Warning (8 page)

Certainly the more you read of the devastation Cyclone Tracy wrought, the harder
it is to believe that only seventy-one died that night (though there are still a
hundred and sixty people listed as missing) so it's no surprise that the figure is
persistently disputed. When I wondered out loud about this figure while visiting
the NT archives, Françoise Barr told me that the morgue photos were held there: I
could look at them if I wanted. Then she hesitated, ‘but I wouldn't recommend it'.
It was Françoise who first told me that photos had been taken to allow identification
because the bodies themselves had to be buried quickly. I eventually had a brief
look at the photos—or tried to. I found it easier to focus on the carefully set out
exercise books filled out by men like Bullock, detailing who was found dead, what
they were wearing and who they were identified by. When interviewed in 1987, coroner
and magistrate David McCann explained that police had:

quickly set up a system for identifying all the people who died and had details of
description, photographs, what they were wearing, rings and ornaments and all those
sorts of things, and then had ticks for whether they'd been identified for relatives
or not…If they weren't identified before they were buried, they'd taken photographs
and taken details of things so they had the information.

But the system was inevitably chaotic, as McCann himself acknowledged.

It's possible that the rumours of mass graves originated in the trenches that were
dug as a short-term solution for the bodies that were on the official death list.
It was David McCann, acting as coroner, who first called attention to the problem
of storing bodies, given that there was no refrigeration. ‘I told them or they asked
me, but anyway I said, “Look, there's no way we can keep the bodies just lying as
they are. They have to be buried smartly and there are all sorts of reasons, including
public health problems if you don't.”' Police Commissioner Bill McLaren says,

I think from recollection I would say it was probably the twenty-eighth of December,
twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth…several bodies were taken—were out at the cemetery
at the same time, but each and every body was put in a separate grave. It's marked,
recorded, and there's definitely no chance whatever of there being a mass burial,
and every person that was buried had a burial service…
¹⁰

Later on, a number of those bodies were exhumed for cremation or reburial.

This story differs slightly from truck driver Peter Talbot's, which, while it supports
McLaren's views that the grave digging was for people on the official death list,
suggests the procedures weren't as respectful as you'd hope.

The Sunday I didn't go to work, my gang in the council—there's 3 of us on the truck—go
and putting all the street signs up, repairing kerbing and making driveways and all
that, doing stone pitching, they were called into the burial party. Because my mate,
he was one of them, he was in the burial party. When he went out to the cemetery,
there was the police—they just piled them on like sardines, you know, you know them
vans, they had them stacked up like that with a tag on their foot, but this is what
[name removed] was telling me, the policeman took—standing—having to pull the body
out, had big rubber gloves. They were buried in the clothes they wore the night they
got killed. Pull them out, just drop them into the grave and there was another policeman
there, he took the number of the grave on the headstone. As they kept bringing the
bodies in for burial, old [name removed] seen a couple of friends of his, and that
upset him; upset him that much; like Billy Muir and a few other blokes. See on that
job we was doing we seen a lot of people he knew. So it upset him and made him crook.
He told the doctor what happened, he was upset, probably shocked too, I supposed.
¹¹

This was on Saturday 28 December and certainly Billy Muir was on the official list
of the dead. An Indigenous man, well known around the town, he'd died during the
course of the night, having protected his wife Hilda ‘using his big, strong body
as a roof,' as she later put it.
¹²
Talbot is Indigenous, as was the man who broke
down. This story overlaps with a statement made by Police Commissioner McLaren that
one man who dug trenches for the bodies had a breakdown. Such scenes are shocking
for anyone, but possibly more so for Indigenous people, who have strict protocol
around treatment of the dead. That aside, it is easy to see how such a traumatic incident
might have morphed into a tale of trenches and hidden deaths.

