(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 old baby daughter, faced such a time when Cyclone Tracy, on Christmas Eve, 1974, almost totally destroyed Darwin where we lived and very nearly ended our lives.
This year, Christmas 2024, marks 50 years since that catastrophic event. It is a story of intense drama and deep personal impact, but through it all, our Christian faith enabled us to hold onto hope for the future and continue to believe in a God who guides our journey through life.
This is our story.
…….
1973
As a high school teacher in the NT Education Department, I applied for full time study year at the Canberra CAE (College of Advanced Education) to complete a Diploma in Special Education. I was successful in my application, and late in 1973 we made plans to leave Darwin and relocate to Canberra for the academic year. We sublet our rented 3 bedroom, Government house, (a two story, 3 bedroom pole home, with the laundry and room for a car space under the house) and packed all our household items into one of the bedrooms. (*I note this seemingly unimportant fact here as it will become more significant in the post cyclone story)
1974
We arrived in Canberra in February, and rented a small one bedroom unit in Woden Valley. I settled into the life of a Uni student once again, and my wife (Dale), a qualified physiotherapist, obtained full time work in the Canberra Health system. Living in the capital city of Australia was interesting, particularly because it was such a different way of life compared to the tropical, northern Australian city, of Darwin.
Nothing of particular importance happened during the year, except for the wonderful news that Dale was pregnant and due to have a baby (Kylie Fleur) late November/early December. Kylie had other ideas though, for she decided to come four weeks early and was born on November 9. The occasion of her birth was significant, however, because I had to rush my wife to the Woden Valley Hospital (fortunately not far away) in the early hours of November 9 as Dale was experiencing extreme abdominal pain. Later that morning I received an urgent phone call from our obstetrician that Dale was in ‘placenta previa’ (whatever that meant!), and both baby and mother were seriously ill. I rushed to the hospital and spent anxious hours pacing the ward outside the birthing room, praying, and phoning as many people as I could think of about the circumstances of my wife and baby (pre mobile phone days of course).
After many days of stressful tests and ongoing medical care, (an initial APGAR rating of 2/5 was suggestive of potential neurological difficulties) Dale was finally able to bring Kylie home to our Woden Valley unit, and I completed my exams for the Diploma of Special Education at the CAE. In view of the fact that I had just finished a Special Education course, and that we were informed that our new baby would quite likely have moderate to severe developmental delays, the irony was not lost on us in terms of Kylie’s future. We continued to pray for Kylie’s complete healing and normal brain functioning, however, and now, 50 years on, we can report that Kylie, in spite of the medical predictions, excelled at school and eventually became an excellent paediatric nurse, which she still is today. Praise God.
Towards the end of November we started to make plans to return to Darwin, with the hope that we would be back in time to share Christmas with our friends!! It was decided that I would drive our Land-Rover back to Darwin and that Dale would fly to Darwin with our precious new bundle, to arrive just a few days before Christmas. During Dale’s physiotherapy work with ACT health, she had met a young man in allied health from England who was very keen to travel to Darwin with me (Ian) before making his way to Indonesia and home. In fact he booked his flight from Darwin to England for the 26th, Boxing Day, before we left Canberra. He accompanied me in the Landy and we arrived in Darwin on Saturday 21st of December.
On Sunday 22nd I attended the am Uniting Church service just up the road from our Rapid Creek home. In his sermon, the minister mentioned that a cyclone was developing in the Arafura Sea off the coast of northern Australia and that we should prayerfully consider the issues around a possible landfall. No-one, it seems, took too seriously the possibility of a cyclone hitting Darwin because there had been many warnings of such an event almost every year. In fact Cyclone Selma, only a few weeks before Christmas, had threatened Darwin, but instead veered off at the last moment and passed harmlessly out to sea. Dale and baby arrived in Darwin on Monday 23rd in time to spend Christmas together!
Christmas Eve, 1974 (some details are now a little fuzzy, fifty year’s on, but most of the experiences and impressions of that fateful day, and the days following, are indelibly etched in my memory, and will never be forgotten)
Christmas Eve, December 24, 1974, was typical of a normal Christmas Eve anywhere in our country. Last minute frantic shopping, preparations for Christmas Day dinner, wrapping presents, and tidying our house for Christmas Day guests. I don’t recall much about the day, but I’ve read reports that it was unusually quiet and still, with a heavy cloud cover, and that the many varieties of birds that were a natural part of our fauna landscape just seem to have disappeared!
Mid morning we decided to make a booking for dinner in a nearby Chinese restaurant as a goodbye gesture to our physiotherapist friend from England. As I mentioned above, he had booked his flight back home for December 26, some weeks before arriving in Darwin as a passenger in my Landy.
