It is a large canvas for Cunningham’s rather personal approach: at least seventy-one people died, and nearly half the houses in the city were damaged beyond habitability. Thirty thousand people were evacuated to various parts of the country within days of the cyclone. Fortunately, Cunningham had access to interviews collected by the Northern Territory Archive Service, mainly in 1979; these include the vivid memories of journalists, the director of education, a restaurant owner, a garage owner, policemen, politicians, doctors and nurses at the hospital, nuns, priests, bishops, sailors, architects, public servants and business people of various kinds, children and families, including a few Aboriginal and Chinese families. Cunningham makes skilful use of these interviews to reconstruct the panic and fear of the night many Darwin inhabitants wondered if they would survive. The individual narratives move from the sense of foreboding before the storm to the perils of the night and the terrible devastation they discovered in the morning:

By one in the morning the winds had really got going. Ida Bishop, who had a great eye for an image, said ‘it was like a giant running his hands down the side of the house going vvrrrrrrrr like this, and you could feel the shudder of the wind going along.’ Ray Wilkie spent the night in his office under the desk, on the phone while he still had a line, trying to keep track of the situation. His last call before the phones went was to Don Sanders. ‘Well, if I sound a bit panicky, Don,’ he said, ‘it’s because I am.’ People hid under their beds, often finding that their animals had beaten them to it. A woman saw her dogs flung through the sky on their chains but by some kind of miracle they made it back to the house.

One woman went into labour while the windows of the maternity ward caved in; others found themselves sheltering in roofless houses or in bathrooms that proved as unstable as the rest of the house. Many were forced outside, where they were blown into the air or pelted, and sometimes killed, by flying debris. Fishing boats put to sea to ride out the storm, leaving seventeen vessels in the harbour. Many of the men in the fishing boats drowned and, by two am, all of the boats in the harbour had disappeared from their moorings. Above the wind and the rain was the noise of the cyclone, so extraordinary that several people taped it, only to find that replaying it revived the trauma.

This is dramatic material. Cunningham describes groups of stunned people wandering through the wreckage trying to locate pieces of their homes, most of them surprised to find that they were not the only sufferers – the whole city had blown away. Then the emergency services moved in. As hundreds of people turned up for treatment in the damaged hospital and ambulance centres, Major-General Alan Stretton arrived from Canberra to oversee the recovery. There were the usual rivalries and disagreements about who should have authority over decisions, with resentment at the southern import from experienced people on the ground. There was an influx of politicians wanting to be seen ministering to the needy, though their demands used up valuable resources and irritated those trying to do emergency work.

The aftermath of Cyclone Tracy

Cunningham tells us that recovery experts regard the evacuation as a ‘blueprint on how not to respond to catastrophe’ though the Darwin recovery organisation did not make many obvious mistakes. Stretton was there for only six days before he sensed the need to leave it to the locals. The evacuation caused the most distress in the long term because it split families and exacerbated their sense of loss. People were angered by the permit system that prevented families from returning to the city and that allowed opportunists from the south to come in and take their jobs. Many of them never returned. The old Darwin, with its transient public service population, was blown away. In the view of Jim Bowditch, the former editor of the Northern Territory News, Darwin ‘was always a bull dust town. We aren’t pioneers and we never were. We’re a spoiled community, a city community.’

This book evokes the isolation and trauma that followed the cyclone, but it is not a handbook on how to prepare for future cyclones, with lessons to learn from the failures of preparation and recovery. It is an attempt to find a place in the national memory for this disaster and to remind us that Australia is not immune from large-scale weather damage, even in cities. Aboriginal people have absorbed the catastrophe into ceremony while some non-indigenous Australians may be happy to forget it. Cunningham cites Rover Thomas’s wonderful painting of the Cyclone and explains the Gurirr Gurirr ceremony that developed from Thomas’s vision – the spirit of a Gija woman showed him the Rainbow Serpent destroying Darwin. She tries hard to find ways to make the experience of the Cyclone meaningful to contemporary white readers, but the effort is obvious. Cyclones are bound to afflict the tropics, with or without climate change, so her ‘warning’ does not make much of an argument for action against global warming. In fact, her book tells us more about Australia’s internal colonialism and the context of the Whitlam years than about the climate. It is a memory of a lost ‘bull dust town’, a hardship posting for people on the make from the south, and of a time when Australia appeared more makeshift and rackety – which isn’t to say it can’t happen again.