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Tracy Tales –
How the Darwin Business
Community Survived the
Great Cyclone
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Acknowledgements
Cyclone Tracy was a landmark event that affected thousands of Territorians in a thousand
ways, from loss of their homes to lost lives. For businesspeople there was the added tragedy
of the loss of their livelihoods. Many were forced to pick up the shattered remnants of their
businesses and re-start from scratch, as well as rebuild their homes. The reminiscences in
this book represent just a few of those who faced the terror of the storm and endured the
hardship of its aftermath. To all those who shared their stories, we are truly appreciative.
This work has had many friends who went out of their way to ensure its success. Our thanks
go out to Richard McLean of Paspaley Pearls who arranged the interview with Peter Bracher
and secured photos from the company library. We also thank the national Coles office for
their efforts in bringing us the testimony of their then CEO, taken from documents published
at the time.
The book is enhanced by the photos taken in the cyclone’s aftermath, and we thank all those
participants who offered them for our use: Ernie Chin, Mark Finocchiaro, Helmut Schimmel,
and Savvas Savvas. Many of the aftermath photos, including the cover, were chosen from
the extensive archives of the Northern Territory Library.
Others have been sourced from the National Archives of Australia.
The book was sub-edited and proofed by Samantha McCue and designed by Imprint Design
and Promotions.
Recording oral history
The Northern Territory Archives Service has a large collection of oral histories that reference
Cyclone Tracy. While the book couldn’t capture all stories from the period, we encourage
people to consider nominating for an oral history interview with NT Archives. Visit
artsandmuseums.nt.gov.au/ntas, email ntac@nt.gov.au or phone NTAC (08) 8999 6890.
Publishing details
ISBN 978-0-646-92586-8
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Introduction
Australian history notes that, when Cyclone Tracy smashed Darwin on Christmas Eve of
1974, the Category 4 storm destroyed 70 per cent of Darwin’s buildings and 80 per cent of
the city’s houses, killing 71 people. History also details an aftermath that left 41 000
homeless and involved the evacuation of 30 000 Territorians to southern centres.
But what history does not document is the effect the cyclone had on Darwin businesses. It
does not chronicle the livelihoods of the multicultural local businesses and their owners’
harrowing experiences on the night, the financial ruin experienced by so many, or the
resilience of those who rose from beneath the debris to resume trading. Many continue to
this day.
This booklet is designed to fill that gap in the historical record. It tells some of the stories of
how 21 Darwin business people survived that ferocious storm, the changes the storm made
in their lives, and how they went about rebuilding their lives and businesses. Many of
Darwin’s most prominent current business figures are veterans of that unforgettable
Christmas Eve.
This book is their story.
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Contents
Introduction ............................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
Peter Bracher – Paspaley Group .......................................................................................... 6
Paspaley Pearls and the Cyclone ...................................................................................... 6
Harry Maschke – Action Sheetmetal ..................................................................................... 9
Knocked Cold by Tracy ..................................................................................................... 9
Dick Griffiths – Bradlaw Agencies ....................................................................................... 11
Beginning Again .............................................................................................................. 11
Ernie Chin – Chin and Associates ....................................................................................... 13
The Terrible Morning After ............................................................................................... 13
Norman Coles and Carmen Simonato – Coles Supermarkets ............................................. 16
Counting the Cost ............................................................................................................ 16
Fred McCue Snr – Ansett Airlines ....................................................................................... 18
The Great Air Lift ............................................................................................................. 18
Sandra Lew Fatt – TAA ....................................................................................................... 22
Prepared for the Worst .................................................................................................... 22
Owen Peake – Electricity Supply Undertaking………………………………………………….25
Restoring Power…………………………………………………………………………………25
Todd McCourt – Norblast Industrial Solutions ..................................................................... 27
Pitching-in ...................................................................................................................... 27
Napoleon and Irene Pantazis – Parap Fine Foods .............................................................. 29
Lingering Fears ............................................................................................................... 29
Des Nudl – Port Darwin Motors ........................................................................................... 31
The Damage Done .......................................................................................................... 31
Savvas Savvas – K Savvas Footwear ................................................................................. 32
Shoes and the Cyclone ................................................................................................... 32
Mark Finocchiaro – Fannie Bay Bakery ............................................................................... 33
Bread for the Survivors .................................................................................................... 33
Mavi Milevoj – The Maddalozzo Group ............................................................................... 35
Disaster at Mandorah ...................................................................................................... 35
Hugh Bradley – Ward Keller ................................................................................................ 37
Battling to Get Back ......................................................................................................... 37
John Hardy – Hardy Aviation............................................................................................... 39
Staying on to Help ........................................................................................................... 39
George Voukolos – Fishing and Outdoor World .................................................................. 41
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Surviving the Night from Hell ........................................................................................... 41
Dwyn Delaney – Delaney’s Country and Western Store...................................................... 43
Post-cyclone Wild Times ................................................................................................. 43
Helmut and Joy Schimmel – Ironstone Lagoon Nursery ...................................................... 45
Replanting Darwin ........................................................................................................... 45
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Peter Bracher – Paspaley Group
Paspaley Pearls and the Cyclone
We see Paspaley today as the Territory’s highest profile company nationally and
internationally. It is a company that conjures up images of luxurious strands of South Sea
pearls displayed in elaborate showrooms, serviced by fleets of sleek boats and aircraft as
well as secluded cultured pearl farms. But that was not always the case.
Canadian Peter Bracher, who today oversees Paspaley’s wine interests, was a young law
student back in 1974, married to Nick Paspaley’s sister Ros. He vividly remembers visiting a
remote pearl farm with his wife and baby in anticipation of a family Christmas celebration,
and the sudden interruption of Cyclone Tracy that would threaten the future of the fledgling
pearling company.
Wishing to travel to Darwin for Christmas shopping, the Brachers joined the Paspaleys
aboard the company’s new purpose-built pearling vessel, the Paspaley Pearl. With Territory
pearl shell numbers decimated by foreign fishing, young Nick, who was working tirelessly to
get the company on its feet, and his father had designed the boat expressly to collect pearl
shell from beds off the coast of Western Australia and return it live to farms in the Territory.
The vessel was a purchase that involved large amounts of borrowed money, and many in
the industry thought it was impossible to transport shell that distance. “The company made
very fine pearls but not in sufficient numbers to defray the great cost of production,” recalls
Peter. “It was a crucial period. If we had lost that boat, the company wouldn’t have gone on.
That boat was the future.”
The group soon got news of the cyclone, expecting it to move west towards WA. They
delayed their departure from the farm and sneaked under the storm, in rough seas, when it
started heading west. They arrived in Darwin on Christmas Eve around 5pm. As they
arrived they heard that the storm had unexpectedly turned south towards Darwin.
Nick anchored the boat off Dinah Beach in a protected mangrove creek, tossing out anchors
fore and aft. The weather intensified as the group, which included Nick Paspaley senior and
wife Vivienne, young Nick and pregnant wife Belinda and the Brachers, collected at Nick
senior’s house. It was billed as a cyclone-proof house designed by renowned architect Harry
Seidler. The group went down to the storeroom where there was a large bank safe a couple
of metres high. “We gathered around this safe so if things got really bad and the roof fell in, it
would hang up on the safe,” Peter remembers. “We gathered as the wind got nasty. Then we
started worrying about the boat. So Nick and I decided to see if the boat was OK.”
They had left a dinghy on the back of a ute at the waterfront so they could easily get out to
the anchored Paspaley Pearl. A few weeks before Tracy, there had been another cyclone,
not as severe. Nick and Peter had got on the vessel and driven it into the storm, which kept it
from washing onto shore. That was the new plan: drive it into the wind while at anchor.
Defying the ferocious weather outside, they jumped into the car. Sparking, live electric wires
crashed onto the car as they headed to the boat. They weaved their way down to the wharf,
avoiding downed trees, often driving on the footpaths. But when they got near the dinghy,
7
the wind was so strong they couldn’t open the car doors. They gave up and drove back to
join their families crouching around the safe. The noise was deafening.
The wind blew the roof off a neighbour’s home, sending it like a guided missile into the
Paspaley home, taking out the top of their house. Peter recalls the neighbour’s fridge ending
up inside Nick’s house.
In the morning the storm had passed and a devastated landscape greeted the survivors.
What about the boat? “We really feared that we’d probably lost it. So Nick and I went back to
the waterfront and we looked out on the water where the boat was anchored, but it wasn’t
there,” recalls Peter.
The pair climbed into the dinghy and went looking for it. They eventually found it striking a
lonely figure high up on dry land. Tracy’s arrival had coincided with a king tide that took the
boat up into the mangroves. As the tide receded, it sank into the mangrove mud, up to the
gunnels. The mud saved the Paspaley Pearl.
The pair spent the next three days using the tides and winching the vessel a few feet at a
time with the very highest part of the tide, finally managing to re-float her. “It wasn’t fully
insured,” says Peter. “I think even if it had been lost and we had got a money payout, it
would have still been a disaster because it would have taken two or three years to replace
the vessel and get things happening. There’s every chance that the company would not
have continued in the way it has. It would have been a desperately bad thing to lose that
boat.”
But Peter Bracher’s tale does not end there.
After saving the boat, Nick and Peter decided to check on their families. As they moved
across the harbour in the dinghy a small barramundi fishing boat dropped anchor right
before them. Nick said, “That’s a barramundi boat. Let’s go buy a barra to cook up for
everybody.” Fresh food was in short supply in post-cyclone Darwin.
They pulled alongside the fishing boat and asked the wizened old skipper on deck if they
could buy a barra. He said, “No worries, it’ll be $5 a pound filleted and $2.50 a pound whole.”
Nick said that was fine but they didn’t have any money with them – but “that’s our boat over
there and we’ll pay you tomorrow.”
“No way,” replied the fisherman. ”I want cash on the knocker.”
Nick said, “You don’t understand – the town has been destroyed and there’s no food around.
You can trust me for the money – I’m Nick Paspaley and I’m pretty well known around
Darwin.”
