Forty years ago I was a teenager looking forward to Christmas Day. After a traditional family supper of ham sandwiches made with the first meat carved off the bone of the Christmas ham, I went to bed with my transistor radio tuned to the popular music of the day, and fell asleep.
Sometime during the night I woke – I think because the music had stopped. There was an announcement. Cyclone Tracy, which we’d heard in the evening news was expected to pass several hundreds of kilometres west of Darwin (capital of the Northern Territory), had turned abruptly south-east and would cross onto land much closer to the city. I turned off the radio and went back to sleep.
Christmas in Tasmania that year dawned clear and sunny. After a cooked breakfast had been eaten, washed up and put away, it was present opening time! I fetched the presents from under the tree as directed by Grandad and my Mum (Nana had passed away ten years earlier). Tommy the cat lounged on the hearth and watched. He loved Christmas because the food was so good – nearly two weeks of turkey and ham replaced the usual tinned food and he was in cat heaven!
We were never a religious family. Christmas Day had no such connotations for us. There were no church visits, no Bible readings, not even grace before meals. Of course we knew Christmas was a Christian holy day but we never celebrated it as such. We adapted the holiday to our own beliefs. For us, Christmas was a time for family togetherness in a spirit of loving and giving.
That year Christmas lunch was at my Aunt Geraldine’s. In addition to Grandad and Mum, there were ten aunts and uncles and 17 grandchildren (including me), two of whom had spouses and a baby each. We were a large extended family and grew up together. When Nana was alive, we met at our house for afternoon tea every Sunday. Hospitalization was the only acceptable excuse for not being there. AN (after Nana), those Sundays faded into memory and Christmas Day was the only time when we were all under the same roof so it was a special day for us.
After lunch, when we were all sated with overeating, there was a lull in the conversation and I suddenly remembered the announcement I’d heard during the night. I asked generally if anyone knew what had happened – had Tracy hit Darwin? No-one knew. No-one had turned on a radio or tv that day. After some uncertain speculation, Uncle Don resolved the matter by switching on the tv.
Scenes of unbelievable devastation crashed in on our Christmas Day gathering. Cyclone Tracy had hit Darwin during the early hours of that morning and nothing was untouched.
Torrential rain and winds, officially recorded at 217 kilometres per hour (135 miles per hour) until the Bureau of Meteorology anemometer was destroyed, battered the city for several hours. Seventy per cent of Darwin’s homes were destroyed or suffered severe damage, and all public services – communications, power, water and sewerage – were severed.
They didn’t know the death toll then but later it was established as 66 – 53 on land and 13 at sea. Many more were injured and over 70% of the population were homeless.
There was no question of anybody being temporarily housed anywhere in or near Darwin. The RAAF (Australian airforce) and Qantas came to the rescue when the air strips were cleared. They ferried hundreds of thousands of people to shelters in major cities on the east coast – Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne – where accommodation was made for them. They had nothing to take with them. Many were still in their pyjamas, especially the children. From memory, the evacuation took at least two weeks.
Grandad instantly took charge of the situation for us. We were all to go home, to rifle through every cupboard and every drawer for clothes, bedding, kitchen ware and packaged foods plus items like soap, toilet paper and towels. Every child was instructed to go through their toy boxes – the Darwin children had had no Christmas, he said. Santa could never land in all that wind and rain. It was up to us now.
The adults knew the drill and I was old enough to remember other emergencies when the family had assembled several car loads of bags and boxes for delivery to local collection points. Grandad always knew where these were. The first delivery was that evening on Christmas Day but the family effort went on for several days more as it took on a military-like precision. Every box and bag was labelled in order to lessen the burden of agencies, like Red Cross and Salvos, appointed to distribute the items. To me this was the Australian spirit at work. We pulled together in troubled times, not because it was a good thing to do but because it was our human responsibility to help others. I grew up with this creed, never articulated but always demonstrated.
What we remember on this forty year anniversary is the overwhelming response to that tragedy from millions of families just like mine. The government did its bit and so did we. The government transported them, accommodated them and rebuilt their city. We provided the food and clothes and toys and books to help them feel whole again, to help them get back on their feet. But most of all we gave them emotional support and care in abundance. That’s what it means to be a fully paid-up member of society. You don’t think about it. You just roll up your sleeves and help out.
Forty years ago, Cyclone Tracy stole Christmas. We celebrated Christmas Day 1974 as we always had: family togetherness in the spirit of loving and giving - it was just more loving and giving than usual.
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