This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of Australia’s most destructive natural disasters – Cyclone Tracy.
The powerful tropical storm hit Darwin on Christmas Eve, 1974 and left a lasting mark on the city and its occupants. Sadly, 66 people were killed in the storm and 70% of the buildings in Darwin were either destroyed or damaged. The city’s infrastructure was left in ruins and as a result, over 20,000 people, about two-thirds of the city’s population, were evacuated.
Resthaven Chiton Retirement Living residents, Aileen and Allan Scott, and their now-neighbour Janine Wells, were among those living in Darwin when the disaster struck.
‘We had been getting warnings about the storm for a few days,’ Alieen says. ‘There was a heavy, leaden feel in the atmosphere. We could all feel that it was coming. But, living in northern Australia, we were no strangers to cyclones – in fact we had lived through Cyclone Selma just a few weeks before.’
It was Christmas Eve and Aileen’s mum and dad, Merl and Ian, had flown in from Adelaide to see the couple and their three children aged 4, 18-months and six-weeks old. They were also there to see the new extension the family had put on their house – including a new room that boasted air conditioning.
Janine, who worked at the Post Master General’s Department (PMG) and lived in a Commonwealth Hostel with fellow public servants about 5kms from Aileen and Allan, remembers it being a fairly typical day.
‘I’d come home and gone to bed as per usual,’ Janine says. ‘I didn’t have a radio or anything going, and it was only when I was woken up by neighbours banging on my door around midnight that I realised something was happening.’
‘Everything in the room was wet,’ Janine says. ‘The wind was pushing the rain in through the louvres, and any other gap it could get into,’ Janine says. ‘I grabbed some clothes and went outside to shelter with the rest of the neighbours as best we could. At that stage, it felt like a severe storm.’
Over at Aileen and Allan’s, the storm felt more acute, with large wind gusts shaking the house and even moving the furniture across the floor. The whole family – four adults, three children and two dogs – were in the newly renovated extension, but as the gusts increased, they decided it would be safer in the bathroom.
‘We had the baby in the bassinette on the floor, just under the air conditioning unit,’ Allan says. ‘Ian bent over to pick her up, and at that moment, the air conditioner was sucked out of the wall and the unit fell into the room and hit him on the back.’
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about what would have happened if he hadn’t been leaning over the baby at that moment,’ Aileen says.
With parts of the roof damaged and blown away, everyone moved as quickly as they could to the bathroom.
‘I remember going through the lounge room, where the Christmas tree was set up with the presents underneath it,’ Aileen says. ‘Our 4-year-old yelled out “Look, Santa has come!” It was surreal.’
Bathrooms in 1970s Darwin were not large, but the family filed in, Aileen and Merl with the children in the bath (with the showerhead overhead), with Ian and Allan standing with their backs against the bathroom door to brace it as much as possible.
‘Water was coming in everywhere,’ Aileen says. ‘Luckily, in the bathroom, the water was able to run down the drains.’
Cyclone Tracy crossed the coast near Fannie Bay at around 3.30am on Christmas morning. Wind gusts reached 217 km/h before the Bureau of Meteorology’s anemometer was destroyed and gales extended to about 40 kilometres from the cyclone’s centre. 255mm of rain fell in 12 hours overnight, with 145mm of it falling in the two half-hour periods on either side of the eye of the cyclone.
‘It’s hard to describe the change that happened when the eye of the storm was over us,’ Aileen says.
‘It became deathly still, and the sky was completely clear,’ Allan says. ‘Ian and I went outside to check if there was anyone who needed help, but we knew we didn’t have long before the storm would start up again.’
The eye lasted around 10-15 minutes, and for Aileen and Allan, the second part of the storm hit them harder than the first.
‘We sheltered as best we could,’ Aileen says. ‘Hoping that the bathroom would stay intact and trying to keep calm for the children. The noise was just something else.’
Janine says that the eye of the storm was much less pronounced where she was.
‘Luckily, we weren’t in the path of the storm like Aileen and Allan were,’ Janine says. ‘I remember seeing a row of palm trees that were all lying on the ground. I thought they must have been knocked over by the storm, but the next day they were standing upright again. I realised they were being blown over by the immense strength of the wind.’
A similar three storey building to Janine’s was located down the road, and when the cyclone went through it sheered off the top floor.
‘It was simply unbelievable to see,’ Janine says. ‘Especially since the building where I was was mostly intact.’
As the sun rose and the storm subsided, Aileen, Allan and the family surveyed the damage.