Peter recalls that you couldn’t see the extent of the damage from the harbour, below the city.
Nick told the fisherman that he should check on his family. But the fisherman accused Nick
of exaggerating.
The skipper had two teenagers on board and one said he wanted to check on their family in
Darwin. An argument ensued and the young man said he wanted to check on his Mum and
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his girlfriend, so he joined Nick and they headed off. In conversation, the boy, he said his
name was Manolas.
Peter observed that Nick had cousins named Manolas. “And the boy said, ‘Yeah – we’re
cousins’. And I said to Nick, ‘This is your cousin’.”
But Nick didn’t say a word. He just turned the boat around and went straight back to the
barra boat.
He pulled up alongside and yelled to the fisherman, “You’re my cousin. You’re Manny
Manolas. You’ve gotta give me a fish.”
Nick had a cousin named Manny Manolas, working as a fisherman out of Broome, whom he
had never met. Unknown to Nick and Peter, Manny had moved his family and fishing boat to
Darwin to work the barramundi fishery.
Manny said, “I know who you are, and I’ve been in Darwin for six months and you didn’t
even call me.”
“I didn’t know you were here!” replied Nick.
“You damn well did. You didn’t so much as say hello.” And the language turned very blue
between them.
Finally Manny shouted to the son on board, “Alright, give him a fish. One of the small ones
on the bottom of the pile.”
“And the kid comes out with the biggest barramundi I’ve ever seen,” remembers Peter. “It
must have weighed 20 kilos. And he hands over the monster barra to us, which we took
back and roasted and fed a huge crowd.”
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Harry Maschke – Action Sheetmetal
Knocked Cold by Tracy
Action Sheetmetal began trading in 1972, fabricating aluminium air conditioning ducts just as
government and private industry began to upgrade from fans to air conditioning. Managing
director Harry Maschke remembers that the company was in the right place at the right time.
The firm also became a key provider after the cyclone as the city was rebuilt. However,
Action Sheetmetal nearly lost its founder on that fateful Christmas Eve as his house
collapsed around him.
Harry Maschke, a German-born sheetmetal tradesman, arrived in Darwin with $168, a sum
he used to kick start his own business. “You don’t go into business with money,” he
philosophises. “You go into business to make money.” Darwin was growing and the new
fabrication business took off. Harry took on partners and bought a workshop in outer
Berrimah Road, which was then a dirt track. Life was good.
On Christmas Eve 1974 Harry was invited out to dinner before returning to his home in
Rapid Creek. The wind was fierce, slicing through power lines and turning corrugated iron
into lethal projectiles. There was a pair of backpackers staying with him. They became
frightened when water began to seep into the elevated house so Harry filled the bathtub with
water. The couple then joined Harry in his room when theirs was blown away. “We looked
out and saw another house across the street blow apart,” he recalls. “It was like someone
threw a hand grenade and blew it up. Then it hit us.”
The three made it to the bathroom where they lay flat around the bathtub. They decided to
try to make it to a neighbouring brick house that was still standing. With the storm raging,
Harry jumped down and stayed there to catch the girl when she jumped. Then her boyfriend
jumped and he smashed his ankle. In the driving rain, the couple headed to the brick house
as Harry turned to join them. Then suddenly all the lights went out. Harry was struck from
behind by flying debris.
The next thing he remembers is waking up in Adelaide River, 100km south of Darwin, days
later. “I don’t remember a thing,” he says. “Subconsciously I must have got the car out and
drove to Adelaide River and slept for a day or more. I think I had a concussion. It was the
lost part of my life.”
Harry decided to return to Darwin but was turned back by a police roadblock. Undeterred, he
drove through the bush, avoiding the roadblock, and made it to the Action Sheetmetal
workshop. His two partners and their families were there. They had been looking for him
everywhere. Their workshop had its doors blown out and part of the roof was gone, but the
building had withstood Tracy’s ferocity.
Then Harry returned to his Rapid Creek home, which he found to have been looted. “But I
had a pair of shoes where I hid the wages for the boys, and that pair of shoes was full of
water but the wages were still there,” he laughs. “We had money, but money was useless.
You couldn’t buy anything.”
As others were evacuated to southern centres, Harry decided to stay. The Army came to
them and supplied them with a generator so they could operate their machines. They still
10
had metal stocks so they began repairing Darwin’s damaged buildings. “We had power and
a refrigerator and there was cold beer,” he recalls. “Drinking was the way of life. It was a
happy time. There was no money so you traded in beer.”
Action Sheetmetal was deemed an essential business to the rebuilding of Darwin and, as
such, traded well above the usual. But after six months the pace returned to normal. Harry
did not rebuild his Rapid Creek home, instead moving to a 24 hectare block he bought in
Humpty Doo. On that virgin block he built the home where he lived for the next 25 years.
Today Action is, arguably, the largest sheetmetal fabricator in the Territory, having utilised
the latest digital technology to remain competitive.
A cyclone survivor, Harry Maschke is concerned about the complacency that modern
Darwinites demonstrate regarding cyclonic danger. “If we get hit with the same velocity of
winds, we’ll have so many rockets flying,” he contends as he views air conditioning units not
properly secured to Darwin buildings. “People say it will never happen again, but nature will
come back. We are due for another.”
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Dick Griffiths – Bradlaw Agencies
Beginning Again
Like that of many others, Dick Griffiths’ life changed dramatically on Christmas Eve 1974.
The current owner-manager of Bradlaw Agencies, Dick was a silent partner in that business
before Cyclone Tracy’s appearance. But after that night, life took an about-face, opening
new opportunities and plenty of fresh challenges for the Griffiths family.
Dick Griffiths and Braydon Lawson started an agency to represent major product suppliers in
Darwin. Dick financed the venture and continued his job of running an insurance company
while Braydon ran the fledgling operation. In 1972 they wrote to over 100 companies
nationwide, to see if they wanted a reputable agent based in Darwin. Kicking off the
business, they became agents for Sanyo, Wella Cosmetics and a number of others.
Everything was moving along very well for Bradlaw Agencies at their warehouse in Stuart
Park’s victualling yards until Christmas 1974. That is where their wide range of stock was
stored on consignment from the parent companies.
On that night in his Rapid Creek home, as the winds picked up, Dick went to bed after a few
drinks before his wife Rosemary woke him saying they should collect the children and go
into the bathroom. They got the baby and their four–year-old when a jagged piece of wood
came flying through the room, skimming the child’s head. Daughter Amanda still carries a
crease down the front of her head. Dick remembers: “We’d never been through a cyclone
before so I put my wife and the baby in the shower and then put the other three kids in the
shower and put a mattress on top. I laid on top of the mattress until the dog started crying so
we left him in.”
Dick’s father had had quite a bit to drink and didn’t want to leave his bed. But he was finally
persuaded to join the family in the bathroom. It was a wise decision. “The next morning when
we got up his bedroom wasn’t there, so it was lucky he came in the bathroom,” Dick
observes.
When the eye came they went outside to have a look. Dick opened the bathroom door and
they were astonished to find that the rest of the house was gone. Then the eye passed and
the storm returned with even greater ferocity. “I’m not a religious man, but I did say to
somebody up there, ‘please look after Rosemary and the kids.’ That’s when you could start
to hear the nails pulling from the steel roofing and the pieces flying around. But not one child
made a noise or screamed. Not one.”
The new morning featured devastation greater than anything they imagined. In the days
following the cyclone the Griffiths children and their mother were evacuated. Dick made his
way to the victualling yards where their warehouse had lost a roof and windows. Then Dick’s
partner Braydon Lawson pulled out and headed south. “He had enough of Darwin,” says
Dick. “When he decided to leave, I came in to run Bradlaw Agencies. I’ve been here ever
since.”
Much of their stock was destroyed, including Darwin’s first consignment of Sanyo colour
televisions, so they moved what was left into a dry section of the warehouse. Dick also
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began helping the road crews clear the street. He was surprised when approached by
Transport and Works official Col Fuller who said, “You haven’t picked up your pay.”
“What pay?” asked Dick.
“We registered you,” was the reply.
Dick was able to collect a much appreciated government paycheque for his labours and
went on to work for Transport and Works, approving works for Treasury that ensured
contractors for the city clean up got paid.
Dick had an STD phone and was in touch with interstate agencies. The news was not good
from a number of the companies Bradlaw represented. “I lost a lot of the agencies after the
cyclone,” he recalls. “Lots of clients just cut their losses. AE&F Tolleys – Tollana Wine – was
doing very well. They pulled out after the cyclone.”
But other brands began to see the opportunities on offer as Darwin re-emerged. Sanyo
stayed on with the agency. “Then the manager of Sanyo went to work as the manager of
Sony and employed us to be the Sony agent in the Territory. We only had Sanyo in Darwin
but Sony licensed us for the whole of the Northern Territory. We started with Westinghouse,
then Westinghouse bought out Kelvinator and Electrolux, then they bought out Simpson then
Chef, Dishlex and Hoover. We just sat back and they kept giving us more product – so we’ve
been very lucky.”
Since the cyclone, Bradlaw has gone from strength to strength. They purchased their own
warehouse in 1982 and opened their sprawling multimillion dollar facility in the Darwin
Business Park in 2013. Today all four of Dick’s children are working in the Bradlaw
operation. “They all came from boarding school, straight into the business – three daughters
and a son,” says Dick. “Maybe will one day the grandchildren will take over the business.
Who knows?”
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Ernie Chin – Chin and Associates
The Terrible Morning After
Real estate developer Ernie Chin’s experience during and after Cyclone Tracy was a lifechanging event that prowls his thoughts some 40 years later. It was an occurrence that
tested him thoroughly, challenging him to look inside and discover his limitations. But Chins
are made of resilient stock, a family that has engaged in a wide variety of Darwin businesses
that helped shape the Territory capital’s economy for four generations. They are a family that
are also no strangers to cyclones.
