit, it stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

When people talk about their childhoods in 1970s Darwin, you get some idea of why
it was a good place to grow up. Ten-year-old Bernard Briec had come with his family
from Senegal, via France, arriving in Darwin in 1969. After school: ‘I came home,
took my shirt off, took my shoes and socks off and went running around the place
barefoot. Used to go down to Rapid Creek on McMillans Road, and we used to go swimming
in the waterholes there, in the creek there…Life was very good.'
²

These days Julia Church is an artist who lives in Canberra but when she was a kid
she too lived in Darwin. Her parents, immigrants from the UK, moved to Darwin in
1971 after a brief stint in Sydney. For her father, ‘Darwin was a dream come true'
³
and his dream was of a ‘working person's utopia'. Julia, eleven when they arrived,
says that the whole family immediately felt at home.

It was a very romantic place, an amazing place. It felt as if it was a new community
we were building. Because it was small people managed to do a lot when they got there…
Back then there was a lot more untouched bush. The bush was closer. Crocs helped
maintain that feeling of the power of the natural world that might creep back in.
The beautiful gardens were tropical and wild and misbehaved. In your garden you had
wildlife from fruit bats to frill-neck lizards. It was rich and smelly, a cacophony
of sound.

But there was a darker side to Darwin, as there had been since white settlement.
In the 1970s it held the world record for per capita alcohol consumption. It was
the ‘hardest-drinking town in the world',
⁴
as ABC journalist Mike Hayes put it in
a twenty-fifth anniversary special put together by ABC-TV's
7.30 Report
. Seventy
per cent of the workforce were public servants, and many of them had been in Darwin
for less than two years. They tended to be under thirty-five, and there were more
men than women. People came and they went, but the recent election of the Whitlam
Labor government after twenty-three years of Coalition rule meant there was an even
higher turnover than usual. The exception, according to Ray McHenry, who was first
assistant secretary in the Department of the Northern Territory, was ‘a core population
in Darwin of some 8000, who would truly be described as Darwinians. Persons of Aboriginal
descent make up a large section of that core group.'
⁵
There were close to 2500 Indigenous
people living in Darwin at that time. Some of them were Larrakia and some were from
the stolen generation. The total population was about 47,000.

In 1974 ABC journalist Richard Creswick was twenty-seven and new to Darwin. Interviewed
fourteen years after the cyclone, he was blunt about the advantages of his posting:
‘It was a quick way—a two-year way—of getting a promotion that might take many more
years in the older cities.'
⁶
Ken Frey, who'd worked for the Department of Works and
Housing in the Territory for close to thirty years, put it this way:

We lived in a younger community; there were very, very few old people here at all.
All the older people from Darwin had been moved out during the war; not that many
of them actually came back…Every two to three years there'd be a great dearth of
many people in the public service—and privately—and there'd be a great inroad of
new people coming in. And so you found it difficult, in many cases, to develop very
close friendships, and things like this.
⁷

Some ten thousand people got out of town for Christmas that year as they always did,
and many of those remaining didn't really understand the damage a bad cyclone could
do. Only a few had lived through the last big cyclone, which had blown through in
1937. Tom Baird, an Indigenous man who was born in 1923, had. It left him feeling
that newcomers just didn't get it. ‘Some of them said, “We'll go down the beach and
watch the cyclone come in”…They didn't actually believe what the old timers used
to say about how devastating the cyclones could be.' But he also acknowledges that
no one really expected a cyclone as bad as this one. With gusts as high as 250–275
km/h, Tracy was a severe Category 4. Gusts over the Cox Peninsula may have been more
than 325 km/h (that is, Category 5), while at Nightcliff and East Point, which were
a few kilometres out of the centre of Darwin along the coast, the winds were more
like 250–290 km/h. ‘We had no idea ourselves that the cyclone would be as bad as
Trace or anything like that.'
⁸

Other than Indigenous people, it was mainly Darwin's Chinese population who could
date their connection with the place back for any period of time—a century in some
cases. They knew a bad wind when they felt it. Lily Ah Toy, who lived a couple of
hundred kilometres down south in Pine Creek, felt the build-up from down there:
‘The wind was jerky, this went on for days and my in-laws—my mother-in-law said,
“Now, this wind is not good, it's no good at all it's been jerking for days.”'
⁹

