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Botanical Gardens director George Brown drove ‘around Darwin streets issuing two
plants to every home…“You'd see them hugging the bloody things, you know, and the
kids'd come up and say ‘Can I have one too?' ” '
¹⁰
It's good to know that such a
tree-loving man went onto become the lord mayor of Darwin, a position he held up
until his sudden death in 2002. The Botanical Gardens are now named the George Brown
Darwin Botanic Gardens.

But despite talk of the damage that Tracy did to Darwin's greenery, the deforestation
of the town had begun long before. Ken Frey recalls battles in the decades before
Tracy to get housing-estate engineers to leave some trees when they cleared; in some
suburbs there was hardly any topsoil left, let alone a tree. Paula Dos Santos remembers
the kind of place Darwin had been, in this description of Nightcliff in the forties
and fifties:

It was thick rainforest. Just across here in Clarke Crescent, there was about eight
banyan trees there, and all these ferns and that. They were all bulldozed to build
Housing Commission houses…when I first moved in here twenty-seven or twenty-eight
years ago, we'd have trouble sleeping at night with the thousands of lorikeets, cockatiels,
budgerigars that used to sleep in the trees around here. They'd keep us awake, chattering
half the night.

She also used to see crocs and buffalo at Rapid Creek, as well as black cockatoos
and Major Mitchells, and frill-necked lizards. While Nightcliff would change in the
years to come, it didn't suffer the same level of depletion as the northern suburbs.
Its trees offered some protection from Tracy; the mangroves that pushed up against
Nightcliff's shoreline also helped.

The species that withstood the cyclone most effectively was the coastal Calophyllum,
also known as beauty leaf. Unfortunately, because they are big and slow-growing,
people didn't tend to plant them. Naturally flexible trees survive much better than
those that are brittle and prone to cracking, which is why palms also fared pretty
well. However, while Carpentaria palms produced new leaves and flowered after Tracy,
another type of palm common to the area,
Livistona benthamii
disappeared. Milkwood
trees, indigenous to the area, did better than some vegetation because they shed
their leaves in high wind, which means there is less pressure on the branches. The
milkwood trees in front of Brown's Mart Theatre in Smith Street were planted in the
1890s and have survived at least two cyclones and the bombing of Darwin. There is
a milkwood tree on Foelsche Street that predates white settlement. Banyan trees also
do okay because even if their crowns are damaged their roots tend to hold. Apparently
after the cyclone a spontaneous noticeboard was installed near the Darwin City Council
banyan. The banyan in State Square, over two hundred years old, used to be a ceremonial
meeting point for the Larrakia. On several afternoons I went and sat under it after
spending time in the library, enjoying the views across the park to the water and
the respite from heat under the massive canopy. In recent years development has led
to the destruction of many of Darwin's remaining banyans.

A report on ‘Cyclone damage to natural vegetation in the Darwin area after Cyclone
Tracy',
¹¹
carried out seven weeks after Tracy, found that the area of moderate to
severe cyclone damage was about 465 square kilometres. Monsoon forests fared badly
and were left even more susceptible to bushfire. (These micro-climates are the dinosaur
relics of a time when fire was less common. The more recent interaction between cyclones
and fires has been responsible for a great, if gradual, reduction in monsoonal forests.
Increasing temperatures also make it unlikely these remnant rain forests will last
many more decades.)

That report recommended that areas near the coast should not be built up, in case
of storm surges, and that trees that could withstand cyclones better should be planted,
in part because they provided protection for buildings. These findings were ignored.
George Brown recommended African mahoganies be planted after the cyclone because
they're fast growing, but he specified that the holes dug to plant the seedlings
needed to be particularly deep. That was the kind of technical detail that, inevitably,
got lost as people replanted their gardens in the years that followed Tracy. In 2011,
Cyclone Yasi ripped African mahoganies out of the waterlogged earth by the dozens
because of their shallow root structure. Once a tree is pulled up by the roots it
becomes just another deadly piece of debris. In her play
Dragged Kicking and Screaming
to Paradise
Suzanne Spunner wrote:

After Cyclone Tracy, common native and exotic trees in the Darwin area were assessed
in terms of stability—numbers of trees standing, leaning and fallen—and the mahoganies
and tulips were downgraded to Category C ‘Unstable', hence their dubious reputation.
Also in the same category are evergreen frangipanis…and mangoes…
¹²

My interest in environmental matters led me to visit field naturalist Hip Strider,
now over seventy. He lives on a platform shelter out at Humpty Doo. A keen observer
of local conditions for some fifty years, he's been keeping notes on a range of the
major effects of practices such as grazing and burning off, as well as storms. Strider
attends to the city, its outskirts and the edge of the cyclone damage zone. He has
a long beard, wears old shorts and not much else, and his dog moves with him, constant
as a shadow.