Ernie Chin’s grandfather emigrated to the Territory, opening a shopfront on Darwin’s
Cavenagh Street in 1880 at a time when Chinese far outnumbered Europeans. Just one
year after they opened for business in 1881, they experienced their first lethal cyclone. But
that was a windy shower compared to the ‘great hurricane’ that struck the town on 6 January
1897. That cyclone coincided with a high tide and caused a storm surge, which hurled boats
ashore like child’s toys. In 1917 and again in 1937 cyclones took lives and caused lethal
damage in and around Darwin, and the Chins were there.
They came from a village in southern China near Canton with a population boasting 40 000
Chins. It was a population from which Ernie’s grandfather recruited his Territory workforce.
Among them were the Fong Lims and the Sun Chung Loongs. “Families were brought out by
my grandfather and they would work for a couple of years as a tailor or shopkeeper until they
could pay him back the favour for bringing them out,” relates Ernie. “Then they moved on to
their own business. And brought their own people over.”
Ernie was brought up working in the family businesses, the most famous being the Chin’s
shaved ice drinks that people enjoyed after filing out of the ‘pictures’ at the Star Theatre next
door. Years later he studied surveying and took up real estate sales in 1972.
On Christmas Eve 1974 Ernie was preparing to go to Black Point in Arnhem Land for Boxing
Day, but the wind was picking up so he went back to his house in Stuart Park. He was
visited by his friend Owen Lai, a Timorese Chinese who had brought a Christmas gift. Owen
said he was going back to his home in Wanguri along with his sister’s three children. He
asked what to do if the cyclone hits.
“I said, ‘Owen the safest place for you is the toilet, or the hallways.’ So, off he went,” recalls
Ernie.
The weather was now getting fierce so Ernie collected his two kids and took them to the
safety of his bottom floor office in Bennett Street. Then the rain broke through and started to
stream inside. The Chins moved from room to room. The temperature dropped, sheets of
corrugated iron were flying past the window and Ernie tried to work out what to do. Then he
heard someone was moving upstairs.
He took a broom and bashed on the ceiling to get a response before opening the back door.
That’s when a figure came down the stairs and straight into the Chin's’ room. He was a
much-distressed relief manager who had just arrived in Darwin that afternoon.” I didn’t know
he was there,” remembers Ernie. “He said, ‘what’s going on?’ He had only pyjama pants on
14
so I gave him a raincoat. And he sat there until about 6am. Then he left and went up towards
the Hotel Darwin, and I never saw him again to this day.”
In the morning Ernie took his family to a safe place and drove around to his brother’s place
near the Chung Wah temple. “When you crawled out of where you were hiding from the
cyclone, and you saw the devastation, it was really emotional. Everything you had and
worked for all your life was gone. It was like being bombed in a way. Some people were
depressed and gave into it, but my attitude was I wasn’t going to let it beat me,” he states.
Ernie ran into Geoff and Barbara James who had fled their house and laid down next to a
fence until the storm died down. Together, they encountered an elderly lady known as
Granny Smith. She was stranded and injured up on the first floor of her house with the steps
destroyed, barring her escape. They got her down and set out for the hospital.
Ernie recalls: “We took off for the hospital. I thought that I’d be able to help and do
something because none of us had been badly hurt. But when I got there and saw what was
coming in and what was there, I just knew that I didn’t have the fortitude to handle this
situation. There were people walking in, covered with blood holding kids that were badly
hurt.
“There was water running through, mixed with blood everywhere. There were people sitting
there with great gashes in their heads and I remember one Greek guy, named Sam, who
was a real hero. He was helping people and directing people, something I couldn’t do
myself. We carried Mrs Smith in and told her to wait there until she was attended to.
“I just couldn’t handle it. So I left and drove up Mitchell Street towards town. And there was a
Volkswagen upside down in the middle of the road. There was a guy in it that had come to
work for Qantas the morning before the cyclone, so he slept in his car. But the car got flipped
over in the storm and a sheet of iron went through and killed him.”
Ernie picked up a 4WD at his brother’s place and headed for Nightcliff to check on Geoff’s
brother, Earl James. “It was amazing,” notes Chin. “By 9 o’clock that morning there were
machines on the road, clearing it. They, to me, were the unsung heroes of that day. A lot of
these guys were just workers with their machines. Without any calling, they just started
clearing the roads. They got stuck into their jobs without anybody telling them or paying
them.”
He drove along Bagot Road, and remembers being able to see straight through to
Mandorah. There was not a leaf left on any tree. He continued his terrible tour, stopping to
buy a 5KVA generator at a wrecked shop. He got two drums of fuel from Earl James and
went back to his brother’s place in town. “They had an above-ground pool and I told them,
‘nobody goes swimming. We need that water to flush the toilets.’ About 40 people gathered
there. We had four freezers full of whatever you wanted to eat. We had a 5KVA generator.
We had lights. But the first night we had to have someone stay awake on guard with a
shotgun because of the looting going on in town,” Ernie recalls.
He went to the Chung Wah Temple and it was completely devastated. “But the idols were
still sitting among the wreckage,” he says. “Now, I’m not a religious guy, but I just had to be
grateful about something. So I said we need to pick up all the gods and put them under the
shelter. It was like saying thank you to somebody that we’re all still alive.”
15
They’re still on display there today.
He went to Wanguri to check on his Timorese friend Owen Lai, discovering that he had been
killed. Owen had sat in the hallway in a chair, as Ernie had suggested on the night of the
cyclone. He died in that chair.
Everyone from the town centre went to Darwin High School to be fed. Ernie remains
particularly proud of the Chinese contribution post-cyclone. “They pulled out the cooking
gear from all the Chinese restaurants and set them up there. And the food was delicious.
They had taken all the food from all the suppliers and there was everything. And you walked
around with a Woollies trolley and got everything you wanted and took it home and cooked
it. We’d cook during the day at home and have an evening meal at the school. It was
fantastic.”
In the aftermath, real estate was on hold, so Ernie and his business partner Phil Harries
worked for an insurance company from Sydney that had lots of cars and caravans destroyed
by Cyclone Tracy. They were tasked to find the vehicles, or what was left of them, and return
the remains for a $50 fee. But real estate and property development opportunities returned
and Ernie soon established himself as one of Darwin’s busiest agents, developing Mandorah
and, in 1990, the Cullen Bay Marina, where his office remains today.
The cyclone, however, left lasting scars and he still remembers the event and its aftermath
with dread. “When the cyclone warnings come now, and they get to that fifth category, I pack
my camping gear and piss off down to Katherine,” he sighs, shaking his head. “I don’t want
to go through that ever again.”
16
Norman Coles and Carmen Simonato – Coles
Supermarkets
Counting the Cost
Nine days after Cyclone Tracy ripped through Darwin, Coles managing director Norman
Coles and a group of company executives flew into the Territory capital on the first nongovernment flight allowed in. He was there to survey the destruction of his two stores in
Casuarina, one of which had recently celebrated its grand opening. Moved by the carnage
he saw on his arrival, Norman initiated a tax-free relief fund for Coles’ Darwin employees,
and was determined no expense would be spared to help Tracy’s victims.
Coles’ stores number 8 and 404 were wrecked and immediately closed; they were unable to
re-open for nine months. “The Navy had already begun to clear stock in the supermarket and
there was a high stench of rotting food,” Norman said later. “My first impressions of our
stores were of total destruction in regards to fittings, fixtures and stock. The force of the wind
just blew stock from anywhere to anywhere and the place was an utter shambles.”
Coles was a wreck. Management decided to let it be known around Darwin that all the stock
inside that was not destroyed was to be given free to anybody who wanted it. “Everything
that was edible – Coles gave it to those who needed it,” recalls employee Carmen Simonato.
Coles also had Darwin’s only operating generator-powered refrigeration. It too became
public property, serving as the disaster’s makeshift morgue.
Norman went to Darwin manager Ron Bulley’s house, which had no power but, unlike most
Darwin houses, had running water. Norman praised the resilience and character of his
Darwin staff, listening to Ron’s description of his family’s night of terror. “We heard roofs
ripping from buildings and smashing into our own,” recalled Ron, who sheltered in their
bathroom with his wife and two children. “We didn’t know what was going on outside. All we
could hear was the roar of the wind, the smashing of timber and iron, the glass inside our
house and the furniture seemed to be crashing around the house.”
Carmen Simonato, who still lives in Darwin, worked at Coles the night Tracy struck. She
remembers the trading as being ultra-busy. It was so crowded that they had to restrict entry,
allowing two customers in if two people left. Lots of employees were working because
everything had to be individually priced with a handgun. She worked at the deli cooking
chicken until after seven o’clock when the power failed. Coles closed the supermarket and
sent everyone home to face the cyclone. “It wasn’t like now where they give you such good
warnings,” Carmen remembers. “They told us it was coming but people didn’t take any
notice. We were never really advised that it was that big. Then we found out.”
By 11 o’clock timbers from the neighbour’s roof were flying through the walls of Carmen’s
Alawa home, the roof blown off. Then the eye went over before the winds changed direction
and wrecked what was still standing. Only the walls were left when the winds died off early
that Christmas morning but all else was demolished. Carmen was pregnant and, two days
later, she went with her two kids to be evacuated to Adelaide, while her husband stayed to
help rebuild their home.
Carmen’s family in northern Italy had read that Darwin had been destroyed and were very
concerned about the safety of the Simonato family. They tried to phone but all the lines were
17
down. “We couldn’t contact them so they thought the worst,” sighs Carmen. “When they saw
the news on TV, they saw this whole line of people getting evacuated. Then they saw me
with the kids getting on the plane so they knew that we were alright.”
A month later she returned with her children to find that her husband had repaired the roof
and the louvres, making the house dry and liveable. Carmen had her baby and eventually
returned to work for Coles for another 33 years.
Norman Coles was impressed with the spirit displayed by the cyclone survivors. He said a
few months after Tracy hit: “The people I spoke to are saying they live in Darwin, they love
Darwin and they are staying in Darwin.” He initiated a tax-free relief fund for Coles’ Darwin
employees, and a trust fund was eventually established with $28 240 raised from donations
from all around Australia. Carmen Simonato was one of the Coles staff who received some
of the benefit of the public’s largesse. “They collected money for us and after a while I got
$100 from them. They thought of us. It was really good.”
