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Ray McHenry felt strongly that the DRC should have stood its ground on this. ‘It's
only a matter of time—whether it's five, fifty or a hundred years, there will be
a cyclone in Darwin, which will wipe out the people in that surge area; it's as plain
as the nose on your face…' He's right. Global sea levels rose by about seventeen
centimetres during the twentieth century, which certainly makes storm surges increasingly
likely. But while McHenry agreed that issues like the surge zone and cyclone safety
standards were relevant, he concurred with critics who believed the planning process
was poorly handled and that ‘delayed decisions about rebuilding basic accommodation
were a worry to us all'. These delays had obvious consequences: people simply gave
up waiting for formal permission and those who could afford it started to build houses
on their blocks that did not adhere to any particular standard.

These days there are surge zones in place in Darwin and Lord Mayor Katrina Fong Lim
insists that primary surge zones continue to be taken very seriously. Fong Lim has
other concerns, though. She is worried that people still don't understand what it
takes to prepare themselves for a disaster, or realise that if the worst happens
they will need to be able to look after themselves for at least three days. The sturdy
apartments they now live in pose another risk—that people become complacent. Survival
isn't just about strong walls.

However in the early days of 1975 strong walls seemed to be the most important thing
of all. Kay Brown, whose daughter Geraldine died in the cyclone, remembers being
‘terrified about living in an elevated house again'. Her next house ‘was besser block
and filled with concrete'. She wasn't alone. After Tracy Darwin became a more boring-looking
town, full of concrete bunkers that some called ‘Tracy trauma houses'. Peter Dermoudy
ended up abandoning his architecture practice in frustration at the trend towards
housing like this. Architect and academic David Bridgman has pointed out that, while
Tracy caused a radical rethink of building codes, the resulting houses:

were predominantly of masonry or precast concrete construction, with small cellular
spaces and small windows…these buildings were much stronger and more able to resist
cyclonic winds, however, the small, poorly ventilated, interiors were often uncomfortable
in the tropical climate and air conditioning became a necessity for comfort.
⁸

Historian David Carment has said it took many Darwin residents less than a decade
to realise that, while these houses might withstand a cyclone, they made life between
cyclones ‘feel like hell'.
⁹

The extraordinary architecture firm Troppo responded to the prevalence of these bunkers
by designing houses that were elevated, audacious, tropical—and safe. Their first
houses were built in the early 1980s and you can see the influence of Burnett in
their work. They have gone on to make a mark on both residential housing and public
buildings in the decades since. If you wander through the back streets of Coconut
Grove you can see them for yourself. They have an audacious quality—modern, on stilts,
lots of louvres—that makes them stand out (if you can spy them behind their wild
gardens, that is). Tragically two members of the Troppo practice, Greg McNamara and
his wife Lena Yali, died in a car accident, alongside friend and landscape architect
Kevin Taylor, while this book was being written. Shortly after their death Phil Harris
wrote of the loss in the
Australian
as a blow for a form that was only beginning
to express its ‘Australianness'.

Big Bill Neidjie (‘Kakadu Man') would say we are yet to hold a real ‘feeling' for
country, one that reverberates with a sense of ecological connection between all
creatures, the earth and landscape, and the seasons that check our progress through
life.

The McNamaras were champions of such a connection.
¹⁰

It's a connection that has been resisted by settlers since Darwin's earliest days.
Captain Bloomfield Douglas was sent as government resident to the place then called
Palmerston shortly after South Australian surveyor George Goyder had finished his
work. Ianto Ware has vividly described what followed next: ‘Douglas went up there,
started building and then had a sort of Heart of Darkness experience; staff eaten
by crocodiles, termites and ants ate everything, and when the dry season kicked in
the heat drove everyone, particularly the resident, mad.' The land selection process
was corrupted and one man, William Henry Gray, snapped up most of the good land. He and his descendants refused to sell it, creating a lag in development that lasted right up until 1960. What sets Darwin apart is that while there is ‘the usual disparity between the environment and land' the systems used to govern it are still ‘overtly disconnected'. He also comments that ‘looking through the laws it's not surprising the place didn't withstand a cyclone; it has a long history of having a legal system that doesn't adequately ensure the people living there can withstand the environmental extremes they're likely to be exposed to.'

