Warning (27 page)

Justice Stretton may have said, ‘We have not lived long enough.' But some of us have.
The problem is we haven't been listening.

When, during my research for this book, I was shown around Darwin by Robert Mills,
I asked him what his thoughts were on climate change. ‘Is it true that the wet is
coming later? And that when it hits the rain is heavier?' Mills and I were spending
the day together so he could give me a sense of what Darwin was like before white
settlement, and since. We'd never met before so, in my ignorance, I figured the weather
was as good a conversation starter as any. And besides, I was frustrated that I'd
been to Darwin several times during the wet season, but it never seemed to rain.
Mills sat in silence beside me. I barrelled on. ‘Do you think the climate is changing?'
After a while he turned and looked at me. ‘My people don't really like to talk about
the weather,' he said. Some time later, I asked him to elaborate on his reluctance
and he laughed and quoted Dylan: ‘You don't need a weather man to know which way
the wind blows.'

THE SHAPE MEMORY TAKES

I FELL in love with Darwin over the weeks and months I spent there, but, like many
who have made this protestation in the past, my life was elsewhere. Whilst the city
is bigger than it was back in 1974—the population is now over a hundred and thirty
thousand—it continues to have a complex demographic and a population that floats
around a small but stable core of people who are there for the long haul. In 2011
about thirty per cent of the population was Aboriginal and the number of overseas
residents was as high as fifteen per cent. As well, long-standing Greek, Chinese
and Filipino families remain. Chips Mackinolty writes: ‘The Territory is heading
towards the non-Anglo demographic structure that so alarmed the good citizens of
Palmerston in the 1880s.' He goes on:

the only periods of population growth from interstate migration have been sharply
aligned to developments in the Northern Territory economy: the ‘empire building'
following self-government in the early 1980s, the defence build-up of the mid-1990s,
and government-led capital works projects between 2007–09. As those periods of economic
growth tapered off, people left in their thousands.
¹

But now there are new projects underway. In 2011 Prime Minister Gillard signed a
deal with President Obama to allow the stationing of up to 2500 US marines by 2017.
The troops will be rotated on a six-monthly basis. As well, developments such as
the Ichthys gas project continue to attract mining and gas workers, though they tend
to be ‘fly-in-fly-out' workers, put up in a purpose-built village just outside Darwin
at Howard Springs.
²
The split between those who consider Darwin home and those who
just fly in for work and a good time seems wider than ever before. And with all those
marines, pilots and miners it's probably going to keep on feeling like a man's town.

One of the central theses of Tess Lea's book
Darwin
is that the city has never, in
fact, stopped being a defence town. She cites the decision to maintain the airport
and RAAF base's position, slap bang in the middle of Darwin, as indicative of that.
When Lea flew over the city not so long ago, what she saw was a town in danger of
drowning, both in a literal sense, and a cultural one.

A thousand feet up and the tough, delicate topography of Darwin comes into view,
a place of military zones, industrial sites and back-to-the-future incarceration
compounds. There is the huge chunk of habitable land consumed by the airport; the
mangroves as they hold the slow-drowning delta system in fragile check; the inlets
of East and West arm, showing how close to inundation Darwin's harbour has become.

On my final visit, in late 2013, I stayed in an elevated house in Jingili. It was
the beginning of the build-up, so very humid. I slept at night with all the louvres
open and the fans on. It was hard to sleep with orange-footed scrubfowl scuffing
around all night and bats shrieking. The moon hung bright in the sky. The experience
was both fabulous and exhausting, like sleeping in a tent. But that's the thing about
Darwin: nature is a raucous presence. It crowds in on you. Early most mornings I'd
head for the Nightcliff pool, before the heat set in, and swim laps overlooking the
Arafura Sea. Nights were spent outdoors, at pubs watching the sun set, and I found
myself wondering if it did something to the brain (good? bad?) watching that golden
red ball fall into the sea, night after glorious night. Suzanne Spunner's phrase,
‘you stagger up from yet another sunset' resonated. I saw fights on the streets,
and in the parks between whites and black. Most tellingly, down at East Point under
a sign that said ‘No Camping', I saw a white man emerge from a camper van and squirt
a group of long grassers with a hose while shouting at them that they weren't allowed
to be there. They laughed at him. I tried to imagine what it would have been like
for those living out in the days, weeks and months after the cyclone and the one
word that comes to mind is sweat. Some days you sweat so much it seems a miracle
that the fifty per cent of us that's meant to be water doesn't end up in a puddle
on the floor.