18
Fred McCue Snr – Ansett Airlines
The Great Air Lift
Fred McCue senior enjoyed a comfortable life as the Darwin manager of Ansett Airlines,
overseeing the local operation of the country’s premier domestic carrier. Along with wife
Cynthia and their three teenage boys, Fred came to the Territory in 1970 and moved into a
sturdy concrete and glass Ansett manager’s home in Fannie Bay. But Cyclone Tracy
interrupted that tranquil tropical lifestyle, propelling Fred into the forefront of the greatest
human evacuation in Australian history. “My four-year stint was supposed to end in 1974 but
after Christmas Day, I just couldn’t get away,” he jokes. “Something got in the way. I had to
stick around for a while to sort things out.”
An Ansett employee since 1956, when the airline was still flying DC-3s, Fred had moved up
the corporate ranks to become manager in Mount Isa. He then came to Darwin to do a fouryear stint as Territory manager for influential owner Reg Ansett. It was a time when Ansett
and its newly acquired MMA (McRobertson Miller Airways) competed with TAA (Trans
Australia Airlines) for dominance of the Australian domestic market.
On Christmas Eve 1974, when cyclone warnings began to be broadcast, Fred, like
thousands of other Darwin locals, did not take them seriously. A few weeks earlier he and
Cynthia had attended a party when warnings of Cyclone Selma were broadcast, sending
everyone home. Then nothing happened –but history would not repeat itself this time. On
Christmas Eve Fred attended another party thrown by British Airways at the Travelodge.
When the winds picked up and the rain became intense, he decided to drive home.
Situated on East Point Road, the McCue home could not have been located in a worse place
that night. The glass frontage facing the sea soon disintegrated, the concrete house shook,
the carport cracked off, and the poured concrete roof raised and moved. The family huddled
in the bathroom while the beach sand created a sandblast, stripping the newly laid wallpaper
from the wall.
Looking out the bathroom window, Fred saw a light bobbing around in the storm. The
neighbour’s house had blown away and a young couple who lived there were wandering
around dazed, in the open. Fred and family shone a torch on them and pulled them through
the window into the safety of the bathroom. “They joined us,” he remembers. “There were
seven of us crowded into that bathroom. Their house blew away and they climbed out of it –
completely shell-shocked.”
The next morning the McCue family surveyed the damage and made their way to the
Travelodge, where the hotel manager had saved them a room. The hotel soon became the
accommodation centre for the relief and reconstruction of Darwin. Fred and family stayed
there for three days before it was taken over by the Commonwealth.
It was Christmas day and Fred was summoned to a crisis meeting at the office of the police
commissioner with the Darwin Emergency Services Committee, which had been set up a
few months before the cyclone. Fred was the only airline person represented at that
meeting. He recalls: “That was the first time I heard the word ‘evacuation’ mentioned – on
Christmas afternoon. It was cited by Charlie Gurd, the Commonwealth Director of Health.
Charlie had worked with tropical disease in Africa and his greatest fear for Darwin was the
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spread of cholera. It was a city caught in a tropical wet season with no accommodation, no
water and no electricity, so it was a very dangerous situation. He said, ‘we’re going to have
to think about evacuation.’ I remember thinking, ‘how do you do that?’ ”
When General Alan Stretton, the Director-General of the Natural Disasters Organisation,
arrived that night, he issued the evacuation order. Committee members had asked Fred to
get in touch with Reg Ansett. Fred argued that it was a government problem and they should
handle it. But the committee members were adamant, saying, “You know how government
works – it’ll take too long. They’ll need to set up committees and that takes time”
“They told me Reg won’t stuff around. ‘If you can get word to Ansett, it’ll happen
immediately. He’ll know how to do this’,” Fred recalls them saying.
He got a piece of paper and pen. “I wrote a message telling Reg that there were thousands
relying on him to evacuate the city – or words to that effect. But the phones were all out, so
someone took the note down to the wharf to a boat down there. They had radio contact with
Perth and Perth relayed it to Ansett in Melbourne. Reg finally got the message because he
told me so afterwards.”
Stretton told Acting Prime Minister Jim Cairns that the evacuation was on and by that time
Ansett crew members began coming back from holiday leave early to help. The first flight to
arrive in Darwin was a TAA F27 Fokker Friendship that had, thankfully, spent the previous
night sheltering in Katherine. It landed in Darwin on Christmas morning after ground crews
used graders to clear the debris from the runway.
In a devastated town boasting no water or power, Fred and his skeleton crew moved into
Ansett’s freight terminal that had seen little damage. The airline sent up a mob of air
mattresses and a stack of generators from Brisbane. “We were pretty comfortable, and on
top of that we had this massive generator loaned to us. We hooked up a flight kitchen with a
cold room in it. So there was everything in there that you wanted: vegetables, ham and
cheese. We even had cold beer,” he recalls.
He made do with few staff. They were like everyone else in Darwin – most were homeless
and some badly injured. Lots of people wanted to get out and did not want to return. “The
authorities wanted to get people out as soon as possible, because they weren’t quite sure
what they were going to do with Darwin. There was talk that Darwin would be moved inland
to another location. It was cyclone-prone and dangerous,” says Fred.
The evacuation began on Boxing Day, an operation that Fred found surprisingly well
organised. People were bussed from the centres to the airport. The committee that
coordinated the evacuation housed the homeless in evacuation centres at Darwin High
School, Nightcliff High School and Dripstone High School. The Army had set up radio
contact between these centres and the airport so airport staff could tell them where the next
planes were headed.
Fred describes the scene: “There was no water or electricity at the hospital so the sick were
the first out. The sequence of removal was: the badly injured and sick from the hospital first.
Next were pregnant women. Then women and children – and that’s when the trouble started.
The husbands were coming out with the wives and kids and they weren’t sure where the
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wives and kids were going and there was quite a lot of emotion. No riots, just blokes getting
in the way. We told them they had to wait.”
Ansett and TAA cancelled their national 727 schedules for four days and ran a skeleton
service with DC-9s servicing Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne, while the evacuation was going
on. All the big jets came up to Darwin. “Ansett, TAA and Qantas operated at the airport as
one, using each other’s equipment and each other’s staff,” observes Fred. “When a plane
came in we didn’t look at the tail to see what the colour it was. But this is a fact: there were
far more Ansett blokes on that tarmac than any of the other airlines. You couldn’t find better
blokes.”
Meanwhile, the airline pilots were facing challenges they will always remember. They could
only operate in daylight hours because there were no lights on the runway. The control tower
was destroyed so there was no air traffic control. There was some contact. Qantas had radio
gear that put them in contact with incoming aircraft, but the control tower had gone so the
normal assistance a plane’s crew gets when they land wasn’t available. The pilots made do.
“My job was to get aeroplanes on the ground and get stuff off them coming in and decide
where each would go to: Sydney, Adelaide or Brisbane,” states Fred. “At the airport, we got
them lined up with the carriers. We had lists of people and where they were going. We were
stuffing the aeroplanes chock-a-block full. A 727 jet had capacity for 170, from memory, and
we were putting 210 on. Putting kids on mothers’ laps and getting as many on each flight as
possible.”
“It wasn’t like Changi Airport with all the facilities. There was no roof on the bloody terminal.
There was no air conditioning. It was raining from time to time and you had literally
thousands of traumatised people passing through. We had to keep it under control. Keep it
organised.”
Not counting Christmas Day, when they had only one flight in, the evacuation was over in
four eventful days. When the cyclone struck, 40 000 people lived in the Territory capital. “We
moved a lot of people,” recalls Fred. “We took a total of 22 000 people out by air with Ansett
and MMA aeroplanes taking nearly 6000 of them. TAA took a lot and Qantas took some and
the RAAF took them out in their Hercules aircraft. Even the Americans brought in bloody
great C5 Galaxies and took people out. But Ansett and TAA would’ve picked up half the
total.”
With the job complete and the crews having worked to the point of exhaustion, Ansett threw
a party. It was New Year’s Eve 1974 and the only cool room in town was at the Ansett cargo
shed. They had to get some beer and the word was that they could get beer at the brewery.
“The beer was condemned. They were going to throw it out,” says Fred. “Then Jack Drew,
our catering manager, said, ‘my son has a truck,’ and he went to get some beer. That
afternoon I was in the shed and a bloody great semi-trailer rolled in – the full length of the
shed – stacked with cartons of beer. I told them that, ‘we wanted a bit of beer, but this is
obscene!’ ”
Hundreds showed up: police, nurses, public servants, all letting go after a week of turmoil. “It
was a wild night, a very wild night,” recounts Fred, who had decided to make a speech
thanking everyone for their efforts. “Crasher Crowell was there with his big police motorbike.
So Crasher told me to deliver his speech from on top the bike. So I was helped up and I’m
21
standing on this bike waving a can of beer, thanking them all for the wonderful things they’d
done and how they made a major contribution to the city of Darwin. That’s when something
happened and I flipped off the bike, head over heels and finished up on the tarmac. Then a
big cheer went up: hheeyeaaaaaa!!”
After the evacuation Ansett remained an important part of the reconstruction effort that
lasted for the next five years. Fred and the McCues finally returned to their rebuilt house 18
months later. He retired in 1988 and moved to a house on a couple of acres in northern New
South Wales only to return to Darwin 10 years ago to be closer to his kids and grandkids.
However, the images of the great evacuation remain locked in his memory today, 40 years
on. “I’ll always remember when the last Ansett aeroplane went out on the last day, late in the
afternoon,” he recalls, like it was yesterday. “There were people getting on including some of
my staff who were going to join their wives. They all had white Ansett overalls on, because
that’s all they had. Then the last plane took off and there was not a sound. For five days it
was pandemonium – non-stop noise – the sounds of people and trucks and crying kids and
jet engines – a continual din. Then all of a sudden it was quiet. It was a touching moment.”