Dr Slim Bauer was the first director of the ANU's North Australia Research Unit, which had been set up by Nugget Coombs to look into the problems of developing in the north. Keith Cole recalls sharing a meal with him not so long after Tracy, during which Bauer made a comment that resonates still. ‘The white man in Darwin has not come to grips with life in the tropics and the environment,' he said. ‘The disaster of Tracy will, sometime in the future, be overtaken by further disaster.'

Eighteen months after Cyclone Tracy there were forty-four thousand people in the city. This meant the numbers—if not the individuals themselves—were almost back to where they'd been before. Houses were being rebuilt according to new cyclone codes. In this way at least, Mayor Fong Lim can see the ways in which Tracy improved Darwin. ‘It's a truly modern city.' Vicki Harris, who left after the cyclone then returned to live in 1980, concurs.

There was a lot more civic pride than what there had ever been. Darwin had always been a frontier town and it was like a forgotten backwater, really, back in the early seventies. But in 1980 it was almost as if the cyclone had done it a favour by blowing it off the map, and they had to get
themselves reorganised and rebuild, and it had really
blown out the cobwebs out of the place. And it had shaken the place out of its doldrums,
too, I think. I mean, apart from the tragedy of human lives being lost, the fact
was that Tracy really did this place a favour.

I MAKE THIS PLACE AS I GO

WHEN I began my research I was taken aback to find that one of the most striking
images of the cyclone was not a photo but a painting, and that it had been painted
not in Darwin, but a thousand kilometres southwest in the remote Kimberley community
of Warmun.

It was 1991 when Rover Thomas painted the iconic
Cyclone Tracy
, in which a black
gulf sweeps across the canvas eradicating everything in its path. The effect is not
unlike one of NASA's images of a black hole collapsing in on itself, eating time
and space and light.

But Thomas had been painting the cyclone for almost twenty years by then. He was
still a stockman when, in early 1975, he received a visitation from a Gija woman
he called auntie. She'd died as a result of injuries sustained when her car crashed
on a flooded Kimberley road in the rains that followed Tracy. She was alive when
she was picked up by a medical plane but died in the air above Broome. In Thomas's
vision, the woman's spirit travelled with him across the Kimberley and across five
different language groups. Finally, she showed him the Rainbow Serpent destroying
Darwin. Thomas was known for his extraordinary visions but, to quote Wally Caruana,
the former curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Australia, it was
the number of language groups this dreaming encountered, the breadth of the country
it ‘sang', that ‘really knocked people out'.

The auntie's spirit showed Thomas aspects of country and taught him the Gija names
for things. She taught him a song and a dance for this journey and showed him designs
to paint on boards to be carried on the shoulders of men as they performed. This
vision became the basis for the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony, described as ‘synonymous
with Rover Thomas and Cyclone Tracy',
¹
which is still performed today. The Gurirr
Gurirr, according to author Alexis Wright:

demonstrates the continuing way Indigenous people have retained knowledge through
a cultural sense of what the great ancestors in the environment are telling us. This
is how the stories tie us to the land as guardians and caretakers, and the land to
us as the most powerful source of law.
²

The first Gurirr Gurirr storyboards were painted by Paddy Jaminji, a senior artist
related to the woman whose spirit had visited Thomas. Thomas needed Jaminji's skills,
as well as his relationship to the woman and her country, to provide the appropriate
knowledge to create the song cycle. Thomas was born on the other side of the Great
Sandy Desert at Yalda Soak, almost a thousand kilometres away. While Warmun was not
his place of birth, it was his chosen home, and he was painting and singing his way
into relationship. All Thomas's work, including the Gurirr Gurirr paintings, are
an expression of the social and cultural dislocation that defined Indigenous experience
last century and this. We hear this in auntie's voice as she passes over Mount Cockburn.
That is when she cries out—according to the words of the song that accompanies the
painting—‘I'm leaving my country.' Further along in the cycle, she reaches Tablelands
(represented by the distinctive silhouette of boab trees). There she says, ‘This
is my country now.'

