My wife Rosemarie and I lived in Darwin at the time of Cyclone Tracy. We arrived in early August 1974 from England with the object of earning money to fund future travels. We were newly married and as I had previously lived in Darwin I had contacts at the hospital where I had worked before as well as driving Keetley’s Taxis.
I went back to my previous job as an Orderly/Ambulance Driver and did some switch board work for Keetleys as well as some driving. Rosemarie went to work in a Solicitors’ office.
In October I was sent to Nhulunbuy (Gove) Hospital to carry out the same duties as well as train to assist in Theatre. Rosemarie was also given a job there while waiting for her Teaching Qualifications to be confirmed from the UK.
In early November we were transferred back to Darwin Hospital where I started training as an Anaesthetic Technician and Rosemarie to train to take ECGs and become a Plaster Technician.
Darwin was a bit like that in those days. A very laid back place to work and live.
Like a lot of local residents we followed the advice when Cyclone Selma threatened, filling the bath with water and taking pictures off the walls, although I was a bit sceptical having experienced a few false alarms before, as this proved to be.
We had booked a meal at the Hotel Darwin on Christmas Eve but when we arrived we were the only people there apart from the staff. The speakers normally playing music were tuned to the local radio station which was giving constant updates on Tracy. We ate fairly quickly and then left.
By this time the wind was getting stronger and we went to call on some friends on our way home to Fish Street. A friend of theirs worked for the Met Office and they had been warned that this cyclone looked to be a big one.
We popped out to Nightcliff to warn some other friends and found all four housemates, together with the cat, in the main double bed to comfort each other. The wind was really gusting by now and a louvred wall blew in while we were there. The four, and the cat, eventually spent most of the night under the bed in the front yard!
We made our way home and, as we were expected into work at the hospital in the morning, we went to bed. The wind doing its by now incredibly noisy thing outside. Our own louvred wall was starting to bend in over the bed, so we dragged the mattress into the central corridor of the bungalow and hunkered down. Rosemarie always says that it was only me and the town drunk that slept through Tracy. She spent a large part of the night on the loo, crouched under a blanket. We’ve never been sure whether it was the scallops eaten earlier or the circumstances at the time that caused the problems.
As the first light of the morning appeared the wind lessened. We ventured out and could not believe the devastation . Our little bungalow had survived relatively unscathed but all around us the world had gone mad. Our Ute, parked alongside the house, had been lifted by the wind and stood on several sheets of corrugated iron. A lone voice called out from one of the broken houses and asked if we were OK. That was the only sign of life.
We decided to make our way into the hospital. The journey took about 40 minutes instead of the usual 10, as we had to clear a path through the debris, sometimes it was easier to go through people’s front yards than stick to the road. Everywhere we looked we wondered how anyone could have survived. We did not see anyone, alive or not, on our way in.
When we arrived at the hospital it appeared to be not too badly damaged, although the electricity was out, and we were met in reception by one of the senior surgeons, an English guy with a Polish name. He had taken over the organisation for the time being. He asked what our normal roles were and sent Rosemarie down to the Plaster Rooms and said to just immobilise any broken limbs as best as she could.
He sent me down to Theatre.
Only 2 of us from the anaesthetic team had made it in. Myself, a very green assistant, and a young Aussie doctor, who while qualified as a doctor was about 6 months in to training to be an anaesthetist, again very green.
Some surgeons and nurses had made it in as well so it was decided that the anaesthetist (I can’t for the life of me remember his name) would put the first patient under in Theatre 1, I would keep an eye on things at the top of the table, while he then put the next patient under in Theatre 2. We would then swap over while he brought the first patient back. We carried on doing this until about midnight on Christmas Day.
We had no lighting for most of the day, someone managed to rig up a generator later on, but we had no other power for CSSD for sterilising instruments, which were put into solution instead. The floor was awash with several inches of water. Who the surgeons and nurses were I cannot remember and who did post-op care or how it was done I’ve no idea.
About midnight we called it a day and I went looking for Rosemarie. I found her in Casualty smoking a cigarette. We had both given up smoking when we left England but the Police had dumped a load of cigarettes into reception they had confiscated from looters that they weren’t sure what to do with, so they said that any hospital workers could help themselves. So I joined her in a cigarette.
Rosemarie had only just finished her work. She had spent the day alone in the Plaster Room except for a constant stream of patients with various degrees of broken limbs. Injuries that would normally have been dealt with urgently in Theatre had to be immobilised, without anaesthetic, to be treated properly at a later unknown time and place.
We must have eaten at some stage but we do not remember what or when. We found a couple of empty trolleys in a corridor and grabbed a few hours sleep.
We awoke about 6 o’clock Boxing Day morning and went back to our departments to carry on as the previous day. I seem to remember that we finished in the early evening and found somewhere in the hospital to sleep.
The next day help from down south began to filter in. Doctors, nurses etc so we found ourselves at a bit of a loose end. Over the next few days we tracked down various friends and heard their stories of the storm. We learnt that my boss, the Head of Anaesthesia, was one of the casualties.
We tried to get some idea as to what might happen in the immediate and long term future but no one had any real idea. The most often heard view was that Darwin would be shut down. It was just a huge pile of wreckage 2000 miles from civilisation. A logistical nightmare. I was friends with the Hospital Secretary and he was not sure whether his job would exist let alone anyone else’s.
One of the things today’s generation will probably struggle to comprehend is the level of communication in those days. We were allowed one 2 minute phone call from the hospital to anywhere in the world late on Boxing Day. This was to tell our families that we were safe. Rosemarie rang her father in England and he relayed the message on. Today the whole thing would have been broadcast live on countless private phones.
We were good friends with the Hospital Pharmacist and we helped him to save what he could from his house in Crush Street and load it into his car and trailer. His family had been evacuated to Sydney and he had another car he would like to get there. As did his colleague. So we decided to drive to Sydney in convoy. Me to drive a Mini without a windscreen. No chance of getting a new one fitted.
We had to leave by January 1st as any help on the way down would be gradually removed from that date.
When Stretton arrived to supervise the situation he stated that there were to be no New Year’s Eve parties. Silly man. Did he think that the community did not need some form of coming together to release some of the strains and tribulations just experienced?
Our party was in one of the doctor’s homes. We were saying goodbyes to colleagues we would almost certainly never see again having just lived through a unique ordeal. My abiding memory is of a mishmash of nationalities, Aussies, Poms, Kiwis, Europeans, all singing (several times over) Land of Hope and Glory!
We duly set off early on January 1st on the long drive south. But that is another story. (There is a poem about it)
50 is just a number. But a significant one. A time to remember and reflect on the randomness of nature’s fickleness. Why one person died reaching back for his daughter’s soft toy, and several people lived after being blown off the first floor sitting in a bathtub.
And to try to recall names and forgotten faces. And what were their fates and future stories.
Bizarrely we ran into my young Aussie anaesthetist 3 or 4 years later outside the Australian Embassy in London. We had laboured long and tirelessly together in extreme circumstances.
We were both on our way to somewhere else so did not have time to stop and catch up.
But I still cannot remember his name.
Rosemarie and Hugh Lake January 2024