22
Sandra Lew Fatt – TAA
Prepared for the Worst
In late December 1974 most Darwin people viewed the Cyclone Tracy warnings with benign
ambivalence. They believed that the cyclone would go the way of Cyclone Selma, a storm
that had been predicted to hit Darwin earlier in the month. Instead it veered out to sea,
leaving the Territory capital unaffected. As a result, most people were caught by surprise
when the Bureau of Meteorology broadcast the news that Cyclone Tracy had diverted from
its westerly path, heading straight for Darwin.
When it was reported that the cyclone had taken a dramatic turn to the south from the
Vernon Islands, alarm bells rang out for Sandra Lew Fatt. She remembered having been
warned years earlier by her wise old bushman father-in-law who had survived the great
Darwin cyclone of 1937. “He always taught us that if a cyclone comes in over the Vernon
Islands, batten down – because we’ll get it,” recalls Sandra.
Today she is the principal of Sandra Lew Fatt and Associates Travelworld, but on Christmas
Eve 1974 she worked on the ticket counter at TAA (Trans-Australia Airways). The TAA staff
were having a Christmas party that afternoon but as soon as she heard about the cyclone’s
sharp movements, Sandra sent the revellers home. “Batten down,” she told them. “It’s
coming.” The wind was already picking up.
Sandra left the TAA offices and headed home to Ludmilla where a family Christmas
gathering had been planned for 100 people the next day. She arrived just as movers
delivered a new teak pool table she had bought for the family, which took up most of the
lounge room. It was to play a major role later in the evening.
Family began to arrive in numbers to play pool with others planning to head for midnight
mass. Sandra began to cook, thinking that, if the storm was as destructive as forecast, they
would have no power the next day for refrigeration or cooking. With the food on the stove
she began to gather the family photos together, placing them in plastic bags for safe
keeping. Thinking the kids might be cold if the rain got heavier, she also packed extra
clothes in TAA airline bags. She sent her husband Benny out to get fresh milk and clothes
for the kids before the weather got worse.
Benny returned after a harrowing journey and told Sandra that it was getting “really bad”.
The group started to feel threatened and all 12 huddled under the new pool table before
heading to the bathroom, then to another room. The roof was now nearly gone. “We packed
suitcases all along the louvres because we thought it would protect us from flying debris,”
she remembers. “That was our last place to shelter and we knew if something happened
there, there’s nowhere else to go.”
When the eye passed over, Benny and friend Ron Harris decided to go out and nail the roof
back on. “So they were up there nailing the roof back and then they could hear the cyclone
coming back so had to try and come back inside to shelter in the hallway. The noise was
unforgettable – like 100 jets going over,” says Sandra. “We sang Christmas carols because
the children didn’t really know the danger they were in. We all prayed as well. We prayed
that if anything happened, take the adults but please spare the kids.”
23
When the wind subsided Benny and Ron were able to open the door and get inside where
the family huddled. Once Benny saw that everyone was alright, he said he had to go to
check on his mother in Stuart Park. He and Ron went by foot and found a scene of utter
destruction where, Benny thought, no one could be alive. “They literally dug her out along
with my brothers and sisters-in-law. A fan had come through the wall and missed her by an
inch. All her clothes were ripped off. I had bought her a sheer negligée for Christmas and I
found it and gave it to her. She wore it for five days.”
Sandra went to the TAA offices and found all business was concentrated at the airport.
People were working round the clock to evacuate survivors south. “Seeing it firsthand at the
airport, I think overall, it was done pretty well,” she observes. “There were women and
children standing for hours in the blazing heat, just waiting patiently to get on a plane. Some
with injuries. Then they said TAA staff with families could go.”
Sandra gathered 22 Lew Fatt kids and their friends and got on a plane. “There were two or
three kids sitting on my lap and others, still injured, that had to lie in the aisles,” she recalls.
“I was going to Adelaide but I ended up in Brisbane. You just went to where the plane was
going.” She dropped off kids as she went.
After sitting for hours in the Brisbane airport she was approached by the TAA airport
manager asking why she hadn’t left. “Well,” said Sandra, “they haven’t called us yet. They
keep calling the refugees.”
“What do you think you are?” he replied. “There’s a plane going to Sydney and I’m putting
you and all these kids on it.”
So off they went to Sydney, then to a migrant hostel in Melbourne, and finally Adelaide. After
settling the kids she returned to Darwin. Getting on the plane she was stopped by a federal
policeman who said she couldn’t go back to Darwin without a permit. “I said ‘shoot me’,” she
remembers, “and kept on walking to the plane.”
Back at work, the TAA building was wrecked so the TAA staff moved in with Qantas. The
evacuations were on in full and the stories of survival and loss by those heading south
became worse every day. “It was very emotional, and some of the staff on the counter
couldn’t take it and had to leave,” she says. “You’d hear the stories of the men losing their
children or wives losing their husbands, and you had to listen. That was our job.”
Sandra and her family returned to what was left of their home and rebuilt it. TAA was bought
out by Australian Airways, which later merged with Qantas. Sandra was among the staff who
made the move to Qantas, where she worked for years until she joined Lyn Adrian in a travel
business. She bought the business outright in 2000 and Sandra Lew Fatt and Associates
Travelworld was born, much to the delight of Darwin’s corporate travellers.
Sandra Lew Fatt is still prepared today. Those turbulent days of Cyclone Tracy have
remained fresh in her mind, prompting her to build a concrete cyclone shelter in her back
garden. “Even now I want my family to be together if there’s ever a cyclone,” she explains. “I
tell them I want them to immediately come over to my place. That’s why they call it Sandra’s
Bunker.”
24
Owen Peake – Electricity Supply Undertaking
Restoring Power
Not only did thousands of Darwin residents lose their homes to the fury of Cyclone Tracy,
but their efforts to rebuild were exacerbated by the complete devastation of the power grid.
The storm flattened a high percentage of the city’s overhead power lines, leaving steel
power poles twisted like pretzels and broken power lines strewn across the roadways. In the
days before self-government, it was up to the Commonwealth’s Department of Works, led by
its mains engineer Owen Peake, to head the effort to restore power to Darwin as soon as
humanly possible.
Owen was sent to Darwin in 1969 after having served as an electrical engineer on
hydroelectric power stations in Papua New Guinea. As mains engineer he was responsible
for designing all overhead lines around the Territory. So, in December of 1974, when a
cyclone was identified to Darwin’s northeast, his team tracked the oncoming storm closely
for a few days. By lunchtime on Christmas Eve Owen informed all concerned that it was
going to make a direct hit on Darwin and it was likely to be severe.
As the storm approached, Owen joined wife Helen in their third floor flat in Smith Street. In
the early hours of the morning the roof was blown off but the building remained steadfast.
“Two days later, our neighbours on the first floor decided to evacuate and handed us their
keys and said we could have their unit,” recalls Owen. “We lived there for the next 10 years.”
The cyclone passed directly over the city delivering high winds before the calm eye passed
over, and even stronger winds after the eye. The power failed at about 4am as,
progressively, power poles were flattened or bent with the lines snapping in the high winds.
Conductors clashed as flying debris snapped lines producing powerful pyrotechnical flashes
and eventually took the city into complete darkness. The power station, however, continued
to operate until there was no load remaining.
After first light and the secession of high winds, it was clear there was a major job ahead in
restoring power. They soon discovered that the northern suburbs had fared a lot worse than
the CBD. “The poor construction of the modern houses produced V-shaped trails of debris
down wind, that ripped apart the adjacent houses,” recalls Owen. “You could see the first
house had flown apart and the others downstream had been destroyed by the debris from
the first one.”
Owen got out on the street by 10am and, to his amazement, contractors were already out
clearing the debris from the roadways. He drove to the power station, at that time located at
Stokes Hill Wharf, where a group of his workmates had sheltered with their families for the
night. Major damage to the power station had been avoided. “I learned that the power station
was serviceable with a bit of effort and it was not a problem in getting supply restored,”
remembers Owen. “Our big problem was that the distribution system was pretty much gone.”
He drove to the hospital at the end of Mitchell Street to survey the damage, as the first
priority for power restoration. Though some sections of the complex were severely damaged,
other areas were equipped to take patients.
25
The hospital was the first to have its power restored just four days after the cyclone, its
location close to the power station aiding the recovery. “The hospital had a dedicated feeder
from the power station and we concentrated on rebuilding that,” says Owen. “Once that
feeder was alive we then went back and reconnected houses a few days later.”
The main transmission lines survived the storm much better than the secondary distribution
lines that fed the suburbs and households. Some of the 66 000 Volt transmission lines
around Darwin had been built to much higher standards than had been done previously. “As
a result there were lines in Darwin that were able to be brought back into service very quickly
because they were almost undamaged,” comments Owen. “In particular that involved a
transmission line between Stokes Hill and a substation in Snell Street in Parap. That line
was able to be brought back into service fairly quickly.”
The transmission line that went up to the northern suburbs had been built to the substandard
old code and was badly damaged, not recoverable. However, so many houses in the
northern suburbs were destroyed; there was very little load demand there. “We managed
without transmission into the northern suburbs, just using the 11KV distribution lines until we
were able to do significant repairs to the transmission system,” says Owen.
There was a rudimentary plan in place to restore power: ask for help from other electricity
utilities and around the country. The department got massive help from the ESU people
from other Territory Centres. Utility crews came from many places scattered around
Australia including from Cairns and Townsville. “Within a couple of weeks we had about 400
people doing line work in Darwin, about 100 of which were our own people from Darwin and
down the track,” he recalls. “Some of the Darwin people decided to evacuate because their
houses were gone, but some of them came back and worked enormous hours for weeks and
weeks, hardly going home.”
The plan was simple: recover poles from the debris and put them back up; fix what they
could fix because they had few new poles in reserve. “It was a complicated business of
deciding where to place resources to get the best ‘bang for your buck’. We had limited
resources and limited materials and we were trying to get as many people back on power as
we could – and that basically took six months,” says Owen.