To understand more about these paintings and the song cycle that they are a part
of, I visited Kevin Kelly, who is both the curator of the Red Rock Art Gallery in
Kununurra and the manager of Rover Thomas's estate. The Gurirr Gurirr storyboards
he showed me had been painted by Tiger Moore, who briefly inherited the Gurirr Gurirr
cycle during the nineties. The board representing Cyclone Tracy depicted the Rainbow
Serpent for the Kimberley area, Wungul (also spelt Wungurr). In Moore's words: ‘This
is the same snake that killed mother [auntie] and caused Tracy. That's the song of
that snake there now.' Wungul is also the name of the cyclone. A series of boards
followed, including one of a truck that the snake grabs and pulls down the embankment—the
accident that caused auntie's death.

I also travelled to Canberra to see the original storyboards, those used in the mid-eighties.
These had been painted, by Paddy Jaminji and Rover Thomas, on masonite. That way
dancers could create a wobble-board effect when they held them aloft. The images
were slightly sketchy, having been produced in the knowledge that they were not standalone
works but would be supplemented by the performance of the ceremony. They were scuffed
with use and wear. As with all the Gurirr Gurirr images, animals were also places,
weather and events. A serpent was a cyclone. A crocodile was a mountain. A person
was a kangaroo. Time operated differently.

Thomas believed it was important the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony be performed for Europeans,
and so it has been. His chronicling of contemporary events for both a black and a
white audience continued after the Gurirr Gurirr series and included works on the
Ruby Plains and Texas Downs massacres, as well as depictions of the impact on the
landscape that occurred after the damming of the Ord River. No other artists have
painted the recent history of northern Australia in such an ambitious fashion.

After the Warmun floods and evacuation of 2011, the source of the water that devastated
the community was the subject of much discussion. The insurance company initially
attributed the damage to the rise of Turkey Creek, which meant no payout. To provide
evidence that water had also washed down directly from the plains, Maggie Fletcher
took the question to the people.

‘We had lots of conversations about the flood and where the water had come from,'
says Fletcher. There was real concern about why the bad weather had occurred, about
what was being communicated, rather than a focus on what might have been lost. ‘This
got people thinking and talking and after a while, people started to make paintings
about the flood…These flood paintings are history in the making.' But, of course,
these are different kinds of history from the ones white society, and law, rests
on.

The ways in which Indigenous people maintain culture—through storytelling, dancing
and painting—are poorly understood in the Australian mainstream. They are important
for many reasons, not least to satisfy the laws requiring land rights claimants to
show that ancestral customs and traditions have been maintained, that a link to the
land has been retained and that the land has cultural significance. But it has not
been easy to align these Indigenous forms of history with white law.

When Tom Pauling moved to Darwin in 1970 he was one of many who recognised that the
way in which white and black law were integrating was not working. Some people advocated
for a system which did more to involve Indigenous people in the process of the courts,
rather than simply subjecting them to a series of experiences that were both incomprehensible
and, ultimately, often fatal. This led to several innovations, such as elders being
present during court cases, both to offer advice and to learn more about the legal
process, and the acknowledgment in some courts of customary Law. (Depressingly, despite
many attempts over the last few decades to improve the situation it seems to be getting
worse, not better, for Indigenous Territorians. Between 2008 and 2012 their rate
of incarceration, already disproportionate, rose by 34 per cent. The Territory also
has the highest rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody in the nation.)

Storytelling incorporates contemporary events into the narrative of the Dreamtime,
which is one word for the fabric of knowledge, history, culture and law that lies
across everything. But the romantic and slightly fairytale connotations of the word
Dreamtime are misleading. Culture, knowledge and law are tough. They are a set of
intractable understandings and rules that have very real consequences in the day-to-day
world. Detail is important. Law is a form of ritualised memory, and memory is knowledge:
the kind of knowledge that can help a people survive. To know the Law is to have
access to millennia of ecological information, and it informs the day-to-day decisions
of elders. Memory of the land, the animals, the plants, the location of water holes:
in all this there is power.

The depth of these memories gives them a resonance that we'd call spiritual, and
indeed they are. But they are also real and relevant to the here, the now. Time and
time again Dreamtime stories have been shown to be based on what we white people
would call historical ‘facts'—now proven through archaeological evidence. For Indigenous
people culture is life but perhaps one of the things I am trying to convey, one of
the reasons I have written this book, is that it's not just life for Australia's
oldest inhabitants: it is for us newcomers, also.

