Iljas Adam Jamieson, Canberra Australia

 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 at the airport, had bought a half share in a small business and had just started flying lessons when Tracy slammed into the place and the airport and planes were damaged.

The myriad sheets of corrugated iron flying around and scraping along the ground sounded like a thousand violins playing out of tune and a man I knew who’d been living on a yacht in the inner harbour, was washed overboard during the cyclone and was swept across the harbour into some mangrove swamps where he’d hung unconscious all night.  He was discovered still unconscious the next day.  Hanging in the mangroves had kept him safe from crocodiles.

I’d been a post-graduate student at the Architecture Association in London and this informed my first move which was to stop the roof on my house from popping.  Because of a false cyclone warning a week earlier for a cyclone that didn’t arrive, I’d bought an extremely large tarpaulin to manage the winds.  We covered the windward side of the house with the tarpaulin and opened all the windows on the leeward side, so that the pressure under the roof could be released.  As a result, we were ready when the cyclone struck, had the only roof in the street and the house held together well.   The eye of the storm arrived at 3am and all became silent and still.  I’d read that the winds come from the opposite side after the eye passes over and so there we were at 3am hurriedly moving that tarpaulin to the other side, opening the other windows and shutting those which we’d previously opened.  Sure enough, 15 minutes later, all hell broke loose!

Broken glass was literally everywhere and homeless people were drifting around with unprotected cut feet.  One of the boarders in my house had been an Army Medic and I’d been a Nurse’s Aid in my youth, so we decided to set up a first aid station because the hospital was a mile out of town.  I put notices at both ends of the street with arrows announcing FIRST AID STATION.

We were told to contact some nuns, who gave us bandages and a supply of rubber sandals which had been given to them.  Woolworths gave me their entire stock of rubber sandals and a hamburger place passed over all their food.  People came for first aid, water, food, footwear and comforting.  There was no running water or electricity.  The prisoners either broke out of or were released from Gunn Point Prison Farm outside of town and they’d helped themselves to a truck and come to town.  Eventually eight prisoners moved in with us.  They were helpful and managed to find large plastic barrels and fill them with fresh water which was a precious commodity by this time.  Eventually a total of 36 men and women were living in and under the house, also six children.  During the worst of the cyclone, I put the children in the bathroom sleeping sandwiched between two big mattresses.

Before Tracy, in our front garden, had been four huge palm trees.  Three had now blown away completely and only one was left standing at an angle of 45 degrees.  A nearby steel power pylon had been literally flattened so that it was bent to 90 degrees resting 18 inches above the ground and of all things, a World War 2 style British Army helmet had blown into our garden. The day after the worst of it, I set off to check on my little shop where I’d been making made-to-measure leather sandals, so I set off on my pushbike, wearing an army camouflage rain cape somebody lent me and I donned the tin army helmet.  The shop and stock were intact, but because there were looters around, I arranged for the stock to be removed to my house.  I must have looked like authority riding along in the camouflage gear and helmet, because I noticed looters ducking out of sight.

The heat was intense as this was the wet season so it was around 96 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity extremely high.  Tempers also ran high.  When one of the prisoners, a French drug dealer, indulged himself by climbing into one of those big barrels of what was intended to be drinking water and gave himself a bath, an infuriated Italian started a knife fight. In the midst of wild weather and wild men, it fell to me to stop these people fighting and I ordered them to vacate the premises which, to my surprise, they did!  I say to my surprise, because I’d always been an unassertive person.  Although highly educated, here I was, a skinny hippie from London in a steamy frontier town among these wild characters.  It was like living in an Ernest Hemingway novel!

For a while Darwin was dangerous.  The air force was issued with weapons to shoot looters who were now breaking into surviving houses and I took to carrying a rifle over my arm.  (A gun dealer whose shoes I was mending sold me a .22 rifle and ammunition and gave me a certificate to show the police.)  At five o’clock one morning, the looters eventually came to my house.  I appeared with the rifle over my arm and coolly said “Can I help you?” and off they went.

It soon became urgent that everybody had to be evacuated to avoid disease and also because the army and navy needed to get on with their tasks and after the evacuations had taken place, I stayed behind with others and helped with the cleanup.  Among other tasks, I tidied up the library in the Community College, rescued books and dried out what I could.  The temperature was very high so I was asked to cut the long grass at the college because of fire risk.  Money felt useless so I gave some of mine to a prisoner who was headed south.  (Now that they were out, they were out and nobody attempted to lock them up again as far as I know.)

I was given a ticket to fly out six weeks later and stayed away for two weeks.  I then returned to live in Darwin for another sixteen months teaching Indonesian at the High School before permanently moving South.

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