There were also those who were never a part of the official death toll but whose
deaths could be traced back to the cyclone. Echo Cole remembers that a lot of people
died in the years following Tracy and suggests that they should have been included
in various fatality figures because there were so many heart attacks after the event.
On 8 January the
Northern Territory News
reported that twelve people had died ‘natural
deaths' since the cyclone—which seems like quite a few given that only two weeks
had passed. It was suggested by McLaren that these deaths were ‘probably the reason
for rumours of many more cyclone deaths than the actual confirmed figure'.
¹³
Edna
Harmer's husband, Bill, was dead within six months. ‘He fretted himself to death…I
reckon the cyclone more or less finished him off.'
¹⁴

Among the uncounted, the hippies loom large, though the definition of ‘hippy' was
a free for all. In the seventies, Darwin was on the counter-culture trail that linked
Australia with Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East. Lameroo Beach, near the
centre of town, was nicknamed ‘Twelve Star Hotel' when it became a commune of sorts
for those passing through. ‘To get a feel for ancient Darwin,' writes Tony Clifton,

you need to go back to Lameroo Beach. When I paid it a nostalgic visit the trees
still swept down to the water's edge, the sun still set blood red, the trees were
clean of human habitation and a handful of Aboriginal people were sitting and talking
on the sand under the branches. The smoke of their fires drifted through the thick
leaves as I walked back up to the neat park at the top.
¹⁵

That was in 2005. When I visited in 2013 I was struck both by the place's beauty,
and by how little actual beach there was. I assumed the beach had eroded but when
I asked a friend who camped out there in the seventies he remembered that it had
always been precarious, and that he'd had to sleep back from the beach on a narrow
ledge. It's hard to imagine where any number of people could have slept, though tree
houses are one answer to that question. Back in the late sixties and early seventies,
‘the hippies smoked the local weed and played guitars in their tree-houses, perched
in the overhanging branches of the casuarinas, which ran down a steep slope to the
shoreline behind what is now the main tourist drag of Mitchell Street'.

What happened to these people when the cyclone hit? It's known that the beach itself
was ravaged beyond recognition, but both Mayor Tiger Brennan and soon-to-be-Mayor
Ella Stack have said that the area had been ‘cleaned up' a month or so before the
cyclone. Where, then, did everyone go? Did they simply move to another beach, and
if so, how safe was that?

After the cyclone Paula Dos Santos was concerned for the fate of ‘about two hundred
men, women and children who were living across the creek at Casuarina Beach. They
were in tents and makeshift shelters, mostly backpackers and drifters who had been
removed from Lameroo Beach.' The day before the cyclone, she gave four of them a
lift from town.

I was shocked to see so many living like that, I said: ‘Don't you know we are expecting
a cyclone? You people will be blown away. You should go to a school or somewhere
until it's over.' But they all said: ‘We'll be right! Don't worry about us.' But
I did worry, and the next afternoon I drove down to the beach and looked across the
creek and it was bare—not a soul there. I still wonder how they coped or what happened
to them.

Similar questions surround the long grassers, the Indigenous people who camped in
the parks in and around Darwin. A 2011 report on Indigenous people and Cyclone Tracy
quotes one respondent as saying:

I mean we know a lot of people that lived in the bush and surrounding areas as they
do today and we reckon there was a lot more people out there unaccounted for that
they just didn't. They weren't able to count them. And so when you saw the devastation,
and those 60 odd people, there's no way that only 60 odd people would have died in
that. I mean there would have been a couple of hundred people living in the long
grass, you know.
¹⁶

It was often said that the Aboriginal people got out of town because they noticed
that the green ants had disappeared along with the birds. Echo Cole: ‘Because of
my Aboriginal identity [I knew]—that something was going to happen to Darwin city
at the time…Everything just went dead. There was no bird life; no movement; even
the trees were still.'
¹⁷
A creature known as the Mandorah Monster (thought to be
a giant manta ray) was spotted in Darwin Harbour in the build-up to the cyclone.
This happened on the Rainbow Serpent dreaming track that stretched from Casuarina
Beach to Mandorah and was seen, in retrospect, as a warning.

