Warning (26 page)

The Larrakia have been fighting for their own land rights since being inspired by
the walk-off at Wave Hill of 1966. In October 1972 they'd presented the ‘Larrakia
Petition' to Princess Margaret when she was visiting Darwin. The petition had more
than a thousand signatures and was 3.3 metres long. ‘The British Settlers took our
land,' it stated. ‘Today we are REFUGEES. Refugees in the country of our ancestors.'
In the fight that broke out as they attempted to break through police barriers to
get to the princess, the petition was torn. Bill Day eventually posted a copy of
it to the Queen, who returned it to the Australian Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck,
in early 1973.
⁷

Malcolm Fraser believes that, given this momentum, and between Whitlam's government
and his own, land rights would have gone ahead cyclone or no. But despite Fraser's
reservations about reading too much into Tracy, there is no doubt that the cyclone
was seen as a call to arms for Larrakia culture. In May 1978
Bunji
was explicit on
this point:

The invaders came across the sea to Larrakia land (Port Darwin) in 1869. The invaders
built a town on the Larrakia hunting grounds…The town of Darwin was destroyed on
Christmas Day 1974, by a wild cyclone…Six months later Judge Ward recommended that
Kulaluk and Goondal be returned to the Larrakia.
⁸

The
Aboriginal Land Rights Act
of 1976 was proclaimed in January 1977. The Northern
Land Council and Central Land Council were created. In 1978 the Kulaluk Aboriginal
land claims over forty-seven acres were officially recognised. Eight years after
Tracy, Daribah Nungalinya was registered as sacred with the Aboriginal Areas Protection
Authority.
⁹
There were seven hundred members of the urban community in 1974. Today
the figure is about two thousand. This came about, in part, because definitions of
what it means to be Larrakia were challenged.

The Larrakia tribe has had to make many changes to survive. For example they never
make a distinction between those who are initiated and those who are not. It is not
even necessary to speak the language to be a Larrakia…It is not land rights to almost
wipe out a tribe and then judge them by anthropology books.
¹⁰

However those anthropology books, and the laws that extend from them, still have
a lot of power. In April 2006 a Larrakia native title claim over areas of metropolitan
Darwin was rejected by the Federal Court. Justice Mansfield found:

that the current laws and customs of the Larrakia people were not ‘traditional'…because
a combination of historical circumstances interrupted and changed the laws and customs
of the present day Larrakia people from those which existed at the time of sovereignty.
¹¹

Ongoing tensions between Larrakia and non-Larrakia are also an issue. One respondent
to the Haynes Report said, ‘There's unrestrained development in our lands; there's
people misrepresenting themselves as Larrakia…I think we need another big one [cyclone]
to wake a few people up.'

Floods and cyclones are a reminder to stay connected to country, kin and spirit.
As a senior Larrakia man Robert Mills put it to me, ‘Your people think of cyclones
as bad things, but we don't see it that way.' Some non-Indigenous people shared this
sense that the cyclone could bring good things. There were ways in which Tracy was
a liberating experience for many, in which normal rules no longer applied. One white
man now in his late fifties described to me the exhilaration of being a young man
staying on, alone, after his family were evacuated. There was a kind of freedom and
wildness to that experience, a rapid coming into manhood that he found exciting.
Peter Dermoudy, who took shelter in the World War Two armament structures down on
East Point, says of the cyclone: ‘It cleansed me.' He wouldn't have missed it for
the world. After the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 and during the thousands of
smaller quakes that followed, it was noted that there can be exhilaration in disaster.
We're reminded that we're ‘temporary inhabitants of a volatile earth…change is the
only constant'.
¹²
We ask, ‘How can we mark these places in our mind before they disappear?'

The stories we tell about ourselves and the manner of the telling are a way of singing
ourselves into being. I think again of the Yolngu saying, ‘I make this place as I
go.' And it's true, we are remaking this place: we are ravaging it, and we are paying
the price.

Climate change science has a long history though the urgency of the message is only
a few decades old, as Tom Griffiths illustrates in his essay ‘Prosper or Perish'
when he describes the research of Swiss-born Professor Louis Agassiz.

