Warning (9 page)

Instead, following the 1975 coronial inquest that formally declared Ruth dead, she
had to make do with some small items salvaged from the wreck. ‘Cos you can see her
with the ring on, you know, see her with the purse. Cos they were definitely Ruth's.'
¹⁹

DOES ANYBODY KNOW THIS HAS HAPPENED TO US?

WHEN ELIZABETH Carroll stepped outside her house on Christmas morning she saw a plane
flying overhead. ‘The feeling I do remember having was: “Does anybody know this has
happened to us?”' It was a good question and Carroll wasn't alone in her fears. A
Northern Territory News
feature, published twenty years after the cyclone, quotes
one woman: ‘We thought no one knew. Here we were in the catastrophe and they didn't
know,' she said. ‘There was this incredible sense of isolation…That we had been abandoned.'
¹

The extremity of the isolation the people of Darwin experienced is hard to imagine
today. In early February 2011 I got up at three in the morning to read the tweets
of one Carl Butcher, known as ‘Cyclones Update', to see how Cairns was weathering
Tropical Cyclone Yasi. After the Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 people
managed to use their phones to let rescuers know they were still alive and where
they were. (This was still no guarantee of survival, though it may well have made
those in peril feel less alone.) During the Brisbane floods of 2011 Twitter and Facebook
helped spread information about where floodwaters were expected to be at their worst,
and were also crucial in the coordination of the clean-up. At the time, writer and
journalist John Birmingham described how, as ‘an intense low-pressure system appeared
over the city as a multi-coloured pixel swarm on thousands of smartphones and desktop
computers, the #qldfloods tag on Twitter started to spike.'
²
According to Associate
Professor Axel Bruns and Dr Jean Burgess from the Queensland University of Technology,
‘In the first place people were passing on the raw footage, the images, the videos
from Toowoomba, and the Lockyer Valley when the flash flooding happened there.' Professor
Bruns says, ‘But the focus shifts to Brisbane and preparing for and responding to
the floods as they were happening. It was no longer a news event that people were
passing on but they were providing practical information on how to flood-proof your
house or after the flood had happened how to clean up.'
³

It's not all good news. If events are moving quickly, reading a tweet that is an
hour old can mean you're getting out-of-date information, much like hearing an expired
radio warning. But there is no doubt that social media has been a game-changer and,
according to the 2013 World Disasters Report, the widespread use of technology,
⁴
particularly mobile phone texting, played a role in preventing a large loss of life
when Cyclone Phailin hit the state of Odisha in India. A cyclone in this region in
1999 killed ten thousand. In 2013, after Phailin, only fourteen are reported to have
died.

But right up to the present day, laying blame when communications collapse has been
a recurring theme in most disasters. Quite apart from any physical damage to the
infrastructure, panicked friends and relatives trying to reach each other in the
build-up to, as well as during and after, an extreme event quickly jam the phone
lines. In the aftermath of Tracy a national registration and inquiry system was set
up by the Natural Disasters Organisation and operated by Red Cross, but systems always
find a way to crash. In 2009, for example, the Bushfires Royal Commission into Black
Saturday interrogated multiple breakdowns in the Country Fire Authority's emergency
warning and telecommunications systems.
⁵

But back to 1974. Hedley Beare describes how it felt to be disconnected so suddenly:
‘When you're without telephone, post office and all of those things, you're actually
standing alone in the universe.' Or, as RAAF commander Air Commodore David Hitchins
mused thirteen years later, ‘Amazing how we are dependent on a telephone. You want
to do something, you put your hands out for the phone and all you get is a hissing
noise.' Hitchins had been out of Darwin at Smith Point in Kakadu (not then a national
park) on Christmas Eve, and when he tried to tune in to the radio at first light
all he heard was static. ‘We didn't really know what had gone on and then late in
the morning, out of the black clouds, appeared one of my old DC3s from Darwin…That
particular aeroplane and that crew had been evacuated from Darwin.' He went to board
the plane with his family but was told that his wife and daughter should stay where
they were because there was nothing to go back to. So they stayed, and as he flew
back over his own collapsed house he saw there was another DC3 wrecked in his back
garden. The RAAF, with the airport next to it, is the largest single piece of real
estate in Darwin. It was home to fifty or so light planes, the civilian airport facilities
and hundreds of people. When Hitchins got there he found hangars built in World War
Two had simply crumpled, aeroplanes were lying on their backs, helicopters were crushed.
‘The whole place was just like one vast rubbish dump.' The control tower and the
communications at the army base were wrecked. The emergency back-up in Berry Springs
(shared with the ABC) had also been flattened.