Around lunch time some friends from across the road came to see our new baby and welcomed us home. They happily looked after our precious baby girl while we went our for dinner that night. We invited them to have Christmas Day lunch with us, but because of Tracy it was quite some weeks before we saw them again.
By late afternoon it was still very quiet and calm, and in response to regular radio bulletins about the possibility of a cyclone making landfall, we went about picking up loose debris in the backyard and filling the bathtub with water, (more on that matter later!!) which were standard procedures for the cyclone season.
We kept our booking for dinner at the restaurant and arrived around 6:30 pm. By this stage on Christmas Eve the wind had started to pick up, but it was certainly nothing to worry about, as far as we were concerned. However, as we drove home after dinner, (about 8:00 pm) we noticed that the wind was now considerably stronger, and that many banana trees, commonly planted throughout the Darwin suburbs, had blown down and some were scattered over the road. I quipped to my wife, Dale, ‘if banana trees are coming down this is getting serious’. Also, the now torrential rain was coming at us horizontally. (That was very unusual!!)
While we were dining at the restaurant, a good friend from the Darwin Weather Bureau, came to our home in Rapid Creek, and left us a message attached to the front door, that read, in part, ‘7:00 pm. Cyclone Tracy is travelling east towards Darwin and is expected to cross the coast near Shoal Bay (25 KM away). Batten down and take all precautions. Your friendly Met. advisor. Jean. Merry Christmas’! What a Christmas as it turned out!
We arrived home about 8:30, picked up our precious baby from the neighbours, and went inside the house. Strong winds are, of course, nothing unusual in tropical Darwin, so even though we were a bit concerned about the damage being done to trees, and loose debris flying around in the streets surrounding us, we were still not thinking, ‘cyclone’ to any great extent.
By 9:00 pm. it was apparent that we were in the midst of a serious storm (still not really appreciating that a severe cyclone was bearing down on us). We put our baby to bed in the main bedroom and she settled down peacefully.
Around 10:30 pm -11:00pm the wind was now gale force and we realised that we were in for a long sleepless night. However, we still had no idea that our house was about to disintegrate around us and that we were in serious danger of being hurt or killed.
I think it was about 11:00pm when the radio stopped working and the lights and power went off. Fear and acute anxiety, especially for our baby, were now becoming a reality. While we were checking on our baby’s welfare (still sleeping peacefully!), there was a tremendous crash and the sound of breaking glass coming from the lounge/kitchen area. We discovered the next day, that most of the louvre windows had been blown in, even though we had taped them up with masking tape in accordance with cyclone instructions! (throughout the house, the walls were filled with louvres from the ceiling to the floor, and all of them were smashed).
One of the pieces of ‘expert advice’ that we listened to on the radio in the days before Christmas, was that, in the event of a cyclone we should shelter in the bathroom (remember the bath was filled with water!), as this was the ‘safest place in the house’. This advice may have been true of ground level concrete block homes (of which there were many in Darwin) but it certainly wasn’t true of our pole home. No sooner had we relocated to the bathroom than we felt and heard a mighty rushing, crashing sound, and the walls of the bathroom blew out (not in) and we were very nearly sucked out of the house. This frightening event now propelled us all to take shelter in the main bedroom: Dale and I, Kylie our baby, the English visitor, and our collie dog.
We all quickly got under the mattress as the cyclone, now, in all its wild fury and madness, attempted to completely demolish our home. Fear and horror at what was happening around us knew no bounds! When we heard a fearsome screeching, tearing sound we looked up and realised that the roof had been ripped off. It was too dark to see any more detail, but where there had been a ceiling and roof moments before was now a black void. The house was being buffeted relentlessly by the ferocious, powerful wind and we didn’t know where to go to be safe. Inside the bedroom we clung to each other and prayed for deliverance. I don’t recall that we were totally panic stricken at what was happening around us, but it was becoming increasingly clear that, apart from a miraculous escape, we stood little chance of survival if we stayed in the house.
Christmas Day, 1974 around midnight – 6am.
Providentially, I feel, no sooner had we decided to get out of the house than the ‘eye’ of the storm seemed to pass over us. Although we didn’t experience a total calm, as others have reported, when the wind suddenly died down to ‘merely’ gale force, we knew we had to get out before the cyclone turned and came from the opposite direction. Our only option, now, was to shelter in the Landrover that was parked under the floorboards. I picked up our daughter in the bassinet, our English friend picked up our collie dog, and we hurried down the short corridor between the bedrooms and the front door. As we did so the ceiling light in the passageway came cashing down, but miraculously landed between Dale and I. Somehow we opened the front door and proceeded down the stairs. Getting down the stairs turned out to be a nightmare though, because many steps had been ripped away, and what was once a straight stairway down to ground level was now a completely remodelled, crazy, twisted set of rails, with large gaps where there should have been steps.