In the late 1830s Agassiz proposed not only that glaciers had moved rocks around
and later retreated—hence explaining the puzzling presence of isolated boulders in
Swiss valleys—but that whole countries had once been covered under miles of ice…His
friend and mentor, Alexander von Humboldt, warned him against the ambition of his
theory: ‘Your ice frightens me.'
¹³

And yes, we should be frightened. Climate change scientists have predicted in hundreds
of reports over dozens of years that the number of extreme weather events is going
to increase, and these events will become more severe. In Australia that means more
flooding and cyclones up north, and more drought, extreme storms and bushfires down
south. While no particular weather event can be laid neatly at the door of climate
change—extreme weather has existed since the dawn of time—there is little doubt that
the growing prevalence and severity of these weather events is in line with what
scientists have predicted. In the last three decades the number of cyclones and hurricanes
has remained constant, but the number of Category 4 and 5 cyclones has increased.
We've ignored scientists' findings on climate change for decades but we've been ignoring
Indigenous knowledge about weather since the moment we set foot on this land. In
2011 Alexis Wright asked:

Are we not curious to know something about the deeply rooted beliefs of this country
and why they were kept in place over many thousands of years? Why are we not hearing
about any of these stories and trying to understand what they might mean?

She exhorted us to listen to ‘the ancient stories of this country—that knowledge
that goes back thousands of years. This is where you will find the weather charts,
the records about the climate and how Indigenous people learnt to survive on this
continent.'
¹⁴

An increasing number of western scientific partnership projects documenting indigenous
observations of environmental change have been initiated around the world.
¹⁵
There
is a range of traditional signs Indigenous people used to read these things, which
differ slightly from area to area. Aboriginal elders interviewed at New Mapoon in
Cape York know, for example, that a period of continuous hot and still conditions
can be the prelude to monsoonal rains or a cyclone. If the Manahawk, a large black
ocean-going bird, is seen in large numbers about the coast, there is a ‘big blow
coming' within two to three days. Crocodiles building their nests higher than usual
above the high-tide mark and long stalks on the mango fruit indicate that a ‘big
Wet' is expected.
¹⁶
However these same elders were concerned that their knowledge
of seasonal weather patterns, passed on from generation to generation, is becoming
less reliable for season predictions. They, too, see that Australian weather patterns
are changing.

In 1988 Len Garton, the man who first saw Tracy hanging from the sky like a black
velvet curtain, said:

I do feel some concern for the weather pattern that seems to have changed…I find
that the dry seasons are not the dry seasons I used to recall where you had a blanket
at night. We've never had a blanket at night for the last two or three or four years…I
don't know whether it's the greenhouse effect or these alleged currents that are
floating around creating problems. I know, in flying, the weather patterns are completely
different. One time, going back five, six, perhaps seven years, I never used to mind
flying in the wet season. You did see a weather front in front of you, a rainstorm,
and it would be ten [or] fifteen miles wide and not very severe. And you could invariably
see the tops at about twelve or fourteen thousand feet or something. But now, when
you see them they're a hundred and fifty, two hundred miles wide and they seem to
go up out of sight in twenty, thirty—thousand feet. And very dense. I have flown
in them a couple of times and frightened myself. The old ones you'd get a bit of
buffeting, but nowadays there seems to [be] a lot of turmoil in them. I've never
seen any records that substantiate this or otherwise but talking to private pilots
like myself they all say: ‘Oh yes, it's different, we won't fly through a storm anymore.'

There have been countless disasters since Cyclone Tracy. In 2005 it was estimated
that tropical cyclones have caused an estimated 1.9 million deaths worldwide in the
last two hundred years. In 2012 there were 552 disasters costing just under 158 billion
dollars. The most expensive of these was Hurricane Sandy, which cost fifty billion
dollars. The deadliest was Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines, which killed 1901 people.

