Now 70 years old, Alan Haines walks into Darwin’s St. Mary’s Star Of The Sea Cathedral. He sits in a front pew, stares into space and can’t help himself, even fifty years on tears start forming in his eyes as memories flood back.
He was here at Midnight Mass Christmas Day 1974, fifty years ago Wednesday, when the fury of Cyclone Tracy struck.
“It still brings me to tears,“ he says. “And I don’t think that will ever stop.”
He recalls the ever-increasing howling of the wind. Windows bursting, glass flying into the church, the electricity went out, then the fear.
“The noise was just massive, it just went ‘BANG!’ and people were scared, seriously scared by that point.”
The priest recorded the wind noise which you can now hear at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. It’s harrowing listening for anyone but for Alan it’s just too distressing.
“That noise, I still can’t listen to it,” he says as his minds wanders back 50 years.
He spent the rest of the night in a nearby hospital with his sister, a nurse. “It was a nightmare, just a nightmare.”
Marie Louise Pearson, who was 16 at the time, was huddling in her home under mattresses in the corridor with her father, mother and six-year-old sister.
“We all thought we were going to die. There was no doubt about it. We were all praying and we were all together, saying goodbye. Everything just shook, the whole house shook, everything shook. The wind just howled and howled and howled.”
Then Police Sergeant and future Northern Territory Cabinet Minister Daryl Manzie huddled with his wife Maureen and their children in their bathroom. “I said, ‘Oh God’ I think we’re going to die!’ and she said ‘it looks like it.”
As he looks through his scrapbook in his Darwin home now, he shakes his head, “I’m just amazed we survived.”
At daylight, he walked out into his devastated street and was shocked. “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I just said to Maureen, ‘We must be the only ones left alive.’ I said, ‘There’s nothing!’”
Mr Manzie began the first clean up and relief operations, working out of a school with a nurse, a neighbour, and shell-shocked volunteers, also neighbours. desperate to do something, anything to help.
Getting around was tough.
”If you drove, you’d get nails in your tyres and you couldn’t tell where the roads were because there’s just rubbish y’know - no signs, no trees, nothing, no houses . We had no communication which was really weird. We didn’t know if anyone knew in the outside world what had happened to us.”
But soon the help arrived. A massive multinational effort began. More than 60 per cent of Darwin’s population was evacuated south.
Alan Haines volunteered to drive hospital patients out to the airport where thousands camped in the terminal or outside using wrecked light planes as shelter.
“See that’s the extraordinary thing,” Alan says, “Despite all the chaos it worked. That was the largest evacuation of people at any time in this country’s history.”
The statistics were horrifying.
66 people killed.
80 per cent of Darwin’s houses destroyed.
Winds, according to recent studies by meteorologists, up to 250 kilometres per hour.
Ironically, all caused by what at the time was the world’s smallest recorded tropical cyclone. Tracy’s gale force winds extended only 48 kilometres from its centre.
“It was very very small .Because it was so small the winds were tightly wrapped around the centre which made it very intense,” says Meteorologist Mark Williams who lived through the cyclone in a bathtub at a mate’s place.
The damage was so bad, at one stage, then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam even suggested relocating Darwin.
That really got locals’ backs up.
There was a steely determination to rebuild ..even an air of invincibility.
Chair of the “Remembering Cyclone Tracy” Survivors’ Group, Richard Creswick sums it up, “Having survived Tracy I think I could survive just about anything. Thinking back there was no question Darwin would rise from the ashes and the wreckage.”
Marie-Louise Pearson was evacuated to her grandmother’s home in Brisbane but fought hard to come back to be with friends and family.
Just three months after the cyclone, she helped organise fashion parades in hotels surrounded by debris and devastation.
“For no other reason than we just needed to build peoples’ morale. We just wanted to get back to normal and we all pitched in together to make it. It was really hard, really tough, but we did it.”
John Garner typified Darwin’s spirit. His beloved 1972 red torana was crushed by a brick wall blown over in the cyclone.
Angry and frustrated, John found a paint can and a brush in the rubble of a neighbour’s garage.
He painted “Tracey You Bitch“ on the car bonnet. (He mispelt the cyclone’s name because at the time he had not read about it in newspapers, only heard about it on radio.)
The image featured in newspapers around the world, which made John very proud of his spontaneous artistic act, “ I just wanted to let people know what I thought of Tracy.”
50 years on John’s recreated it for the Northern Territory Museum. Officials there found a 1972 red Torana, crushed it the same way and got John to repaint his slogan. He laughs, “When you see the houses and see all the equipment and telegraph poles bent and yet this has become the iconic thing from Tracy!”
At dawn this Christmas Day at East Point where Tracy first hit land the Prime Minister and the Governor General are expected to join hundreds of survivors to unveil a memorial. It’s what survivors have longed for.
The word so many of them use for the 50th anniversary is cathartic.
For the first time in half a century, some will sit down to their Christmas lunch with a sense of peace.
According to Marie-Louise Pearson, “It’s cemented finally that you have peace, and you can move on. It’s made me proud of Darwin, the resilience of the people of Darwin, but also the fact that Darwin is here to stay and I’m very proud of that.”