We sat under a slow-moving but noisy fan (so noisy I couldn't tape the interview).
A couple of times, to illustrate a point, he got up to take a book from his shelves,
only for silverfish to scatter as the book disintegrated in his hands. Conditions
were harsh to say the least, but they also meant that Strider was alert to minor
changes in wind speed and temperature and to all the shifts in the seasons. (A chronicler
of most things, he took a photo of me sitting there in the heat and dust and I was,
as I was most of the time I spent in Darwin, sweaty and red-faced, a fish out of
water, a southerner come north.) He told me how to pick a tree that had survived
the cyclone by looking for its scars.

On his advice, I went to visit one not far from where he lived. Older than the rest
of the trees, it towered above the other gums and had the tell-tale knots where limbs
had been torn from the trunk. Strider knew of only half a dozen such gum trees. Given
the ravages of cyclones, fires and development, older trees are increasingly rare.
Trees that date back to the time before white settlement, or those that grew soon
after, provide mute witness to several hundred years of history. They are memorials,
of a sort. Yet there is no legislation to protect significant or historic trees in
the Territory, and no plans to change that any time soon.

THE SHOOTING OF THE DOGS

KUNBARLANJNJA IN west Arnhem Land is Dog Dreaming country. An elder described his
people's relationships to the animals this way:

We can only say this—dogs are our friends. The belief of the people here is that
a dog is just like a child and no one can hit the dog. People used to give each other
dogs. The pup and the child would grow up together. Puppies would be promised to
each other. This created for both groups what you say in English, ‘family'.
¹

Pets suffered alongside their owners during Tracy and, as with humans, there were
stories of miraculous survival too. People describe the trauma of finding their beloved
cats or dogs crushed under rubble, or the hilarity of their cockatoos surviving—but
being stripped of feathers. The day after the cyclone, journalist Barbara James found
her cat—alive—in the washing machine where it had taken refuge. Beth Harvey spent
much of the cyclone worrying about her cockatoo and cat, both of whom had dashed
out of her car at the height of the storm. She found them when she got back to her
house, although the cat wasn't in great shape, having been rolled in iron and jammed
into a letterbox. It ‘was a very paranoid cat after that'.

In general, animals that lived through the cyclone tended to be scared of the wind
after that experience—as, indeed, their owners usually were. Bernard Briec remembers
a family friend's Afghan hound that couldn't eat or drink for several days. ‘Dad
said: “It's not going to survive, better put it out of its misery,” so Dad took him
round the back somewhere and killed him…I mean, the owners were a bit upset at it,
at Dad putting the dog down. But it was the only thing he could do really, when I
think back on it now.'

As well as companion animals, countless farm and wild animals died. In the opening
sequence of her book
Darwin
, Tess Lea speaks of her experiences of the cyclone and
writes vividly of the stench of rotting marine animals ‘swept in by the stormy waters
and crushed against rocks'. There were stories of devastated chook sheds and dozens
of birds being found in a terrible state days after the cyclone. One of the compensation
cases that followed Tracy, and dragged out until 1982, was a chicken farmer complaining
that his birds had been put down. Colonel Thorogood tells the story of one man, a
crocodile farmer, concerned for the lives of his reptiles: ‘And I told him that the
quicker he could turn them into effing handbags the better—and that was the end of
that call.' I laughed when I first read that, then remembered that back then crocs
had only been a protected species for three years, having been hunted close to extinction.

There are haunting photos taken by Barbara James of dead livestock draped over the
backs of utes, dead donkeys and, in one surreal shot, of camels and horses trotting
through the ruins and rubble—escapees, it turns out, from a circus that was camped
somewhere in town. In
The Furious Days
, Major-General Stretton wrote of a conversation
he had with a garbo who cornered him at a press conference. ‘No bastard will help
me,' the garbo said. ‘Me truck's broken down up the road with a load of stinkin'
animal corpses. No bastard will git it going.' It's not clear if the animals had
died during the cyclone or after it.

