Category Survivor Stories

Cyclone Tracy – Relief Work Recollections as an Army Reserve Air Dispatcher – Melbourne and Darwin – Dec-Jan 1974/75 At the time, I lived in Melbourne and worked as a trainee accountant, with a part-time job in the Army Reserve (then the CMF – Citizen Military Forces) as 24 year-old […]

Cyclone Tracy 24th and 25th December 1974    by Murray Brunsgard 2024 Click on an image to open a larger view. Just a week or two before Tracy, there had been another cyclone but eventually it passed to the north and had very little effect, so when warnings were sounded for […]

Click on an image for a larger picture. On Boxing Day 1974, we invited our next door neighbours to dinner in our brand new Hoppers Crossing home. At that time I was based at Point Cook and was working through Christmas, except for public holidays. Helen had worked a day […]

I was four years and four months old when Cyclone Tracy tore my family apart. I remembered my Mum, Sandra, cooking the turkey early on Christmas Eve as the power went out when Cyclone Selma hit two weeks earlier, and she didn’t want to risk having raw turkey on Christmas […]

by Pat Messenger At the age of twenty seven I drove a distance of 1500 kilometres in a beaten up car with limited fuel. “How could you consider that?’ I hear you ask”.  Fair enough. I would ask the same question. No windscreen or rear window. Driver’s door, so badly […]

Written by Carroll Cox not long after the event, these accounts of Cyclone Tracy, submitted by her sister Connie, capture the profound human experience in the aftermath of the storm. This collection brings together raw, personal reflections that lay bare both the terror and the resilience felt during that night. […]

The drive home from the Bagot Aboriginal hospital ward after my night shift was dark, and the winds were wild. Matron had let us leave a bit early—there was a cyclone coming (again… we’d had one a few weeks earlier) and all the electricity was off… again. I had just […]

By Dora Pearce, Hospital Scientist at Darwin Hospital 1974-1978 Before leaving the hospital on Christmas Eve we were advised that we were “On Call” should Cyclone Tracy eventuate. Just before midnight, I telephoned the hospital to ask if I was required at the hospital because I suspected that as weather […]

I was nine when the cyclone hit. Our family—Dad (Ray Twist), Mum (Annette Twist), my brother Colin (6), and my sister Caroline (3)—had been at a neighbour’s house for a Christmas party when the wind picked up and the cyclone warnings were on the radio. People kind of ignored them […]

In the lead-up to Cyclone Tracy’s 50th anniversary, Dave Carr recounts his unforgettable experience as one of the young Kiwis living in Darwin when the cyclone struck on Christmas Eve 1974. What began as a typical holiday gathering quickly turned into a night of survival against fierce winds and flooding. […]

13 years old survivor The night of Christmas Eve where we spent opening Christmas presents as a family’s traditional Christmas Eve, I received my first ‘Watch’, so excited and cannot wait to put on the following day. I was 13yo at that time. We went to sleep with the rain […]

Cyclone Tracy had a sound; it was the most terrorizing sound I have ever heard. The sound of literally millions of sheets of corrugated iron being scraped across the ground at 250 kilometres per hour and crashing into rather flimsily built fibreboard buildings. Homes exploded off their stilts, leaving people […]

 When tropical Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin I’d been living there 18 months in a typical wooden house on high stumps, with a steep pitched iron roof in Searcy Street behind the Post Office where I’d let a couple of rooms to fellow travellers. I had a temporary position cleaning planes […]

From Danny’s sister Georgia: “Danny was always passionate about Cyclone Tracy and that it be remembered as a significant event in our history. He produced a small concert at the gardens for the 30th Anniversary. This also got media coverage which may be available in the ABC (?) files. We […]

Cyclone Tracy – 25th December 1974 My name is Antony Bullock, and this is my story. Christmas Eve 1974 marked a particularly special occasion for me for several reasons. It was my last year in primary school, and I was going to start high school in January. I was just […]