Closer to home one could cite Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009,
or Queensland's Big Wet of 2011, which led to three-quarters of the state being declared
a disaster zone. After those floods Germaine Greer wrote in the
Guardian
:

Six months ago the meteorologists thought it was worthwhile to warn people to ‘get
ready for a wet, late winter and a soaked spring and summer'. So what did the people
do? Nothing. They said, ‘She'll be right, mate.' She wasn't.
¹⁷

Brisbane was built on a flood plain, as many cities are. The Indigenous people knew
this and when Surveyor-General John Oxley entered the Brisbane River to found Moreton
Bay in 1824, elders ‘told these white explorers of floods that submerged today's
West End'.
¹⁸
Brisbane flooded severely in 1893 but few people with memories of that
flood were alive in 1974, and not many from 1974 were in Brisbane in 2011 when the
whole thing happened again. Matthew Condon: ‘We forget, especially in this restless
place where history finds it hard to take root. And here, in the young city, we are
at least two generations from 1974, and all of the city's new inhabitants, squinting
into tomorrow, just wouldn't know about the floods of 1974.'

The disasters of 1974—the Brisbane Floods, Cyclone Tracy—and those of 2011—Cyclone
Yasi, more floods in Brisbane—were both born of the same weather pattern, La Nina.
2011's La Nina was the strongest we've seen since 1917. You would have thought that
the lessons of 1974 would have prepared people for 2011, but generations of knowledge
and memory keep slipping away. At times the reluctance to tackle these issues head
on is more wilful, as suggested by recent reports that Victoria's power companies
did not act on promises regarding the management of power lines after the Ash Wednesday
fires of 1983. A
Four Corners
report in late 2013 pointed out that yes, it would
cost 750 million dollars or more to put power lines underground in parts of southeastern
Australia that are at high risk of fires. But the fires themselves? They're costing
us billions of dollars—and hundreds of lives. Similarly, doing nothing about climate
change will cost the planet much more in economic terms than the cost of addressing
it.

In ‘Prosper or Perish' Tom Griffiths writes:

a place of escalating fatal bushfire, and with a small and embattled agricultural
economy, Australians might have been expected to rush to sign Kyoto a decade ago…for
two hundred years, the European colonisers of Australia have struggled to come to
terms with the extreme climatic variability of the continent. Australia has a boom-and-bust
ecology. Settlers have had to learn, slowly and reluctantly, that ‘drought' is not
aberrant but natural; they have struggled to understand seasonal and non-annual climatic
variation; they have had to accept a wilful nature that they cannot control or change.
They are still learning. And now, suddenly, Australians are confronted by long-term,
one-way climatic change for which they, in part, are held responsible.

Tess Lea, writing of our propensity for a shared amnesia, linked it to, among other
things, what she describes as ‘the killing times of settlement'.
¹⁹
That is, our reluctance
to acknowledge the warfare and attempted genocide that underpin colonisation. She
is right to remind us that forgetting is strategic and that it has, in this country,
become a very bad habit. Certainly before we have come to grips with the first factor—that
Australia
is
a sunburnt country, one of droughts and flooding rains, of cyclones
and bushfires—a second factor is upon us.

Six of the hottest Australian summers on record have occurred in the last eleven
years. The United Kingdom has had its five wettest years and seven warmest years
since the year 2000. In 2013 Australia's weather broke every record since records
began. The summer of 2012–13 recorded the warmest September–March on record, the
hottest summer on record, the hottest month on record and the hottest day on record.
A record was set for the longest national-scale heatwave. It was also the hottest
summer on record for Australian sea-surface temperatures, thus increasing the chances
of a cyclone. All this in a year that was neither El Nino nor La Nina, the other
oscillating weather pattern associated with extreme weather. Records are breaking
so fast that no doubt several more will have shattered by the time this book is published.
The week before I sent the final version of this manuscript to the publishers, several
public figures raised their voices to call for the cutting of carbon emissions. Some
of these could be said to be predictable, such as Nicholas Stern, the author of a
2006 report on the economics of climate change. Less predictable was the statement
by US Secretary of State John Kerry that man-made climate change was ‘perhaps the
world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction'.
²⁰
Christine Lagarde, a conservative
and the head of the International Monetary Fund, urged the Australian government
not to abandon its role as ‘a pioneer' in the debate on climate change.
²¹