Once at ground level we quickly climbed into our short wheel base, two door, Landy. There was insufficient room on the bench seat of the Landy so I placed Kylie, still asleep, in the back section, thinking that she would be safe enough there. I sat behind the steering wheel, Dale sat beside me, and our English friend sat in the passenger seat, left side. Our collie dog was somewhere on our feet.
One of the recurring stories we’d heard from some people who had previously been through a cyclone in the tropics, was that pole homes sometimes lifted off the poles by the force of the wind, and then came crashing down again trapping anything that lay in its path. So, we were understandably very nervous about remaining under the house as we sheltered in the Landy. (Some days after the cyclone we actually saw a house that had come off its poles and had flattened a car underneath!). With this thought in mind, I made the decision to back the Landy out from underneath the floorboards to what I thought would be the relative safety of the driveway. Of course we were far more exposed to the fury of the wind now, and it was a decision I quickly came to regret. (easy to be wise in hindsight!!)
No sooner had I backed the Landy out from underneath the house than we were hit side on by flying debris that crashed against the car and caused it rock and shudder violently. Fearing that Kylie was too vulnerable in the back of the Landy on her own I turned around and placed my upper body over the bassinet. Just as I leaned over her there was a violent crash on the side of the rear section of the car exposed to the powerful wind. The window had shattered and I was immediately covered in pieces of glass that cut into my head and back. When I saw blood all over Kylie I thought she had been injured as well, so I picked her up and flung her over the back of the seat into Dale’s arms, (I think that’s the best word to describe my action, because in the circumstances I certainly didn’t ‘gently’ lower her into the front seat). Kylie, of course, was now fully awake, and strongly objecting to this sort of treatment. She was also desperately hungry. However, because she was covered in blood, and glass, Dale felt she couldn’t risk breast feeding her. Kylie didn’t appreciate this situation, of course, and for the few hours before daylight she cried and cried (screamed!), and in between, managed to catch some moments of sleep. The physiotherapist friend and I sat in numb confusion and horror as the cyclone roared around us, while Dale sang Christian choruses over and over over for the next few hours as she attempted to pacify our baby. Our loyal collie dog, who was very frightened and shaking uncontrollably, whimpered constantly as it sat on our feet.
For the next 5 or 6 hours or so (it seemed like forever) we endured the worst of the cyclone as it pummelled and blasted our Landy with furious wind, flying timber, sheets of iron, and anything else that was airborne. Apart from God’s protection, I don’t know how the Landy stayed upright.
At one stage I can remember looking across the road in the flashes of lightning, and noticing that the two story house just up from us had completely disappeared. Days later we came across the remnants of the house at the bottom of our street. We never found out what happened to the occupants.
Christmas day, 1974, about 6 am.
As the weak, dawn light filtered through a heavy overcast sky, the wind slowly abated and an eerie calm descended over a completely shattered landscape. We tried to open the two front car doors, but both sides were blocked with debris and impossible to move. Then we heard a shout from our neighbour next door who lived in a ground level home. He asked if we were OK, and when he received an affirmative he helpfully began to remove the timber and iron that was stacked up against the windward side of the car door. When he had cleared the rubbish sufficiently to open the door we literally fell out of the Landy and gratefully embraced the neighbour who had rescued us.
We were met by a scene of utter devastation. Apart from the houses that were completely or nearly completely destroyed in our street, and the contents scattered everywhere, the image that is most firmly fixed in my memory was all the trees were stripped bare, with no leaves at all. The picture that most readily came to mind, in comparison to this level of carnage and destruction, was Hiroshima, Japan, after the atomic bomb (remember Darwin is normally a tropical, lush, green environment). Stark, bare trees still standing were surrounded by a horrifying and incomprehensible level of destruction.
Dressed just in shorts and thongs and covered in blood, I must have looked a fearful sight, but so was everyone else that I came across as I wandered around in a complete daze. No-one said much. As I walked around our street to see if anyone was in need, I noticed the high level reservoir tank (built on steel poles to provide water pressure), at the top of our street listing crazily, with a huge caved in section. Apparently a fridge, which was found at the bottom of the water tank, had become airborne during the night and had crashed into the side of the tank. Stark testimony to the ferocity and power of the category 5 cyclone.