‘We looked out through the bathroom window and the view was bleak,’ Aileen says. ‘Not a leaf on a tree and damaged homes all around. Later in the day news filtered that people were gathering at the local school, so we headed there. Some people had lost absolutely everything.’
Many homes had been completely destroyed, and some people were forced to spend the night in their cars, getting out with just the clothes on their backs.
‘In one of our trips back to the house, I grabbed all the children’s clothes and took them to the school so that anyone who needed things could help themselves,’ Aileen says. ‘I also grabbed a string bag full of Duplo that I thought the kids might want to play with to keep them busy.’
Food was brought to the school from local shops (nothing would be sold anyway because there was no power to keep anything cold) and big batches of soups and stews were made to feed everyone.
‘I remember hearing the ABC news and the lead story was “Darwin’s been devastated by a cyclone”,’ Aileen says. ‘I was so relieved. I thought, good, people know what’s happened. Help will come.’
‘Darwin was a long way from the capital – especially in those days,’ Allan says.
In the hours following the storm, it was evident that without any infrastructure the citizens would not be able to stay in Darwin. Aerial spraying was carried out with the aim of stopping diseases such as typhoid, and clinics were set up to provide the population with voluntary free tetanus shots. A state of emergency was declared, and the evacuation operation began.
Janine drove with friends to Alice Springs, where they were able to get on a plane to Adelaide and leave the territory from there.
‘The car we had was pretty battered by the storm,’ Janine says. ‘We saw others driving with plywood for a windscreen, with a hole cut out so they could see the road.’
On the day the bus came to take people from the school to the airport, Allan and Ian were out in the community, helping to clean up.
‘It was our anniversary, December 27, and I remember thinking I can’t even let Allan know where we are going,’ Alieen says. ‘Luckily, he and Dad came back just as the bus was leaving to take us to the airport, so I was able to blow him a kiss through the window.’
Because no one had any luggage, many people were able to be transported on the evacuation planes at once.
‘It meant that not everyone had a seat, and lots of the children were sitting in the middle of the aisle,’ Alieen says. ‘I remember looking down and seeing everyone’s kids all playing with the small bag of Duplo I had grabbed from the house. Kids are amazing.’
Allan and Ian stayed on in Darwin for around a fortnight after the cyclone, helping where they could. Ian was an amateur film maker and shot footage of the aftermath of the disaster.
With the announcement that women with children aged under 16 years would not be allowed back to Darwin in the coming months, Allan and Ian left the city as well, making the difficult decision to have both dogs put down as they were unable to bring them on the flight.
‘It was a time when many hard decisions had to be made,’ Allan says.
Allan’s job with the Commonwealth Public Service was transferred to Adelaide, and he went on to do social work, helping many of the people who were displaced after the cyclone.
Janine returned to Darwin to work at the PMG for a couple of months, before also moving on, heading to Western Australia.
After around six months living with Merl and Ian, Aileen and Allan bought a home at Morphett Vale.
‘Not long after we moved in, we decided to get some new insulation pumped into the roof,’ Aileen says. ‘The noise shocked me hearing this whirling in the roof, and I grabbed the children and a few books, and we went and read together behind the garden shed. I simply could not be in the house while it was happening.’
Janine, Allan and Aileen say that when there is a storm, even 50 years on, it makes them feel uneasy.
‘For many years, Allan would always check the wind speed before we went to bed,’ Aileen says. ‘And I remember a time he got us all up and out of bed to shelter more safely in the front rooms of our house when there was a big storm.’
On the radio
Aileen and Allan still have the film reels that were shot by Ian in the days after the cyclone hit.
‘I decided I wanted to convert his film into digital so that they were easier to watch,’ Aileen says. ‘I took them to a local guy here who offers this service, and he was blown away by the quality of the celluloid footage, as well as the significance of the film itself. We got to talking and turns out he is involved with the local radio station as well.’
Aileen and Allan’s experience has been turned into a radio segment series titled ‘Surviving Cyclone Tracy’ which will air on Great Southern Community Radio, Happy FM, from mid-October. Ian’s footage has also been included in a series produced by Granada television called In the Eye of the Storm.
Aileen and Allan moved into Chiton Retirement Village in April 2018 and Janine moved in October 2019. It was only a chance conversation that led them to discover they had all been in Darwin on the night that Cyclone Tracy hit.
‘There are 47 residents who live here (at the moment) and we are all good friends,’ Aileen says. ‘It’s amazing the connections we have discovered.’