Birds stayed away from Darwin for close to a year, with the strange exception of
thousands of kites. ‘Before Cyclone Tracy you'd spot maybe a dozen a dry season.
Around 1500 turned up in May 1975 and no one really knows why. Might be because the
trees were knocked down.'
²
It was (kites excepted) a terrible absence. Donna Quong
described the eeriness. ‘I mean, you don't appreciate the noise of the wind through
the leaves until you don't have leaves. And you don't appreciate the sound of birds
until you don't have birds.' Tom Pauling was delighted when someone brought a canary
in a cage to his house, one that ‘busily sung from time to time'. Cedric Patterson
became very fond of the lorikeet that moved into his house, ‘a straggler' that had
lost its flock. It stayed with Patterson for quite a while, seeming to need the company.

A gulf emerged between people who treated their pets as an extension of the family
and those that came to fear them in this new, chaotic world. Certainly many an animal
lover had been injured, even risked death, in an attempt to protect their animals.
Richard Creswick was unusual only in that he was a cat lover rather than a dog man.
‘We had three cats…And they were our surrogate children so I went to some considerable
lengths to protect them and ensure that they survived.' It was a shock, then, for
people to realise they weren't allowed to bring their pets to the accommodation and
evacuation centres that had sprung up in high schools, fire stations and police stations.
Of course some ignored the rules and took their pets along. Ken Frey was one of many
who were concerned about this. ‘People, although they'd been asked not to, brought
their pets and wouldn't let them go, and all this sort of thing.' Senator Collins—who
acknowledges that roaming dogs were a health risk—took quite a few dogs down to the
CSIRO labs so they could be cared for there.

Not only were pets not allowed at evacuation centres, they were difficult to evacuate.
Once Thorogood realised that ‘a lot of people didn't want to leave Darwin because
they didn't want to abandon their pets', he changed the rules to allow them to take
the animals on the aircraft when they were evacuated. This has led to many a story
of people on already overloaded aircraft finding themselves with birds flying around
the cabins and puppies stowed in baskets. This didn't necessarily lead to a happy
ending for either the pets or the owners. One pilot recalls a 747 with:

kittens, puppies, goldfish, rabbits, guinea pigs, and whatever else you could hide.
The crew…turned a blind eye, the customs and officials did not…most of these pets
somehow disappeared. How anyone could take a beloved pet from a traumatised child
is beyond me, but as you know there are always the officious arseholes in every exercise.
³

Another pilot got as many animals out as he could, flying them to safety. Les Liddell
recalls seeing them out at Tennant Creek airport, row upon row of cats and dogs wearing
labels and destination tags. ‘And it was the greatest thing—a humane thing—I've ever
seen, to see all these animals sitting quietly there in this aircraft.'
⁴
Dawn Lawrie
did manage to get her puppy safely evacuated—it was flown out on the flight deck—and
hid her female boxer. Pets, she reasoned, along with children, were important to
rebuilding a society. Other people gave in to the inevitable and, before they evacuated,
took their pets to the local police station to have them shot. Elizabeth Carroll
was traumatised for years afterwards by the fact she put her cat down. ‘It was just
so terrible to think that he had actually survived the cyclone, and he'd come home,
and we had him, and we had to leave him…'

One recent survey suggests that forty-nine per cent of people say they would not
leave their home if they could not take their animals with them. The real numbers
would probably be lower than that;
⁵
however, as the number of disasters—cyclone,
floods, fire and earthquakes—increases, the issue of what happens to the animals
that are also affected does become more pressing. World Society for the Protection
of Animals Australia CEO Carmel Molloy has noted that ‘Lives were lost during the
Victorian bushfires because people wouldn't leave their premises as their animals
weren't being catered for at evacuation points.'
⁶
In response to criticisms of the
way these issues were handled on Black Saturday, the Victorian Emergency Animal Welfare
Plan set out arrangements for emergency animal welfare management. It should also
be noted that it's estimated that more than a million animals—including livestock,
wild animals and pets—died in the fire.

When the people of Turkey Creek were evacuated from Warmun to Kununurra after the
floods in March 2011, they couldn't take their dogs. This was a source of real grief.
One woman interviewed just before evacuation commented, ‘Some of us also leave our
dogs. We're going to leave man's best friend. They never left us but we're going
to leave them.' Wayne Mulga, also about to be evacuated, made a similar comment:
‘…our animals and that back there. No good you know. Sad.'
⁷
During Hurricane Katrina
many people refused to leave their home if they couldn't take their animals with
them. Around six hundred thousand pets are believed to have died or been left without
shelter as a result of that event. As a result of the mismanagement of that disaster,
the
Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act
was passed by the House of Representatives
in May 2006. This legislation requires that state and local authorities seeking
funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency must take into account pet owners,
household pets and service animals when drawing up evacuation plans.