On one of my first trips to Darwin I'd caught the ferry to the Mandorah Hotel to
have one of their famed counter teas (among other things, they refused to do chips).
I'd sat under a faded striped umbrella looking past a Cyclone Tracy memorial made
of twisted metal to the beach, then to Darwin across the harbour. That was when I
met the publican, Nick Candilo. I told him what I was working on and he pointed to
a navigation light that flashes all night every night and told me that he often looked
at it to remind himself of his friend, the skipper of the
Mandorah Queen
. On my last
trip the Mandorah pub closed its doors for the last time. Candilo said its position,
right on the water, made the forty-six-year-old building impossible to maintain.
‘I don't think it's repairable and it probably goes way back to the cyclone. The
metal is rusting and it's like an old ship at the end of its days.'
³
It's easy to
be nostalgic for a place you barely know, but even I could see that Darwin was changing
rapidly and Cyclone Tracy was a story from a long time ago. A story that people new
to Darwin, living in reinforced (but untested) apartments felt didn't affect them.

The morning I left I went for a long walk along Casuarina Beach at low tide. Sea
water snaked in channels across the expansive sand like half a dozen glistening serpents.
Daribah Nungalinya emerged as the tide dropped, squat and strong. With its sturdy
fortress-like air it's not hard to see why the rock formation was considered a custodian
of the lands and the waters in the area.

Issues of memory were on my mind. In a coming-together of my personal and professional
life, Darwin was the place that my father received treatment for dementia. The experience
endeared me even more to the place because people treated Dad with such care and
understanding. Some days I'd dash to and from the archives to where he was staying,
or to take him to doctor's appointments. What people remember, and what they don't,
took on an even greater significance. A friend who writes on such subjects told me
that people with dementia often remember the quality of an experience even though
they forget the detail. If something makes them sad they feel down without remembering
why, and if it was a good experience the converse is true: they feel strangely uplifted.
One night I took Dad to the sailing club in Fannie Bay for dinner so we could watch
the sunset. I was convinced I'd spotted some crocs circling. Locals told me that
couldn't be right, before standing next to me, looking at the series of tiny tail
fins moving through the water and conceding maybe I had a point. Swimming in the
sea was never on the agenda for me up there, but even less so after that night. Dad
ate some potatoes with his meal and they triggered a memory of a particular meal
he had as a child. He was beaming. On other occasions, flickers of moments barely
remembered made him flinch as if pained. The body, it seems, remembers longer than
the mind. The things that happen to us, they stay with us. Even if they slip from
our memory, they live on in our bodies.

When I met with Lord Mayor Katrina Fong Lim in those final few days, I asked her
how Darwin planned to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the cyclone in late
2014. ‘It's a tricky question,' she acknowledged. ‘It's certainly not something to
celebrate. As a city we still don't know what to do. We can't have a party on Christmas
Eve because everyone has their own plans. And if you have an event on another day,
what are you celebrating?'

In the days and months after the cyclone people wanted to talk about it. A lot. Margaret
Muirhead remembers that ‘most people who'd been through the cyclone needed to talk…because
Jim and I were not traumatised by the cyclone, we were able to listen and every dinner,
every night at dinner, the cyclone, the cyclone, the cyclone…' In her interview with
Richard Fidler in 2013, Wendy James recalled that this need to talk about the cyclone
endlessly became almost debilitating, and finally, in an effort to move on, she instituted
a system of fines at any dinner parties she held—if you mentioned the cyclone you
were fined a bottle of wine or some beer. She also commented that she found the cyclone
hard to talk about because it brings things back. Her breath shortens and goosebumps
prickle along her skin. ‘After all these years,' she said, ‘it never leaves.'

Nowadays, in contrast, says Fong Lim, survivors ‘don't want to talk about it'. She
compared this to the commemoration of the World War Two bombings in 2012, when the
seventieth anniversary fell. Those who were still alive were keen to talk about what
had happened, indeed, memories were flooding back. She believed the survivors of
Tracy aren't at that stage yet, despite the passing of forty years.