Curly Nixon remembers that at around two on Christmas morning ‘the ABC fellow that
was on the air, he said: “Well the roof looks like it's going and I'm going.” That
was the last time we heard from the ABC.' The ABC fellow was Sally Roberts' husband.
He'd driven in at midnight when it became clear how bad the cyclone was going to
be, because he didn't want things left in the hands of an inexperienced announcer.
⁶
Sally was upset because she thought he should be with her, not worrying about the
news. It was seven in the morning before someone who'd been rostered on for 5 am
staggered into the studios and said that the northern suburbs were ‘destroyed'. By
that stage, there was no way that information could be shared. Don Sanders remembers
that the ABC's communications were ‘all part of a weird setup' that had been put
together ‘at the time of the Indonesian confrontation and put up down at the 32 mile,
inland…Responsibility for the transmitter was shared between ABC, Telecom and Defence
Department thus it all got a bit messy as to who was responsible for getting it up
and running again.'

Don Sanders managed to get a radio message out of Darwin early in the morning by
using a ship's radio, though he doesn't specify a time. ‘All I said was, “Darwin
devastated by cyclone. All transmissions stopped. Anticipated up to 35,000 evacuees.”
I wanted to let them know that in my estimation that they should be starting to do
something…I just wanted to let them know that something bloody serious had happened
up there.' Charles Gurd remembers finding a policeman—a Sergeant Kettle—who was in
charge of communicating with ambulances and asking him to help get a message out.
‘Who to?' Kettle asked. ‘The outside world,' was Gurd's reply. That message, sent
out via the Postmaster-General at Mount Isa, from where a message was sent to Canberra,
was received just before 11 am. By that time other messages had already made it through.

Major-General Alan Stretton, a military man who'd served in World War Two, Korea,
Malaya and Vietnam, was the newly appointed and founding Director-General of the
Natural Disasters Organisation. His new job was about to become very interesting,
very quickly. It was 6.20 am Canberra time (4.50 am in Darwin) when Stretton got
a call from the Cyclone Tropical Warning Centre in Perth saying that a cyclone had
hit Darwin. That was around the time his kids were getting out of bed demanding their
presents. ‘This call started the longest week of my life.'

Stretton then called the Darwin police station to see what was going on and spoke
to a sergeant on duty named Taylor. The cyclone was still going, it was dark, and
Taylor couldn't judge, as yet, how bad things were. Ever the optimist, he told Stretton
that the hospital had not reported any casualties. Of course at that time people
were still battling the winds and couldn't have made it to the hospital if they wanted
to. Stretton's call to Taylor was one of the last to get through for many hours.
From that point there was no direct official communication with Darwin until about
ten, when the Western Australian ship M.V.
Nyanda
entered Darwin Harbour, and managed
to establish a tenuous Morse link. At 10.30 am a weather officer in Darwin spoke
to a weather officer in Perth and reported that it looked as if the place had been
bombed. A message was sent by the secretary of the Northern Territory at around
the same time, via Adelaide. That message was addressed to both Jim Cairns and Stretton.
‘Darwin completely devastated by cyclone last night…'

There was the issue of communicating with the outside world, but there was also the
issue of communicating within Darwin itself. How do you make a series of practical
decisions when the people on the ground have no way of speaking to each other unless
they are standing face to face? Your first impulse would be to get in your car and
drive but, on that first day at least, the rubble was so thick on the roads that
cars couldn't make it through and the people driving them couldn't keep up with the
number of flat tyres. Those who got anywhere generally did so on their rims. Cedric
Patterson remembers:

One of the other little things that occurred was that, as you went about your business
during the day or such like, you would see somebody. For instance, I can remember
seeing Babe Damaso and I waved to him and he waved back. Now when I saw somebody,
I'd say: ‘Well I saw Babe Damaso today, he's all right.' And Babe would say: ‘I saw
Cedric Patterson today, he's all right,' and that was the way the information got
around.