Some lines were still in place and could be repaired. The department took those poles that
were broken off or bent and salvaged them by cutting them off or re-welding those that were
damaged. They also had limited supplies of replacement wires and they had to import huge
amounts to be delivered by sea. “We borrowed it. We stole it. We had it manufactured,”
Owen observes. “We took everything irrespective of size and type that manufacturers had in
their warehouses. We were getting container loads of wire in the first three weeks.”
Power began to be restored street by street, business by business. After six months the
power was restored to most Darwin users who still has something to connect it to.
Today Owen Peake is retired and living in Melbourne doing heritage work that celebrates the
history of engineering in Australia. He says there were many lessons learned from the
Cyclone Tracy experience. “The obvious lesson was: don’t put it up in the air – put it
underground,” he states. “After the cyclone we didn’t do any more residential construction
overhead in the Darwin area, right through to today. That policy has held. All the new
construction in Darwin is now underground except for transmission lines. We also got Darwin
26
Reconstruction Commission money to underground some of the older suburbs that had been
patched-up after the cyclone – suburbs like Tiwi and Wanguri. More recently Nightcliff has
been undergrounded, that is effectively a continuation of the same program that’s been
happening progressively ever since Tracy.”
27
Todd McCourt – Norblast Industrial Solutions
Pitching-in
For prominent Darwin hotelier and industrialist, Todd McCourt, Cyclone Tracy was a
frighteningly exciting experience. He was 14 years old when the storm ravaged Darwin and
he recalls the morning after the storm, wading through the debris on the street and dodging
downed power lines. “I saw it as a grand adventure,” he says. “But I look back at it now after
having a family and think that you never want it to happen again. You lose everything. But
that was something I didn’t think about as a 14 year old - the financial consequences.”
At the time of the cyclone Todd’s father Bob and mother Heather owned and operated a
crane and steel fabrication business – McCourt’s Cranes. So Todd and his five brothers
grew up in a construction environment and were all driving heavy machinery by the time they
hit their teens. They were skills that would soon come in very handy.
On the night of Christmas Eve 1974, there were eight McCourts sheltering in their Moil
home. Gathered in the lounge, the house started to come apart with the wind and rain raging
through the walls. Then Bob McCourt made a memorable decision. “Dad split us up in the
house when the weather got really bad,” Todd recalls vividly. “He was about three or four
steps away from all of us. He and mother and the youngest were in the storeroom, two were
under the bed and two were under the closet. My brother Robert and I were under the
lounge which was upside down. Dad split us up so if one part of the house went, he wouldn’t
lose all of his children. Dad was a bit like that. He never liked it if we all flew in the same
plane either.”
Later in the night when the eye passed over they looked outside and saw a neighbour’s boat
in their front garden. Although it was quiet and tempting to go out for a look, Todd’s father
cautioned against it. Bob knew the wind and rain came back with a vengeance. Thankfully,
they didn’t go outside that terrible night because when it was all over they climbed from the
debris that was once their home, and the boat was gone.
As the owner of 15 cranes, Bob McCourt was in great demand in the cyclone’s aftermath.
Tonnes of debris of all kinds and trees littered the roads across the city. “The next day Dad
had cranes out on the road helping clean-up. He had cranes clearing streets. They lifted
trees and big debris off the roads. He donated his services and equipment for nearly a
month. It was the spirit of the time.”
With the house gone, the family went to see if they could move into a property they owned in
Berrimah, but that was also wrecked – the house pushed off its foundations. Undaunted,
they moved into the company’s workshop on Reichardt Road that had very minor damage.
The McCourts were joined by all their employees. “From memory there were about 40 or 50
of us living in the shed,” remembers Todd. “The workers and their families all lived in the
shed. There was a big pot of stew made at night and everybody ate. We all banded together
and that’s where we lived for about six months. You had the women peeling onions on one
side of the shed and the blokes changing tyres on the other.”
During the day, Todd and two brothers were enlisted into the Darwin clean-up as well as
their dad. They were sent on heavy-lifting cranes to straighten the power poles that were
twisted like pretzels by Tracy’s fury. “We were driving cranes at 14 and 15 years old. Three
28
of us pulled down the 2 1/2 Mile workshops. We were clearing the site until the unions arcedup. Then someone sent us out to Nightcliff and Rapid Creek to straighten the power poles
there,” he recalls. They did that for months.
Bob continued running his crane business until 1978 when he sold up in order to live his
dream and buy a prawn trawler. After that he went down south and built a sporting complex
before returning to Darwin and building Tipperary Station for flamboyant entrepreneur
Warren Andersen. Bob died in 2006 and Heather went on to operate the BP garage at
Fannie Bay and continues to work with her son Paul.
Most of the McCourt boys went on to become prominent Darwin businessmen. “Business
has always been in the blood,” notes Todd. “I’ve got five other brothers and four of them are
in business. I’ve got two brothers who put all the steel up on the Darwin Convention Centre,
and my company, Norblast. did all the protective coatings for the Centre.”
Todd McCourt went on to own and operate Allblast until selling it in 2001. He joined Norblast
in 2006 just as the resources boom hit the Top End. The company services the oil and gas
industry tackling anything that needs corrosion protection, concrete repair, high pressure
water blasting and cleaning. They have produced work for ERA (Ranger Uranium), Coogie
Resources, BHP, ENI, and Woodside, among others. Norblast has also opened premises in
Perth. In the hospitality industry, Todd owned two city bars: the Wisdom and, until recently,
the Fox, as well as two hotels, the Ashton Lodge and Barramundi Lodge.
Todd and his brother Matt bought and refurbished the Darwin Dental Clinic in 2004, which is
now known as Wisdom Bar & Café. They opened it eight years ago and were tested by the
Territory weather early-on. A cyclone warning was broadcast two weeks after the opening.
He acted immediately, pulling the shade cloth structure apart and stacking it away, removing
everything that could blow away. The wind came but Wisdom was prepared. “In business
you do a risk management plan and think about your employees,” he observes. “We believe
we set a standard along Mitchell Street as far as the (Wisdom) bar goes. We pack up and
close up and send everyone home when we have cyclone warnings. I don’t want one of my
employees driving home at 2am in the morning with tree branches falling and debris flying in
the air. I know what it’s like.
29
Napoleon and Irene Pantazis – Parap Fine Foods
Lingering Fears
Irene Pantazis remembers Christmas Eve 1974 as being the most terrifying night of her life.
It was an event that saw the ferocity of the storm separate her from her husband, Napoleon
‘Paul’ Pantazis, and forced to shelter helplessly while the house fell apart around her. It
scared her deeply, leaving a frightening emotional memory that’s still triggered by Darwin’s
wet season weather, 40 years on. “Even today,” she relates, “when there’s a high wind and
you hear that whistling howl, I just melt like butter.”
Paul and Irene Pantazis own and, along with son Neville and daughter Paula, operate Parap
Fine Foods, a Darwin culinary landmark stocked with a generous variety of fresh foods and
food products, much of it imported from every corner of the globe. It is an iconic shop,
frequented by a religiously loyal clientele that mirrors Darwin’s multicultural population
makeup. The business survived Cyclone Tracy and, like the damaged city around it,
emerged even stronger than ever before.
Paul came to Australia in 1951 from his native Cyprus, meeting and marrying Perth girl
Irene, born of Greek parents. For years he ran the Victoria Hotel’s Dining Room and Snack
Bar before opening Parap Fruit and Vegetable Supply (which later became Parap Fine
Foods) in 1968. It was located in the Parap shops where Pickles Mexican Restaurant is
today. “From fruit and vegies to start with, then we sell frozen stuff, dry goods, anything – a
delicatessen, a rotisserie," recalls Paul in his soft Cypriot accent. “Then the business started
to improve…until the cyclone come along.”
On the night of the cyclone Paul closed the shop at 9:30pm and the wind had just started to
pick up in Parap. The Pantazises heard the warnings but took little notice, having
experienced false alarms in the past. They went home to celebrate Christmas Eve, never
imagining what was to befall them. The weather got wild. “No one expected what we got,”
states Irene. “It was a freak.” By midnight the storm calmed down and Paul decided to take
his nephew Angelo to check on the shop. But the calm was a false end to the storm – it was
the cyclone’s eye passing over.
Dodging the fallen trees and the downed power lines, the pair made it to the shop. They saw
there was little damage to the exterior before going inside. Then about ten minutes later the
wind swung around as the eye passed over, and the storm doubled and tripled in intensity,
trapping the pair inside the shop until dawn.
Meanwhile, Irene and her family members – her sister Mena’s kids and Angelo’s pregnant
wife – sheltered in the bedroom as the house began to fall apart. They decided to move into
the bathroom and none too soon as a timber rafter came crashing through the ceiling. “We
put some pillows and blankets in the bathtub and put the children in there, thinking they
would be warm,” remembers Irene. “But by morning the children were soaked – like drowned
rats because the rain had seeped through. Here I thought they were warm and cosy, and
they were drenched. It was quite devastating. Half the house was gone and everything was
in the swimming pool. The garbage can did not move!”
But Paul and Irene’s main worries were for each other, having been separated by the
storm’s ferocity. At dawn when Paul and Angelo returned to the house they recoiled at the
30
devastation but were thankful everyone was unhurt. There was roof damage to the shop and
some perishables were ruined. They also lost a second house they owned, but insurance
eased the pain. “The telephone in our shop and at home worked,” recalls Paul. “It was
incredible. They were one of the only phones in town working and, of course, everyone
wanted to use ours. A little later we got a bill for $1000!”
In the end they were approached by the evacuation centre located at Darwin High School,
giving them all the frozen and fresh food left in the shop. It was that food, in a city with no
power, water or accommodation, that sustained survivors in the area for the first few days.
Paul stayed behind to get the shop and the house back into operation while Irene and their
kids were evacuated to Perth. They were back in business a couple of months later, having
made renovations and upgrades. Parap Fine Foods traded until 1988 when they moved into
their spacious new facility a few steps from the old one.