Old-timer Curly Nixon, who'd lived in Darwin since 1949, was cautious also. While
he hadn't weathered a major cyclone himself, some of his friends had. ‘Old Snowy
was living here…I took notice of him…and I put six-inch nails into my roof and tied
everything down that I couldn't put under cover.' Jack Meaney had lived through five
cyclones. ‘You could almost feel it. If you've been through a cyclone, everything
sort of dies before it comes along; the calm before the storm they call it.'
¹⁰

Of course, some newcomers also had an understanding of what weather could do. Journalist
Barbara James had grown up in tornado country in the States so she took the warnings
seriously. So did fifty-four-year-old Charles Gurd, Darwin's Director of Health.
He'd lived in Fiji and his wife had once been shipwrecked during a cyclone, so he
knew exactly how bad things could get. Soon after he arrived in Darwin in 1972 he'd
put a plan in place for Darwin hospital that assessed which buildings would be safest
should a cyclone hit, and established procedures for handling mass casualties should
they occur.

Some old-timers, on the other hand, maintained a carefree attitude based on the view
that Bathurst and Melville Islands would protect them from cyclones. Historically
there was some truth to this, but Cyclone Tracy was to break all the rules. Dentist
Howard Truran had lived in Darwin for twenty years. ‘They used to have a habit of
coming around Bathurst and Melville Island and sort of being stationary, like Tracy
was. And then they would sort of veer off down the west coast.'
¹¹

Ida Bishop, a woman in her late forties who'd been born in Darwin, worked for a shipping
company called Northern Research. She had twelve prawning vessels to take care of,
which meant she took cyclone warnings very seriously. She remembers discussing the
possibility of the cyclone with her boss, Nao Nakamura. ‘I said to him: “I don't
like today…There's something dreadful going to happen.”'
¹²
Nakamura called her fanciful
but Bishop's concerns persisted. ‘There was no sound of a bird. There was always
“whoo-hoo” and things going on, but there was this ominous quiet. And the heat. And
it just made me feel creepy. I thought: “There's something going to happen.”'

Vicki Harris said as much to her friend Fay. ‘I've got this funny feeling,' she said;
she'd been saying something similar to her husband for weeks already: ‘Something
dreadful's going to happen, I can just feel something's going to happen'.
¹³
Harris
was only twenty-two at the time but when she was interviewed almost thirty years
later she remembered that the clouds were high and strange. The sky, as someone else
put it, was ‘purple and green and everything it shouldn't be'.

It was midday on Christmas Eve when Len Garton, a fifty-six-year-old insurance assessor
who'd lived in the Territory since 1941, actually saw the thing. He was sitting in
an office at Mudginberri Station, about 250 kilometres east of Darwin, and everything
went dark. He walked outside and saw ‘a black velvet cloud hanging down from twenty
[or] thirty thousand feet to almost ground level'.
¹⁴
It was rolling, or pulsing,
at the same time.

At the Bureau of Meteorology, Ray Wilkie began placing calls to let people know Tracy
was on the way. Gurd got his call and the hospital staff began their preparations
with some trepidation. They had 237 patients to look after that night, and several
babies on the way. Cyclone warnings started appearing hourly on the ABC, the announcements
recorded by broadcaster Don Sanders himself because he wanted to shake people up
a bit, make sure they weren't just hearing the same old voice and therefore assuming
it was business as usual. Sanders was fifty and had a classic ABC voice: rich and
calming. He told people to check their transistors, batten down their houses, remove
pictures from walls and ornaments from tables. He suggested sheltering under beds
and tables, filling the bath with water.

He was right to be worried that these warnings would be ignored. They usually were,
partly because they were so frequent: every wet season there were around twelve warnings
or so. Three weeks before Tracy there were warnings that the city would be hit by
a cyclone called Selma, which petered out at the cost of a few trees and some minor
injuries—Beth Harvey almost miscarried when Selma's sirens started up. This made
it even more likely than usual that people wouldn't fuss much about this latest alert.
As Kate Cairns, a woman who'd lived in Darwin for four years, put it, ‘We'd been
told to batten down so many times before and nothing had really happened and—you
can't live in a battened-down situation.'
¹⁵
Others commented that there were so many
cyclone warnings it was like ‘crying wolf'. When Dr Ella Stack, who would become
mayor within a few months of Tracy, spoke to the
7.30 Report
, she put it this way:
‘In the ten years '64 to '74, there were twenty-five major cyclones in our area—twenty-five
that were named. So it's not that you get blasé about it, but, you know, they so
rarely strike that you're most surprised when they sort of hit you.'