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 day. The lead up to Christmas was pretty uneventful. My Dad, Doug Fudge had finished up the school year teaching at Nightclift Primary school and we enjoyed relaxing at the nearby Nightclift swimming pool. We had recently moved into our new house at Rattray Street in Nakara, a tall house on stilts with three bedrooms, bathroom and toilet, lounge and dining area with a kitchen and a balcony. The house had a besser block storage room under the house and a laundry attached. Dad had organised for some mates to come over in the new year for a concreting party, to lay a slab of concrete while he cooked a barbie and handed out cold beers. The insurance agent had come, but had brought the wrong forms, so we were covered for house and contents, but not the house. When he left he told my Dad “no worries mate, I’ll be back in the New Year with the forms”.
A couple of days before Christmas my Mum had taken me down the road to visit a neighbour who kept rabbits. I remember asking Mum if I could have a baby rabbit and she told me that they needed to grow a bit first, so I should get one at the end of January. I excitedly picked out which rabbit I wanted.
I remember the Christmas tree and how pretty it looked. Mum and Dad told me that the next day Santa would have left out presents. It was exciting!
I went to bed hoping that Santa would give me a Cindy doll. The next thing I remember was Mum waking me up and taking me into the bathroom. My Dad was in my 18 month old brother Owen’s room, having retrieved him from under a shower of glass that had blown into his cot. We bunkered down in the bathroom for a few hours with me laying down on towels in the bottom of the bath, while Mum and Dad took turns holding onto Owen. All of a sudden there was silence, a horrible, terrible silence…..
Then, bam, all hell broke loose as the wind started blowing again. Howling. However, this time our bathroom walls didn’t hold up. Mum and Dad and Owen disappeared into the night wind. The bathtub blew away with me in it and hit someone’s house with a tremendous crash. I fell down into a garden and laid there stunned and winded. The wind was racing around me. I crawled and found some corrugated iron that was rolled up with debris on top of it and crawled inside and tried to hide from the wind and the rain. I laid there for what seemed like forever, crying, terrified.
The next morning I woke up freezing cold, but there was something furry next to me. As it became lighter, I realised that the furry thing was one of the neighbours rabbits. I had scratches all over me, from flying debris and from the rabbit. Luckily I knew where I was and started walking past the three houses to my home. Except it didn’t look like home, there were no walls, no roof and not much floor. I remember being grabbed and carried by one of the neighbours. Mum and Dad were searching through the rubble looking for me not knowing if I was alive or dead. They had landed not too far apart with Owen and had managed to crawl to the HQ Holden which was under the house. Dad had kept going out to look for me, but had to return to the safety of the car as sheets of tin and floorboard stopped him searching. Once they had me back they looked to practical things. Luckily Mum found an unbroken bottle of vodka. She used this to sterilize two of Owen’s bottles that had also miraculously survived, and gave us both some carnation milk. It may or may not have had a shot of vodka in it to calm us down!
They found the fridge with the cooled but not cold turkey in it, and shared it with our neighbours, who managed to find bottles of wine or spirits to contribute to our Christmas lunch. Someone found a camp oven, so we were able to boil up potatoes and the defrosted frozen veg, and some water for drinking.
We were evacuated the next day via Mt Isa, Townsville, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and finally Adelaide. Mum got us on the train into Adelaide and when we walked up the ramp at Adelaide railway station, my brother and I started screaming. We had never seen a building over two stories before and we were worried that those buildings were going to fall on us! A nice lady looked at us, Mum in her dirty nightie, me in one of Dads tee shirts and Owen in a nappy that was actually a bath towel, all of us with bare feet. She took her purse out of her handbag and gave $20 to Mum. It was the first time I had seen Mum cry.
We eventually returned to the Territory 6 months later, first living at RAAF Tindal in a donga, and then living in Katherine. Dad got a position teaching at The School of the Air, and Mum started cooking at the Katherine Club. We ended up in the same design of house that we lived in, in Darwin. We gradually healed. I couldn’t use the toilet unless the door was open. Severe claustrophobia. We all had scars from flying glass. I had extra scars from the rabbit!
I still have those scars today.