But terrible times cut deeply into the psyche leaving lasting scars. “The cyclone affected
people in different ways,” observes Irene Pantazis. “It altered my thoughts. It’s changed me
a lot. I’m a calmer person now, more caring, more understanding.”
31
Des Nudl – Port Darwin Motors
The Damage Done
Port Darwin Motors was a Territory institution that was initiated by Des Nudl’s father, Hans,
back in 1939. But the Nudl name (pronounced ‘Null’) goes back further as his grandfather
came to the Territory as an early aviator, inventor and gold prospector. Port Darwin Motors,
a Leyland, Austin, Morris and Jaguar dealership, survived the bombing of Darwin, and after
a wartime hiatus, Des’ father started it up again in 1946 before moving from their original
Peel Street location in the city to the Stuart Highway in 1954. Des and his brother took over
the business in 1962.
On the night of the cyclone on Christmas Eve of 1974, warnings prompted Des to send all
his employees home early. They packed up the workshop and parked the cars close to each
other before going home to Parap. There was a Christmas party out in the northern suburbs
that Des and his wife attended until the weather started to turn violent. The couple got in the
car about midnight and made their way back to Parap, with stranded cars and fallen trees
already blocking their way.
They were only home a short time when a canopy in the back garden sheared off, taking
flight with the winds threatening the house. Shortly thereafter their service manager and his
wife, who were living in a caravan park out on McMillans Road, come to shelter at Des’s
house. Eventually the cyclone’s eye came over and the group all went outside to assess the
household damage. For 20 minutes the storm abated, remaining still and silent until a distant
roar broke the calm.
It was the other side of the cyclone, driving the two couples back into the house. “But within
seconds the front doors, the backdoors and the sliding doors blew out,” Des recalls. “The
roof was off and we were blown into a bedroom. We stayed like that until 6am in the morning
and when we stepped out on the veranda where the front doors once were, you could see
the ocean. There was nothing left. It was unbelievable.”
They went to Port Darwin Motors at just after 7am, to discover vandals had already stolen
wheels from their display cars. Other cars were crushed after neighbouring Bridge Motors’
brick fence fell on them and part of the roof of the workshop was gone. They brought in the
service manager’s damaged caravan and parked it in the workshop where there was still
roofing in place. “Four of us – my wife and I and his wife and him – lived there for about
three months. He and I set about trying to help people patch up their cars so they could drive
out. There were cars with roofs bashed in and windscreens smashed and we just did as
good [a job] of repairs as possible. Then the government came and wanted some of our
undamaged cars for people who came up from interstate. I told them I needed an order
because they couldn’t just take them. Later they tried to bring the cars back, but I told them,
‘no… they’re yours now’.”
Port Darwin Motors was eventually rebuilt, the workshop reopened and Des eventually
bought out his brother. The business grew and prospered until 1999, after 60 years in
business. That is when Des sold it to neighbouring Kerry Holden, who amalgamated it into
their current business. “We survived and did good business after the cyclone,” Des
remembers. “Darwin’s always been a place that booms or busts and I think it’s still the case
today. It’s like trying to sail a boat on a lake with circulating winds.”
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Savvas Savvas – K Savvas Footwear
Shoes and the Cyclone
K Savvas Footwear is a Nightcliff landmark, a traditional family retail business in an age of
corporate chains. They advertise the message, “You use your feet every day, so it’s
important to make sure you have the right support. At K Savvas Footwear Pty Ltd you’ll find
a fantastic range of footwear to suit your feet! As well as practical shoes, K Savvas Footwear
Pty Ltd pride themselves on bringing the most stylish shoes to Darwin.” It’s an old time
practical sell that still resonates well after 50 years in business.
It was that that sort of no-nonsense approach that made Kyriacou (Kel) Savvas’s shops so
popular before the 1974 cyclone. The entrepreneur from Cyprus came to Darwin in 1949,
opening his Smith Street city shop in 1952. But by the 60s Darwin’s growth had spread into
the northern suburbs so, not one to miss out on a business opportunity, Kel opened a
second store in the emerging suburb of Nightcliff in 1964. By 1974 that shop was firing with
four staff on hand.
On the night Tracy made her dramatic debut Kel was leaving the Nightcliff shop after late
night trading on the Tuesday evening. He returned to the family home in Larrakeyah as the
winds began to pick up strength.
Savvas Savvas, one of Kel’s six children, was just 12 years old at the time. He remembers:
“I went to bed late and mum woke me up because there was water leaking in the house. So
we had pots everywhere to catch the water. Then it got worse when other people’s debris
began hitting the house. Then we all huddled in my sister’s bedroom. My twin brothers were
sitting in the cupboard and I was holding the door closed. It was frightening.” The family
survived the storm but, like so many others, lost the roof as well as a few walls.
The dawn brought calm and the realisation that the town had been destroyed. Kel and a few
of his sons drove to the city to examine their shop there. “We lost the roof and all the stock
was damaged,” recalls Savvas. “Same in Nightcliff. But in Nightcliff we didn’t lose the roof
but flying debris ripped it open and the water poured in. The stock was almost all lost
because we had no insurance on the city store and the storeroom.”
With the house wrecked, the Savvas family moved in with Nightcliff neighbours who had a
two storey hardware store and a dry ground floor where they slept. The next week saw the
women and kids evacuated to Brisbane and later Toowoomba for three months.
Kel stayed behind and repaired the house. “We didn’t know what was going to happen to the
town. Lots of people were saying that was the end of Darwin so Dad closed down the city
store and moved everything into Nightcliff.”
Savvas came into the business after finishing high school in 1978 and his father kept an eye
on the business until he passed away in 2010. “Dad showed me the ropes,” says Savvas.
“Buying was always the hard bit. But when a rep came through I always went along to watch
Dad and find out how it worked. He was a great teacher.”
33
Mark Finocchiaro – Fannie Bay Bakery
Bread for the Survivors
Mark Finocchiaro was raised in a Sicilian bakery like fine semolina bread fresh from a brick
oven. His mother and father operated the business and Mark grew up with flour under his
fingernails. It was a profession from which he could not escape. Even after immigrating to
Australia, he found himself back in the bakery business, and in Darwin’s desperate hour of
need he and his family provided an essential service.
Mark Finocchiaro owned the Fannie Bay Bakery which became the Darwin Bakery in
Winnellie. A baker all his life, he came to Australia from Sicily in 1952, landing in Fremantle
where he stayed for four years. It was there he met his wife Gay and came straight to Darwin
after the wedding in 1956 to join his two brothers. “I came to Darwin to do whatever I could
do,” Mark remembers. “I was sick and tired of bakery work so I came to Australia. But I
couldn’t find anything that I liked any better than that. So I come back to a bakery.”
Darwin already had three bakeries when Mark arrived: Walshe’s Bakery in Smith Street,
(where the Darwin Central Hotel is today), DX Bakery in Cavenagh Street, and Quong’s
Bakery in Smith Street west. Mark went to work for DX, baking in forms, “not fancy breads”,
before eventually leaving to start his own bakery in 1961. He called it the Fannie Bay
Bakery, located where Fannie Bay Super Pizza is today. “After commencing that business
he bought out DX Bakery and shut it down,” recalls Mark’s son Ross Finocchiaro. “In 1971
father built what is now the Darwin Bakery in Winnellie. That was new premises and he
relocated and modernised it with new machinery and a modern business platform.”
On Christmas Eve 1974 Mark decided to come home early because he and Gay were
hosting a family Christmas dinner. “My wife was cooking because we were expecting the
whole family over for Christmas Eve. She told me to bring everything in from the veranda
because there were cyclone warnings,” says Mark in his soft Sicilian accent. “A total of 36
people showed up for the celebration – all six brothers and their families. But by 9:30 we
were looking for buckets to catch the leaking water. Then I saw that we had no roof any
more. So we took refuge in the long passageway. Over 30 people were in the hall and one
bedroom. So all that was left in the morning was the passageway and one bedroom. The
rest of the house was wrecked.”
Mark emerged from the rubble and, when he was satisfied that all were well; he went to
survey the damage to the Winnellie bakery. He found the damage to be minor with the
parapet over the flour room having fallen inside, destroying the flour reserves. The other
parapet had fallen forward, missing the mixing room. “We could run those mixers because
the damage was at the other end,” says son Ross. “But all the flour was damaged and had
to be disposed of. The military flew in flour and installed a huge gen set to power the
bakery.”
The military supplied generators to what they saw as essential food production: Pauls Milk
and the Darwin Bakery. That was day three after the cyclone. Mark worked to get the bakery
back on line as most of his family were evacuated south. All five Finocchiaro families were
evacuated on the same aircraft.
34
Mark’s brothers Benny and Peter stayed to help restart the bakery, along with a few key staff
members. About 30cm of water remained in the bakery while one oven was damaged but
the other was operational. “One oven was good enough for the loaves we had to supply,”
observes Mark. “About 1500 loaves a day. The military flew in some flour. We were
producing bread four days after the cyclone when the building was still damaged. We
delivered it to the government [evacuation centres] at Darwin, Dripstone and Nightcliff high
schools. Anybody who comes for bread – it was free.”
The Darwin Bakery slowly returned to its previous condition, servicing Darwinites returning
from evacuation. Mark and his family rebuilt his house and finally sold the Darwin Bakery in
1988. Mark turned to another family business for semi-retirement. “I invest my money in
Gaymark,” he says. “We formed a family company and called it after my wife Gay and I. So
it’s Gaymark and that was incorporated in 1968 to do property development. Then I bought
some properties in WA and started a business called MarGay. And that’s still going. ”
However, old habits die hard and, although Mark sees himself as a property developer, he
still wakes up every morning while it’s still dark outside, just as he had done for most of his
baking life. At 86, today he watches TV rather than going to the bakery to start the mixing
machines. But going to work is important. “I still come to the office every day,” he sighs.
“Sometimes only to read the paper and talk to the boys, Ross and Terry. But we still do
everything as a family.