There is no doubt that the willingness to mark Cyclone Tracy has ebbed and flowed.
My preferred memorial, the twisted iron in the Mandorah pub's beer garden, had been
there since soon after Tracy. In August 1976 the foundation was laid of a new Christ
Church to replace that old stone building Bishop O'Loughlin was so worried about.
His concern for history rather than the day was given form through light, air and
space: it's a beautiful church. The old stone porch was integrated into the back
wall of a modern octagonal building, with massive arched windows. Inside is a Cyclone
Tracy memorial window in hues of (mainly) purple and blue. Designed by artist George
Chaloupka, it represents fishing nets and waves and is really quite something. The
window was financed by a Gollin Kyokuyo Trust fund, and there is also a plaque to
remember the seven men that company lost at sea. Almost ten years after the cyclone,
another memorial was constructed using twisted girders from the home of Sergeant
Kevin Maley, one of the first people flown out after Tracy. The girders had been
bent by front-end loaders during the clean-up operations and a teacher from Casuarina
High school had them set in concrete. The memorial was unveiled in June 1984. It's
an affecting monument but there have also been criticisms that it was a reconstruction
(bent out of shape by human forces) rather than indicative of the power of the storm
itself. As well, it was the result of one man's initiative rather than the expression
of a desire to commemorate victims led by any community organisation or form of government.
Of course, despite government initiatives or lack thereof, individual survivors develop
their own memorials. Bill Wilson and his wife continued their ritual of a scotch
for Christmas breakfast for some twenty years.

People's relationship to the cyclone changed over time. At the time of the tenth
anniversary, historian Mickey Dewar noted that there were:

plenty of tangible reminders of the effects of the cyclone. Vacant lots, elevated
houses with the upper storey gone and ubiquitous staircases that led to nowhere.
Newcomers to Darwin were initiated in the stories of the cyclone in the same way
that crocodile and box jellyfish stories are also told; accounts of hospital floors
awash with blood, civilian looting, the hundreds of deaths that were concealed by
the government. By ten years after the event, the historical event that was cyclone
Tracy had become entrenched within the mythic folklore of Darwin.
⁴

When Suzanne Spunner moved to Darwin those signs were still there: ‘housing pylons
left over from Tracy. “Cyclone ballrooms” they call them—freestanding polished wooden
floors. Over time the wood rots and disappears leaving the steel and concrete bearers
to support supple vines, where once they held up whole families, little worlds aloft
in the air.'

Nowadays the vacant lots are gone and Ray McHenry's words from many years ago seem
both more pertinent and increasingly remote. ‘The best message, I think, is the visual
impact of what happened in Tracy…What I have learned, I think, is that the further
you get away from a disastrous experience, the more difficult it is to try and keep
people interested in planning and in preparedness…'

In 1994, on Tracy's twentieth anniversary, Bernard Briec, like many Darwin residents,
didn't want to accept that a cyclone like Tracy could ever hit again. ‘I think one
of the reasons that I don't feel that scared is, I don't think something like Tracy
could happen again. I don't know if that's being complacent about it, or what, but
I think Tracy was almost a one-off sort of event for Darwin.'

Francis Good asked him, ‘You can't conceive that something like that could strike
twice?'

‘I pray to God it never will, something that bad,' Briec replied.

Mickey Dewar was responsible for developing the twentieth anniversary commemoration
that is now a permanent exhibition at the Northern Territory Gallery and Museum.
Visitors to Darwin would know this exhibition, which was designed by Troppo, and
includes a sound room that plays the recording made by Bishop Ted Collins in the
early hours of Christmas Day 1974. A sign outside the room warns people who actually
went through Cyclone Tracy that they may find it distressing to enter. When you step
in it is dark except for occasional flashes. For me it was the strobing light representing
lightning that was most agitating, but many can't bear the overwhelming noise of
metal scraping the ground or the loud moaning of wind. Little kids who followed me
in looked seriously freaked out, and who can blame them? About 300,000 people a year
visit the Cyclone Tracy Gallery, which is considered a model for memorials after
disaster.

Back then, though, Dewar found the mounting of the memorial a difficult task. Despite
the fact that a similar exhibition had been housed at Fannie Bay Gaol for some years
there were complaints that such a thing was even being contemplated. ‘A commonly
voiced fear concerning the commemorations,' Dewar wrote, ‘was that by marking the
anniversary we would be tempting fate and would bring another cyclone down upon the
city.'