*

Captain Cook law—white law—on the other hand, took a while to settle in the Northern
Territory. The area was governed by South Australia for its first fifty years but
after that it became the responsibility of the Commonwealth, and when Tracy hit
Darwin it had been under federal administration since 1911. Tom Pauling says, ‘It
wasn't until about 1975 that we saw party politics as such operating in the Northern
Territory. In those days, just about everyone was independent although it was well
known that Dick Ward was either a communist or socialist.' The first fully elected
Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory was created by an act of the Commonwealth
Parliament in October 1974. That's only a couple of months before Tracy. However
the assembly had few significant powers and, according to Bill Wilson, even those
powers were dismissed by Canberra. ‘The federal government hardly recognised them,
and they saw this [Tracy] as an opportunity to flex their muscles.' Wilson was not
the only one to argue that Canberra bureaucrats used the cyclone to try and consolidate
control over a town that was beginning to slip from their grasp. At the time of the
disaster eighteen federal government ministers had special responsibilities in the
Northern Territory.

Harry Giese, like many of Darwin's senior figures, believes the tensions after the
cyclone further motivated the drive for self-government. There was a powerful sense
that Territorians:

should have the same rights and the same privileges, exercise the same powers and
responsibilities, as any of the states. That feeling was very, very strong. I think
Cyclone Tracy and its aftermath led to a strengthening of that attitude. Certainly,
I think it brought forward some of the changes in government, in the powers and responsibilities
of the Legislative Council, and of course, led to the '78 setting up of a Northern
Territory Legislative Assembly.

Margaret Muirhead remembers 1978, and the declaration of self-government, as ‘the
highest pinnacle'. She too believed that it was a ‘direct outcome' of the cyclone.

Paul Everingham, the Northern Territory's first chief minister after self-government,
said these moves had been underway long before Cyclone Tracy. Malcolm Fraser insists
that greater self-determination would have happened regardless of the cyclone—‘the
time had come'. He laid claim to being an advocate for statehood during the 1975
federal election campaign, when he announced that the Territory would be granted
‘statehood in five years'. He ‘also promised an immediate transfer of executive responsibilities
to the Legislative Assembly if the coalition parties are elected on December 13'.

When I spoke to him, Fraser said the Territory itself resisted full statehood when
it was offered, perhaps out of concern that it would be financially disadvantaged.
He made this particular point in response to my suggestion that the granting of statehood
for the Territory could be seen as a way of defraying the massive rebuilding costs
that the Commonwealth Government (estimated to be between eight hundred million and
a billion dollars, when all was done and dusted) undertook after Tracy. While he
acknowledged that was a lot of money, he argued that the rebuild generated significant
economic activity, so it was wrong to simply see it as a drain. Either way, in 1977
an agreement was reached that self-government would be achieved, through a gradual
transfer of responsibilities, by mid-1979.

It was not just political will that was tempered by the cyclone. Residents' personal
passion for the place had also become more steely. Peter Dermoudy has said that the
cyclone made him and others ‘commit themselves to the place or leave forever'.
³
Maria
Tumarkin writes that in the aftermath of the cyclone ‘people who had little consciousness
of land rights and so on, all of a sudden discovered their own attachment to place'.
⁴
Barbara James concurs:

Individuals made a real choice to come back to Darwin. The city had been destroyed,
most people had lost their homes, most of their belongings. So the choice to actually
come and stay here or move here was a very deliberate one and a commitment and I
think it has stabilised Darwin's population to a large extent. It's a lot less transient
than it was. But as a nation, I also think it was really important for the country
to feel that it was part of rebuilding Darwin.
⁵

James and others talk about the renewed heritage push that resulted from this increased
engagement and ‘sees the “town hall ruins”, the crumbled remains of a former town
hall that now stands in the heart of Darwin's business district, as a reminder of
the power and influence the residents' groups came to yield'.
⁶
There was also a greater
valuing of the few Burnett bungalows left on Myilly Point, and a hard-fought battle
saved the remaining bungalows (including the Giese house) in 1983.

This change of heart set Darwin's newer residents on a direct collision course with
its oldest. The parallels between white and black experiences may seem obvious to
us now, but Dawn Lawrie appeared unaware of them when she criticised the impact of
the permit system, then the DRC, on Darwin's residents, writing in her contribution
to Giese's DDWC report: ‘After your survival instinct and your need for love the
third most basic thing is your territorial imperative, that's your bit of land. We
are not very far removed from our ancestors in caves.'