Warning (22 page)

1975

THE REASONS behind, and details of, Major-General Stretton's abrupt departure from
Darwin are fairly murky. There were some concerns in Canberra about his management
of the situation—and his grumpiness towards various ministers and senior Canberra
folk wasn't helping. He certainly seemed to arouse unusual antagonism and jealousy
in public servants in both Canberra and Darwin. The unions, in contrast, were supportive
of him. The judgment of the man closest to him, Colonel Frank Thorogood, is that
Stretton's authority was accepted. ‘Mr McHenry chaired the first meeting, but I think
already the force of Alan Stretton's personality was starting to become apparent,
and I think he was seen as the natural leader to whom they could turn.'

However it is true that Stretton barely slept for a week after Tracy and by 30 December
the strain was starting to show, as he himself acknowledged. ‘After making some notes
and compiling some draft signals, I got to bed after 3 am, and with the aid of the
sleeping pills prescribed by the good doctor, I went off into my first sound sleep
for six days.' He was woken at 7.30 am by the secretary of the Department of Defence
who wanted to discuss Governor-General Sir John Kerr's visit two days later. The
conversation was terse, to say the least.

It's been suggested that Stretton became obsessed with the protocol surrounding
Kerr's arrival. While Colonel Thorogood doesn't dispute the timing of the tension
he gives the reason as precisely the opposite: he says that it was Canberra's obsession
with protocol that drove Stretton to distraction. But whatever the reason, and however
unfairly, people were becoming nervous about the man. At eleven in the morning on
New Year's Eve Stretton made his charge up the courthouse steps to attack David McCann,
an event the media made much of. Some time that afternoon Stretton did something
that made him the butt of many a joke: he issued a directive that New Year's Eve
be ‘cancelled'. Air Commodore Hitchins remembers that Stretton:

directed that all Service messes were to be closed and that there was to be no frivolity
on Service establishments on the ground that he felt this would be unfair to the
civil population…Fellows had been working pretty hard and by the time we got to New
Year's Eve, a lot of us, rightly or wrongly, had decided that it was time to relax
a trifle.

Hitchins says Stretton's message got to him too late for him to act, though you'd
be forgiven for thinking he simply ignored it. Ken Frey heard talk of ‘banning of
New Year's Eve' but decided to throw a party at the sailing club anyway. The party
‘actually got a bit hysterical and people went a bit mad'. As
Sydney Morning Herald
reporters wrote of Stretton: ‘In trying to stop the celebrations he bore a marked
resemblance to King Canute. The tide of liquor was irresistible. The order most commonly
heard in Darwin on New Year's Eve was “Roll out the barrel”.'
¹
Many of the town's
citizens saw out the year as they'd seen in the cyclone: pissed.

There was concern expressed when Stretton shed tears during one of his regular radio
broadcasts, and then again on television. Stretton, to his credit, argued that it
was perfectly reasonable for a man in his position to become emotional given the
amount of devastation and trauma he dealt with over those few days. It's hard not
to agree with him. However it is indicative of the extremity of what unfolded in
Darwin that Stretton, a man who'd played VFL, fought in World War Two and the Korean
War and served three tours of Vietnam, found the experience so shattering. Or was
it something else? A friend pointed out the obvious—that the devastation of Darwin
may have triggered memories of other wars, those he fought in the forties, the fifties,
the sixties. And here he was, in another decade, with yet more ruin all around.

Channel 7 news footage aired around this time talks of the ‘combat fatigue' that
was descending on the population. A program of examining people, military staff
and others, was put in place by Canberra to ensure that the right decisions were
being made and that people weren't becoming ‘too emotionally involved'. Stretton
had been one of the first to volunteer for examination and was passed as fit to carry
on. This didn't stop a news reporter prompting one interviewee: ‘[Stretton] crack[ed]
up at one stage, didn't he?' The man being interviewed paused. Then he said, ‘If
you went to Darwin and didn't shed a tear you really needed psychiatric care.'