But Cole himself didn't leave town and I found no particular evidence that Indigenous
people responded very differently from non-Indigenous people. That is, some were
concerned and did their best to be prepared, and others ignored the whole thing.
Some—Indigenous people included—make the distinction in the knowledge held by those
living traditional lives, who did know something was up and got out of town, and
those who were more urbanised.

In emphasising some kind of innate knowledge, there's a danger of slipping into a
romantic myth, one that conveniently covers up the lack of attention paid to some
Aboriginal communities around Darwin before and after the cyclone. There were around
twenty-three Aboriginal camps around Darwin—five of them had had permanent residents
for decades. Many of these communities had no radio and wouldn't have been in a position
to hear the ABC's hourly warnings. Anthropologist Bill Day has recalled that during
previous emergencies he'd had to relay warnings to various camps, otherwise messages
were unlikely to reach them. He was not around to do that when Tracy hit. ‘I know
that a lot of the traditional mob they actually left because they were reading the
weather signs and the warnings from the animals and things like that. But I do know
a lot of people died because they were never given the warning. Or they couldn't
understand.'
¹⁸

In the wake of the cyclone it was also hard to get exact figures on the number of
deaths at sea. According to harbourmaster Carl Allridge's report dated 4 January
1975, ‘At least 29 vessels were sunk or wrecked, several were driven ashore and later
refloated and at least twenty persons were lost.' On 7 January thirteen ships were
still missing and twenty people still unaccounted for in Darwin Harbour. William
Woodyatt, engineer, and Robert Wade, cadet fisherman on the
Frigate Bird
, both died.
But the skipper of the
Bird
, Bob Joss, and cadet fisherman Bob Dowman were rescued
a day and a half after the cyclone from an air pocket in a life raft in which they'd
been trapped for nearly thirty hours. The skipper of the
Arrow
, Bob Dagworthy, was
found alive, floating in his life raft, some thirteen hours after he took to sea
in it. Two lives were lost on the
Mandorah Queen
. That ferry was found in 1981. A
second ferry, the
Darwin Princess
, was not located until 2004.

As the fate of these ferries suggests, it was years, and in some cases decades, before
all the boats were salvaged. The
Flood Bird
was located in May 1975 but it wasn't
dragged ashore until 1977. Human bones were found in the wreck. The body of one crew
member, Dennis Holten, was found soon after the cyclone, but three of the other four—Captain
Odawara, George Roewer and David Fealy—were listed as missing until the vessel was
recovered. A fourth crewman, Robert Swann, was not positively identified until 1989.
Those wrecks still remaining in the harbour have joined those from World War Two,
and several Vietnamese refugee boats, to become scuba diving sites.

Those not known to be dead were ‘missing': by its very nature a category that's hard
to pin down. Initially, to avoid vagueness, a ruling went out by telex on 13 January
1975. ‘The only persons who are considered to be missing persons in the true sense
of the word are the persons believed to be missing from the various boats sunk in
the Darwin harbour and whose bodies have not been found.' At some point this must
have been revised: the current official missing list is a hundred and sixty people.
Seven years after the cyclone those still missing at sea were declared dead, but
of course they were no less ‘missing' after that.

When the
Booya
was discovered in 22 October 2003, intact and lying on its side, the
bodies of the five people who'd been known to be on board were not found. ‘It is
not so much a grave but a living memorial,' said Rick Weisse, one of the divers who
found the
Booya
. ‘You look inside and it is crystal clear water and you can see inside
the steering compartment.' One of the five was Ruth Vincent, a twenty-four-year-old
barmaid and mother of three. She'd gone to the wharf for a party after her Christmas
Eve shift at the Victoria Hotel. When the
Booya
was finally found Ruth's sister,
Naomi Senge, was still hoping police divers would find her sister's remains. ‘You
have thoughts,' she said. ‘Maybe, just maybe, she's still alive.'