Some say that the stories of the brutal treatment of dogs after Cyclone Tracy, particularly
by police from interstate, was a beat up. Another crazy rumour sweeping the town.
But this rumour is substantiated by dozens of people who witnessed the casual slaughter.
Because of fears that hungry and traumatised dogs would form packs, the order had
gone out that all dogs, and indeed cats, were to be shot. Some police dreaded the
task. Others became a bit too enthusiastic. Air Commodore Hitchins found:

a police gentleman with two loaded revolvers sticking out of his belt patrolling
around the RAAF tarmac on a motorbike and when I asked him who he was, he said that
he was there to make sure that there was no civil trouble and what's more there were
a lot of loose roaming packs of dogs…And he was there to shoot all these dogs on
the RAAF Base.

Hitchins told the man to get on his bike and bugger off.

Police were told that to set an example they had to destroy their own dogs. This,
after nights of no sleep and evacuated families and devastated houses. One policeman,
a friend of Beth Harvey's, tried to finish off his six-year-old dachshund, but found
himself unable to do it. ‘I went to shoot her and she just licked my hand.' He ended
up giving her to Harvey to care for alongside her labrador. People were given the
option: take their pets to the police station or take the risk that police would
shoot them from their cars without warning and in front of the owners.

Cats were better at eluding armed police, but you have to wonder if the Northern
Territory's present day feral cat problem—responsible for the extinction and endangerment
of several species of small marsupial—escalated dramatically after Tracy. Ray Wilkie
says that in the weeks following the cyclone the cats were left to run around—sometimes
he'd look up at night and see thirty or forty pairs of feline eyes looking down at
him from the wreckage.

Interstate animal welfare agencies arrived in town immediately after the cyclone
but by 2 January the RSPCA were lobbying to get more of their staff into Darwin.
According to the
Northern Territory News
, ‘the society's phones were being jammed
by Darwin evacuees seeking information about their pets'. Increasingly women looked
out for animals, on their own behalf, and also on behalf of men who feared for their
pets if they left them alone. Kate Cairns was living in Jingili under the ‘dance
floor' of a house across the road from her ruined one. She moved in there for a few
days, along with eleven other people, as many dogs and two cats.

I was looking after something like eleven dogs at one stage, because they were being
shot. And these were pets. And the men were going out every day helping the clean-up…
In some cases it was the only thing they had left and they weren't game to leave
the dog unattended. And so when all the women went and—there were very few of us
women left in Darwin after the mass evacuation—the guys would say: ‘Katie, would
you look after my dog?'

George Brown, who'd been out of town when the cyclone hit, felt great affection for
the nameless woman who hid his dogs for him. The woman was

…one of the ones that determined she wasn't going to be evacuated. She contacted
me and said: ‘Do you want your dogs?' And I said: ‘Yeah, well thank you very much',
and sort of took her in my arms and thanked her and comforted her, and she comforted
me that she was all right and I was back again, and there were the two dogs—well
the dog and the pup.
⁸

Shooting pets was an extreme policy without a shred of nuance, like much that happened
after Tracy. However, concerns about the dangers of packs were not unfounded. Bill
Wilson, a dog lover himself, acknowledges that ‘dog packs formed and some of them
were getting quite violent and they were quite dangerous'. Ken Frey was one of a
number of people going from house to house doing a survey on the state they were
in, and, if necessary, recovering bodies. It wasn't long before he got himself into
a fix. ‘In one place I got in and found, when I got into a bedroom whose door was
not locked but closed, that there was a pack of dogs in there and they were by this
time extremely hungry, and I was lucky to get out the front alive.' As a result of
such experiences he had no qualms about the orders given to shoot dogs—after several
run-ins he was wishing he could shoot them himself. But it's a long way from those
concerns to what actually happened.

Ray Wilkie remembers the way one dog was killed. ‘One day an officer came around,
and there was an old dog in our place—he was a nice old fellow—and the [policeman]
said: “You got a dog there?” and I said “Yes. He's not hurting anyone”…Out he came
and bang, that was it.' Events like this were an added trauma for people who had
just been through a catastrophe. Wilson: ‘all they had left was their animals; they
had no house, and in some cases no husband, no wife, and for these people to come
in and act the way they did I think was wrong…' In its twentieth anniversary special,
the
Northern Territory News
describes Anne Taylor handing over her cat but begging
them not to touch the dog. To no avail. They shot the dog right there at the door
in front of her. Taylor remembers, ‘I went insane with rage. I got into the car and
tried to run them over.'