(As recalled, Fifty Year’s on – Christmas Eve, 2024) At some point in almost everyone’s life, there will come a moment when you are faced with a situation that may be terrifying, tragic, impossible to comprehend, life threatening, or simply very unfair. My wife and I and our six week’s […]

Cyclone Tracy, 24 December 1974 Julie Brimson It was sometime in early June 1974 when I found out I was pregnant with our second child, with a due date of 29 January 1975. Given that our first baby, a daughter, was born in Adelaide, we were so pleased that this […]

Our Cyclone Tracy Memories (The Night from Hell) Michelle Walker Roberts (aged 21), Deb Walker Hendry (aged 14), and Jannine Walker Hardy (aged 12) It was Christmas Eve 1974, and Michelle’s 21st birthday was pending on Christmas Day (luckily, we had the party the weekend before). Our interstate relatives staying […]

Cyclone Tracy – Darwin, 24th & 25th December 1974 In 2014, on the 40th anniversary of Cyclone Tracy, I retyped our memories and added to them. Cyclone Tracy Meteorological Bureau Vital Statistics: Size: Gales extended to about 40 km from the centre. Diameter of the eye: about 12 km at […]

Cyclone Tracy Hi, my name was Gjoka Nicovic then, now Nicaj. I was 8 years old and remember most of it like it was yesterday. We lived on McMillans Road in Millner back then. Now I live in Sydney, having been flown out a couple of days after Tracy. It […]

I’m like most survivors; Tracy doesn’t go away. In the unforgiving grip of Cyclone Tracy on Christmas morning in 1974, our Nightcliff unit transformed into a battleground. Huddled in the bathroom, knowing this wasn’t going away, we endured harrowing noises, with walls seemingly pulsating in and out, inflicting pain on […]

December 24, 1974. Living in Jingili near Rapid Creek. I was on maternity leave from the Attorney-General’s Department, approximately eight and a half months pregnant with my first child. Around 11:30 am, I attended a Christmas party at the Civic Centre. Before leaving home, I filled the bath, secured any […]

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 […]

I think that I was one of four men who went through Cyclone Tracey twice! ————- On Christmas Eve 1974 I was working in Pilot Briefing at Darwin Airport. I was one of three recently qualified Air Traffic Controllers had been transferred from Adelaide to Darwin in July 1974, and […]

In 1974, I was the District Officer for the Commonwealth Department of the Northern Territory (formerly the Department of the Interior) in Katherine. I recall after the Christmas Day church service in the Anglican Church in Katherine, I was with Andy McNeill the local police officer. We were eating prawns […]

From my diary – Also online at http://www.pikle.co.uk/journal/1974/Dec1974.html 24-30 December, Darwin CYCLONE TRACY And suddenly it is Christmas Eve. Work [at the power station] isn’t really work (yesterday it was quite interesting – we had to take the complete two ton end of the cylinder off – I was a […]

Bath filled with water; windows taped. Ironically all the new sliding windows would be smashed to smithereens and only the kitchen louvres would survive Tracy. My mother Flo wisely put some children’s clothing in a suitcase. Swinging power lines gave way to the din of roofing hitting the bitumen in […]

Christmas in Darwin was always something quite different from that experienced anywhere down south. There really was no ‘silly season’ as such, probably because the ‘silly season’ lasts twelve months up there. Before the introduction of Remote Locality Leave Travel, it was normal for personnel on a two-year posting to […]

In approximately October 1972 my family (Dad, Mum and 4 kids aged 2, 4, 6 + 8) moved from Victor Harbour South Australia to Darwin, as my Father’s employer, Mr Ian Cocks had tasked him to build a Darwin branch of the Adelaide based concrete production business known as “Direct […]

My husband Lou and I had only arrived in Darwin 6 months before Cyclone Tracy with our three little sons, Justin, four years old, and twins Shannon and Paul, three years old. We had settled happily in our Thornton Crescent, Moil home, a very sturdy home built by Watkins Builders […]

This is not my story but that written by late wife, Mary Fox, shortly after Cyclone Tracy. It is the personal account of our experience during and immediately after CT. Mary passed away on 30 May 2022. Robert Fox An Account of Cyclone Tracy by Mary Fox, January 1975.   […]