Somehow I got the Landy to start, and hours later, on Christmas Day about 10:00 am I think, we
managed to drive the 3 – 4 kilometres to the local high school (Casuarina High where I was a Special Ed. Teacher). We, along with a lot of other people were looking for a place to stay. I recall that the journey took a long time mainly because all the roads were heavily strewn with almost impassable levels of rubbish and building debris that in many cases forced us to divert around (or drive over) the obstacles and proceed on the footpath so that we could make some progress.
After arriving at Casuarina High School (along with hundreds of other homeless refugees) we found a room that was still reasonably intact (although the floor was very wet) and eventually tried to settle in for the night, along with our baby, physio friend, and collie dog. Someone then suggested that we use the lockers, located outside the room, as makeshift beds by turning them upside down! We emptied the lockers of books etc. and then dragged them into the classroom. By nightfall there were about 30 people in the room, many still in shock, everyone was very hungry, and all attempting to get some sleep! That was a forlorn hope! Picture the scene if you can. Thirty people, plus dogs and babies trying to get some sleep on the upturned lockers. I think I can safely assume that anybody reading this account of Cyclone Tracy, has never slept on upturned steel lockers in a crowded classroom with barking dogs, crying babies, and water on the floor. Some people obviously did manage to get some sleep because my memory of that night, and the following night, is also of constant noise from snoring sleepers, and the crump, creaking, bang of steel backed lockers when anyone tried to turn over or get up to go to the toilet.
The next day, Boxing Day, some organisation of the hundreds of people who had found a roof over their heads at the school was implemented, whether by authorities or school personnel I’m not too sure. My wife was assigned the task of finding out how many mothers were breast feeding, and I was given the task, along with a few other guys, of clearing out the accumulated rubbish that has started to pile up in the rooms. (as you might imagine, a very unpleasant task in some of the rooms!). Another vivid memory of the living arrangements at the school was seeing the attempt to provide toilet facilities on the school oval, as all the toilets in the school buildings were either blocked or damaged. Remember, because there was no power, the taps didn’t work so the toilets didn’t fill up with water after flushing. Someone, though, had the bright idea of digging a trench with a back hoe and placing lockers, with the backs ripped off and the doors removed, over the top of the hole. I’m not sure how much use was made of this innovative ‘waste management system’ but I for one, was certainly not going to try it out. (I’m not sure what I did otherwise, but the lack of privacy probably resulted in me being constipated for a while!)
Two days after the cyclone, December 27, marked the beginning of a mass evacuation of as many of Darwin residents as possible before disease, dysentry, and starvation, made a chaotic situation even worse. Buses were lined up at the school and priority lists were compiled of the mothers, babies and young children who were to be evacuated first. Lists of names were read out as each bus came through, and we simply had to wait around for some hours till Dale’s name was called. By this stage, we were informed that the airport runways had been cleared and the airport was ready to begin operations.
In his book, Winds of Fury, author, and head of Nungalinya College in Darwin, Keith Cole, wrote about a young mother’s trauma in having to be evacuated from Casuarina High School on the 27th of December with her new born baby daughter. The young mother was my wife, Dale. The following is an excerpt from those pages, (47- 49)
‘I burst into tears when I said goodbye to my friends and family. I then sat down in the queue for about half an hour, with a hastily packed bag, not knowing what I had with me. I had my name and also the name of my baby written across each of us in case we got separated somewhere along the line. Then they called out my name to go on the next bus from the school out to the airport. I got down to the bus and they said I couldn’t take my baby in the carry-basket, but my husband pushed it past the policeman and said, “Oh yes she can, it will fit in. I got on the bus and sat beside an Indian friend with the carry-basket on our knees. All the men outside were standing there, and just helping with those getting on to the bus. Then there was the most pitiful sound which I will always remember – the sound as we drove off as every woman on that bus started to cry, I included. It was awful. The poor bus driver taking, taking these busloads of women out to the airport, all in tears! And then just utter silence as we drove through the streets and looked out the window to the ruined city”.
As soon as Dale and baby Kylie left on the bus for the airport, I made my way to a friend’s house that was still reasonably habitable underneath the floorboards. It was to be my home for the next few weeks while our pole home was re-roofed and made structurally sound by the army. Dale and baby returned a few weeks later when we were eventually given permission to move back into our government pole home, (you weren’t allowed to return to your home until it was inspected by the appropriate government authority and passed as satisfactory for habitation).
Ian and Dale Bachelor
June, 2024.
* As I mentioned earlier, when we packed up our house to move down south in late 1973, we put all our household items not needed for our 12 months away in the spare bedroom. Not a good idea as it turned out, because when we first went back to our house after the cyclone we found everything from that room scattered all over the front yard or the roadway.