Colonel Thorogood's account of his and Stretton's six days in Darwin are perceptive
and sometimes amusing, but they also give you a real insight into the antagonism
that Major-General Stretton and the blow-ins from Canberra managed to generate in
such a short period of time.

Stretton always sat at the head of the table, and it was my wish and his too, that
I sat next to him, because I'm the one that had to be able to write down the points
of action and interest and whatever. And on a couple of occasions a rather pleasant
little chap, a round little man, kept sitting in my chair, and I had to tell him,
politely but firmly, to piss off. And he mostly did piss off, but a couple of times
I'd come back and found he was there again, and this became a bit of a standing joke.
It wasn't until New Year's Eve, when Alan Stretton and I sallied forth to Government
House to say we were leaving, and to hand over to his Honour, the Administrator,
that I found this gentleman in fact had been his Honour, the Administrator.

The ‘little' man Thorogood was referring to was Jock Nelson, a Labor politician who
had been in public life since 1949. (The position of administrator—equivalent to
the governor of a state—held symbolic power, but in a practical sense there was
little he could do in a crisis like this.)

New Year's Eve heralded a symbolic end to the emergency. Hedley Beare remembers ‘sitting
in our house…when the fleet came up the harbour. It was one of those—almost a transcendental
moment. They were just grey silhouettes as they moved up the harbour in the early
morning.' This sense that the navy could save Darwin was one that Major-General Stretton
cultivated. ‘I deliberately overplayed the importance of the arrival of the fleet
in Darwin…I presented the arrival of the fleet as coinciding with the end of the
emergency and the return to normal.'

The navy's main job was to help with the clean-up. They brought helicopters, which
were useful for moving debris, and dozens of strong young men, who were set to work
on the thankless task of cleaning rotting food from the fridges. Curly Nixon:

They all should have got a medal—the whole lot of them should have got mentioned
in dispatches if nothing else because the poor bastards were unacclimatised, they
were just sent straight out of there into the street and after about three days,
the town—you know, the fridges that they were cleaning out and the places they were
cleaning up were just putrid. And those kids—they would spew, have a mouthful of
beer—because I was carting beer to them—have a mouthful of beer and then did it again
'til they did another bad one. They'd have another spew and another half a stubby
of beer and then do it again. But Jesus they worked, them poor bastards, they really
worked.

(And when they weren't working, he wondered ‘what they expected the navy boys to
do—run around and rape the girls that were left or something like that'?)

Tess Lea reminds us that it wasn't just the ‘navy boys' who were sickened by this
assault on the senses: ‘Survivors recall the smell of rotting things, dead flesh
rotting in wet ground, food putrefying without electricity, sodden materials rotting,
sewer pipes dribbling and everywhere the dank clotting of mildew…'

Richard Creswick chose New Year's Eve to track down his wife. She'd been in Bali
on holidays during the cyclone and then been refused entry back into Darwin. She
was waiting for him in Perth but it had taken her some time to establish he was still
alive. He'd sent her several telegrams saying he was okay but she hadn't received
them. Creswick's convoy was one of the last to leave Darwin during the evacuation.
‘We decided that we would drive down to Perth in convoy, three of us in three cars…And
I loaded up into the ute what I considered salvageable and we left.' They each took
one of the cats. He, Eric (the friend he'd sat in the bath and sung ‘Waltzing Matilda'
to as the cyclone bore down) and another mate had been drinking for much of the afternoon
and evening and it was eleven or so at night when they left. At the Thirteen Mile
turnoff there is a ‘nasty' set of curves. The ute was fully loaded and they had a
head-on collision with another car but then ‘we sorted out our little drama and we
continued on down the track'. By Katherine, tyres had blown and the cats were suffering
heat stress. They got some tranquillisers for the cats at Katherine hospital then
kept on driving into Western Australia.

Every day was a big news day in Darwin at that time, and New Year's Eve marked the
return of the
Northern Territory News
. Some have commented that it was as if Tracy
had blown away the (relatively) reasonable version of the paper—as personified by
Jim Bowditch who was the editor from 1954–73—and replaced it with a crazier tabloid
determined to throw its weight around. This is not to say that Bowditch had been
scared of a stoush. Historian David Carment remembers that Bowditch, ‘was a great
crusading editor. He took up particular causes. He was very interested in, for example,
pushing for the Northern Territory to have greater powers of self-government.'
²
He
also intervened when three Malay pearl divers faced deportation, to the extent of
actually breaking the law and hiding a man from the authorities.