At the time of Cyclone Tracy I was living as a young Army wife in Larrakeyah Barracks where my husband was posted. I was in the early months of my first pregnancy and working as a Community Nurse based at the Parap Centre. At the time of Tracy I was […]

I flew, with our four children, to Darwin on 2 November 1974, my birthday, with a couple of suitcases, just clothes, bedding and a few bits and pieces. The rest of our belongings were very few and arranged to be delivered in about 2 months. John had secured a home […]

By Christmas 2024, it will be the 50th Anniversary of Cyclone Tracy, the fiercest and most destructive cyclone that destroyed Darwin. Here is our story of escape and survival of Cyclone Tracy. At the time, my wife Penelope and I were staying with my wife’s parents, Colin and Clara Royes, […]

Each year during “Cyclone Season” (November to February) every week or two we would listen to the “Woomp Woomp Woomp Cyclone Alert ! Cyclone Alert !” on radio and television until most people including Velia (my wife) and I just became very complacent. In fact 3 weeks before Tracy I […]

The Christmas Santa Never Came (Santa never came, instead Tracey came) Christmas eve 1974 had more than the usual anticipation. Cyclone warnings had beenblaring on the hour all day. We could almost say it off by heart, but did not really thinkall the precautions would be necessary. After all we […]

A lifetime spent in the Top End is full of near death experiences ‘NDEs’ but the one that holds the most vivid and emotional memories is that night in ’74 that stole my childhood innocence and changed my World view forever!

Christmas Eve 1974: you couldn’t actually say Cyclone Tracy caught Darwin by surprise because we all knew it was coming. What actually surprised us was the ferocity and destructiveness of the storm.

Like many people I remember Tracy very well and was well aware of what a cyclone could do, we had family friends that remembered the cyclone of the late thirties and the damage that caused to Darwin.

Ray Casey is probably alive today because his wife, Mavis, and daughter, Sue, wrapped themselves around his bleeding and unconscious body to give him warmth in the ruins of their home.

It was busy in the restaurant that night. Why wouldn’t it be? It was Christmas Eve. Insults and instructions were flying across the room in rapid staccato Italian. “Porca miseria Paulo! Tu idiota, rapido! Portare la lattuga fretta!” Pop yelled at me as I turned steaks on the grill and […]

Wondering if anyone can remember being evacuated from Darwin on a commercial flight that departed about 4pm on 26 December 1974? My baby daughter and I were evacuated on 26 December on what I’m pretty sure was Ansett VH-RMW B727-277. The flight went via Mt Isa to Brisbane. Ron Cuskelly […]

My story is not particularly spectacular, and no different from anyone else who went through that black, howling, ripping wind. There were 7 of us kids, ranging from 15 to 3. I remember I’d spent the day, Christmas Eve, picking up rubbish from the yard and putting stuff inside, but […]

It was a very uneventful Christmas morning, my husband was at work and I was home with my two young daughters doing the usual shopping, cleaning and preparing food for the Christmas feast. The weather at the time wasn’t unusual for this time of the year, so I paid it […]

I had this 20 acre block in Darwin, or actually 21 miles out of the city centre, and on holidays and other opportunities I would go up there from Kununurra and do some work on it with the idea of one day moving to Darwin and building there, if not it would still be a good investment.

Christmas Eve 1974. I was 3 years and 24 days exactly, just a child, even a toddler, but that night and the days following are burned into my brain the way that nothing else in my life has ever done.

It was Christmas Eve and we were all excited as we would be leaving for a trip by car to Queensland early in the morning. As we were leaving early on Christmas day we had decided to open our Christmas presents that night.

My name is Gail McNamee; I grew up in Darwin, I  experienced cyclone Tracy’s devastation on Darwin on Christmas Eve, of 1974. TRACY Distinctly I remember the one night in December, Hells wrath fell from the heavens and struck upon our shore, First the calm before the storm, a soft […]