In the hours and days after Cyclone Tracy this organic unfolding of events that took
place as a series of autonomous actions led to what Bill Wilson called ‘independent
fiefdoms'. There was a lot of this happening: senior figures taking direct action
without consultation, because consultation was not possible. It was necessary to
make clear decisions at top speed but some decisions inevitably caused later controversy.
The relationships, hierarchical and otherwise, between these senior men were to become
increasingly tricky over the next few days because of the lack of clarity around
areas of authority. Who had it and who didn't? Who cared?

David McCann's position as magistrate meant he was thrown into the thick of it. He
describes the scene at Darwin police station: ‘Officers said, “Look we've got a lot
of prisoners here and Fannie Bay has been virtually destroyed.”' Arrangements were
made to send longer-term prisoners to Alice Springs, which meant that twenty-nine
prisoners were put on a bus at around 4 pm that day. But there were other prisoners
serving short sentences, or who had only been picked up the night before. Like most
of the people of Darwin, they no longer had a roof over their heads whether they
were in prison or out of it. McCann couldn't track down Jock Nelson, the Territory's
administrator, to get permission for his preferred solution, so he took it upon himself
to write ‘released' against the names of prisoners who had less than three or six
months left of their term (he can't remember which) and ‘they all raced out of the
police cells' at around three in the afternoon. Eight prisoners remained at Fannie
Bay Gaol, and another four were picked up over the course of the day. Bill Wilson
recalls seeing one prisoner, a man he'd arrested a few months before, wandering down
the Stuart Highway. He gave him a lift. Quite a few prisoners ended helping out with
the general clean-up, or on cooking duty at the various relief centres which were
being set up in high schools around the town.

Over at the RAAF, Hitchins decided to spray the pesticide malathion as a protection
against disease. He had ‘spoken to the Department of Health and got nowhere. Bugger
them all,' he thought, ‘we'll do it ourselves.' His planes spent ‘the next three
or four days beating up and down the main streets of Darwin at about 100 feet and
I think they used to possibly drink a little bit of beer in the evenings and Darwin
got sprayed and we didn't have a health hazard. I do believe that the action I took
was possibly a little high-handed.' High-handed it was, but no one objected and crop
dusters fogged on and off over the next few weeks. While there are still questions
asked about using chemicals like this, Darwin mists against mosquitos using malathion
to this day.

There was no shortage of leaders, though they were not always the most obvious or
most senior men around. As Ray McHenry put it:

Born leaders came out of the rubble…Nobody really needed to tell Ben Hammond to have
a look at what had happened with a power break-down…but he was at the power station
at about 6.30 on Christmas morning assessing the damage. Bob Prickett, the man in
charge of the Darwin water supply arrangement was in fact down at Darwin River Dam
at 7 o'clock…Harold Bradford was at the bus depot about 7 o'clock assessing the situation
of buses…Tom Abbot, the then town clerk, was another man who had council machinery
and trucks with drivers available very early on Christmas morning, starting on a
street-clearing operation.

McHenry himself had the seniority and the temperament to emerge as one such leader.
This inevitably set him against the leader that the Commonwealth were flying in:
Major-General Stretton. Stretton's understanding was that he was in ‘supreme command'
of Darwin during the days of the emergency and indeed, that is the authority Jim
Cairns had given him. However, men like McHenry had already taken charge and remained
unconvinced of the legitimacy of Stretton's certainty that he was in complete charge.
Questions abound, one of which was whether a military figure should have such power,
another being whether locals were in any shape to sort out the situation. Not surprisingly,
the two men give conflicting accounts of what decisions were made in the hours after
the cyclone, and who was responsible for making them, a situation which makes the
truth hard to get to.