But, despite some form, after Tracy the paper leapt into the task of opposing the
various government bodies that were vying for control over the town with more vigour
than usual. Ben Eltham and Alex Burns, in their essay on disaster journalism, noted
that newspapers tend to get bullish after disasters, glorifying the victims and getting
stuck into decision makers. Frank Alcorta, a journalist at the
Northern Territory
News
downplayed the extent to which the
News
did this. ‘The paper took it as one
of its causes to be involved in the rebuilding of Darwin, and in the rebuilding of
a new society there as we saw it.'
³

Suzanne Spunner's riff on
Northern Territory News
headlines from the late eighties
rang as true in the mid-seventies as it does today. ‘Minister Resigns/Feds Interfere/Croc
Attack/Black Land Grab/Boom Around the Corner/ Wild Dog Attack/Travel Claims Rort/Journalist
Attacked/Croc Sighted/Miners Clash/Mangrove Protest/Territory Tops/Sex Disease Survey/Railway
Link Coming/Croc Caught/Cavalry Coming/Hotel Deals above Board/Feds Intervene/Boom
Still Coming/ Sex Not the Issue.' All I'd add to that is: tits. The paper has always
had, and always will have, a sense of sheer cheek that can be redeeming.

The
Northern Territory News
's headline on 1 January was ‘Stretton Calls it Quits'.
This was a fair summary of the situation. Stretton, who'd been due to leave after
Sir John Kerr's arrival on 2 January, left abruptly at 3 pm on New Year's Day. He
did so on the grounds that he did not want to make a fuss or risk large crowds and
endless farewells at the airport, a concern that Stretton himself later acknowledged
was ‘vain'. Before he left he made a final warm and jovial radio broadcast—‘Thank
you all. God bless you all. Good luck to you… When I come back I want to make sure
that bloody garbage is cleaned up…otherwise I'll be saying a few words to you people.'
Paternalistic, of course, but you can see why the general population warmed to him.

There weren't large crowds but Stretton was met at the airport by a journalist who
asked him how it felt to hand back more power than any individual had held in the
country since Governor Phillip. Slightly obscurely Stretton replied, ‘Son, when you
study the Darwin disaster, you will find that you have had just as much power as
I have.' Nonetheless his public position remained consistent. He'd left, he wrote,
because he had done all that had been required of him and it was time to leave the
running of the place to locals.

The water and power was back on. The streets were clear of debris, traffic was flowing
freely, some shops were starting to open and the first unit of the first fleet had
arrived…Darwin was again functioning as a city. It seemed unbelievable that all this
had been achieved within six days and without any further loss of life. I realised
that the crisis was over and that my task was complete.

Stretton got to Melbourne around midnight, spent the night at Jim Cairns's home,
and returned to Canberra the next day.

On the Queen's Birthday 1975 Stretton would be presented with an Order of Australia
for eminent services in duties during the days following Cyclone Tracy, but this
is not to suggest that his battles were over. Indeed they escalated in 1976 when
his book about the emergency,
The Furious Days
, was published. In that book Stretton
was deeply critical both of particular individuals and of Darwin's response to Tracy
in general. Stretton accused the army—in contrast to the navy and the airforce—of
lack of initiative after the cyclone and said that those at the barracks had looked
after themselves rather than supporting the community. At the time, defence minister
Jim Killen and prime minister Malcolm Fraser accused Stretton of ‘great impropriety'
for speaking out. When I spoke to Fraser he said he was sorry he'd chastised Stretton
publicly and that he wished he'd taken the time to get to know him better. He no
longer stood by his criticisms and believed Stretton had done a difficult job well.
While aware of Stretton's ability to rub people up the wrong way, Fraser noted somewhat
wryly that these qualities are sometimes to a person's credit.