35
Mavi Milevoj – The Maddalozzo Group
Disaster at Mandorah
It was Christmas Eve 1974 and every room at the Mandorah Hotel was booked out, others
came for à la carte dining, and 300 were expected to cross Darwin Harbour in ferries to
celebrate that night with a brilliant holiday buffet. That kind of frenetic business was normal
for a holiday or even a weekend for the Mandorah Hotel. But cyclone warnings became
more urgent and by 5pm the wind started picking up and the seas were getting rough so the
pub’s owner, Angelo Maddalozzo, cancelled all ferry services to Mandorah.
Only one guest was left at the hotel because he had arrived the day before. “We went into
lockdown,” recalls Angelo’s daughter Mavi Milevoj, today of the Maddalozzo Group, then a
19-year-old. “Nobody really knew what to expect. Three weeks earlier we had warnings and
nothing happened. That was the feeling. We just blew it off.”
The Maddalozzos had never experienced a cyclone hitting Mandorah before that night. Life
for Angelo and his family, until then, was hard but rewarding. He had arrived in Australia
from his native northern Italy in 1951. A builder and brickie, he had gone directly to Mount
Isa to get building work. From there he and a mate travelled to Darwin by car, an arduous
trip that took them seven weeks. He married, raised a family and stayed until he passed
away in 2006.
Angelo started a construction business building pre-fab huts, storing building materials at Six
Mile on the Stuart Highway. The pair had to travel there by truck and had to cross the train
tracks when the goods train still serviced Darwin. One day he stalled the truck on the tracks
and the train wrecked the truck. Undaunted, from then on they carried the building materials
on their shoulders to the city building sites.
Angelo started hiring other tradesmen, successfully winning government contracts. It
became a family business and building contractor. Angelo purchased the Mandorah pub
from Alan Carter in 1969 together with the Schreiter family. It was comprised of two
corrugated iron sheds – a pub and a kitchen. A ferry came with it. “There was a bar and a
kitchen already there so he decided to knock it down and put in something more substantial,”
remembers Mavi. “We built the bar, the restaurant, the kitchen and then we had 20 rooms
and a pool. We had three ferries: the Milson, a 120 passenger steel boat called the
Mandorah Queen, and the smaller 60 passenger speedboat called the Corina.” Business
boomed.
On Christmas Eve 1974, while the Maddalozzo family was in Mandorah, Angelo was in
Darwin at their Fannie Bay home. When the weather got dangerous that night, he went down
to the ferry jetty at the old Stokes Hill Wharf where the Mandorah Queen was docked. On
board was skipper Fred Wolfe, his girlfriend and another mate. Angelo told them to put the
boat on the mooring and go home to sit out the storm. Oh no, they argued. They wanted to
take the boat into Woods Inlet on the Mandorah side of the harbour to shelter from the wind.
“So Dad came home and collected three bottles of champagne and an Italian Christmas
cake,” relates Mavi. “And he went back and told them to take it and ‘I’ll see ya tomorrow’.
They said ‘fine’. Dad went home and they tried to sail down into the protection of Woods
Inlet. They were lost and died that night.” The wreck of the Mandorah Queen was not
36
discovered until 1981 and the bodies of her three crew members were never recovered. The
wreck remains today a favourite artificial reef for harbour fishermen.
Meanwhile, the storm was lashing the Mandorah Hotel. At 9pm, taking shelter in the pub
area, they could hear the trees crashing down outside. “Then after about an hour it calmed
down and we thought it was finished,” says Mavi. “The pub was still alright. And then it just
came back and the wind did a U-turn and came at us from another direction. Then it went on
and on and on until about 3 o’clock in the morning.”
By then she had transferred to her unit and heard a loud crash on the roof. It was the entire
wall of another unit next to her that had landed on it. She remembers the terror: “I got the
door opened and something flew by in front of my face. So I got down on my knees and I
crawled towards the office, and I saw the things that were flying around were the kitchen
knives. They were like Frisbees!”
She made it to the office and was dragged in to find her family and staff sheltering there. The
office was protected by cooler rooms and a dining room. Then they heard a great crack – the
plate glass windows were shattering as the back wall of the bar came crashing down. “The
noise was horrific. And the colour of the sky was purple and green and red. It was like a
horror movie that never really happens in real life,” recalls Mavi.
Morning saw the storm pass. When the Maddalozzos and the staff emerged from the hotel
office they were struck by the magnitude of the damage. While roofs and walls and windows
had gone, the strangest sight of all was stranded on the front lawn. “The Milson was moored
in the marina overnight,” says Mavi. “And in the morning it was up on the lawn in front of the
units. It had been picked up and deposited on the front lawn.” The other vessel, the Corina,
was moored at Stokes Hill and it went down as had the Mandorah Queen.
In the morning Angelo left his home in Fannie Bay taking two hours to get to the wharf,
dodging debris and power lines along the way. He had no idea whether his family across
Darwin Harbour in Mandorah was alive or not. All communications were down. As he got to
the wharf a fishing trawler pulled in. Angelo asked the skipper to take him across to
Mandorah to see if all was well. They made the crossing but did not have to land. His family
were all lined up on the shore and, when he saw that everyone was OK, he turned back to
Darwin.
The rebuilding of the Mandorah Hotel began. The fact that they were on generator power
meant they had electricity well before Darwin. Although everything was wet and there was
extensive damage, the Maddalozzos were able to make the place liveable and avoid
evacuation. “We stayed in Mandorah,” states Mavi. “We were fortunate. We had power and
we had water. We weren’t reliant on town facilities. It was the best place to be.”
37
Hugh Bradley – Ward Keller
Battling to Get Back
Hugh Bradley, the retired Northern Territory Chief Magistrate and then the managing partner
of Ward Keller,- was in Bali when Cyclone Tracy demolished Darwin. Holidaying with
colleague Michael Maurice and their partners, he heard about the cyclone and set about
collecting enough money to get back to Sydney because the Darwin airport was closed.
When they landed in Sydney they found that the Commonwealth was prohibiting any access
to Darwin with the exception of those holding entry permits.
Hugh recalls his desperate attempt to return to Darwin. He and Michael Maurice started in
Sydney, then travelled to Canberra, before landing in Alice Springs trying unsuccessfully to
get a permit to return to Darwin. All of his business partners were either out of Darwin or in
the hospital as a result of the cyclone. One of the partners, Peter James, was flown to Perth
with a severe slash, caused by a window, across his chest.
Hugh remembers: “When we got to Alice Springs, Michael and I realised that they [the
Commonwealth Government] had no legal power so we rang the Darwin courthouse and
arranged for an application to be made to Justice Ward [once Ward Keller partner] who was
a judge of the NT Supreme Court. We had an appointment for a telephone application to the
judge for an injunction, set down for 9am the next day. But the word must have gotten out
that these two lawyers were going to make a nuisance of themselves. We got a call at 11:30
that night and they said, ‘can you be at the airport at 6am tomorrow morning?’ We said yes.
And they said, ‘we’ve got a ride for you’.”
It was 2 January 1975 and the aircraft waiting for the two lawyers was the same aircraft used
to take the Deputy Prime Minister, Jim Cairns, up to Darwin the day before. There was
nowhere for the air crew to stay in Darwin so they flew to Alice Springs to spend the night.
The plan was to then fly back to Darwin at 6am to pick up their VIP passenger. The lawyers,
minus any permits, got on board.
Hugh disembarked the plane and went straight to his house in the Narrows. His elevated
home had lost the walls around the living-dining area, with much of the roof also blown off.
The three bedrooms, were however, all dry. He moved in and, because he had an address,
his wife Sue was able to come back. “Then the Army came by and asked if they could patch
up these walls, and I said, ‘bloody oath’. So I ended up with a corrugated iron wall and a
patched-up corrugated iron roof. And we lived like that for a couple years,” he recalls.
Hugh found the Ward Keller offices, in the building that is now a dental clinic on Mitchell
Street, to be dry. There was minor window and roof damage but the office had been spared
major destruction. But the partners and solicitors and secretaries were gone and Peter
James was in hospital in Perth. They conferred by phone and all agreed that the staff who
remained in Darwin could come back to work on full salary and the partners’ pay would be
reduced to $100 a week.
They worked under those conditions for the next six months, until business was normalised.
“We had run a big agency practice up here so we did a lot of legal work for people down
south,” says Hugh Bradley. “Quite a number of firms owed us money for agency work. So we
38
wrote to each of them and said, ‘instead of waiting for you to get paid, can you pay us in
advance?’ And they all did.”
Hugh spent a good deal of the weeks following the cyclone helping repair the damage on
some of his friend’s houses. They scavenged building materials from houses set for
demolition, fitting them to damaged houses like Nick Paspaley’s home and Peter James’,
who was able to return once he’d been released from hospital.
Hugh remembers 1975 to have been a great time to live in Darwin. It was a time when
everyone pulled together to help rebuild each other’s lives. “I don’t remember any real pain,”
he says. “You can hardly feel any pain when you think of the 71 people that died and the
people who lost everything. I was in a dry house, patched up. I had a job and friends. We
had 17 or 18 people living there at the time because the government started letting people
back into Darwin as long as you could give them an address. We just told people to name
our house. They would rock up and sleep on the floor and quite a number of people around
town to this day remember staying at Chez Bradley in the months after the cyclone.”
39
John Hardy – Hardy Aviation
Staying on to Help
John Hardy, most recently of Hardy Aviation, has always been known as a pioneer of the
Territory air transport industry. However, when Cyclone Tracy ravaged Darwin on Christmas
Eve of 1974, the man who was to give us Airnorth was no longer flying. He was working as a
radiographer at Darwin Hospital, then in Larrakeyah.
John came to Darwin to fly. In 1971 he began flying for SAATAS (South Australian and
Territory Air Services) between Darwin and the Indonesian island of Seram. American
energy giant Gulf Western had bought an oilfield in that isolated island. He also began
regular flights to the remote Aboriginal communities in the Top End that were all
experiencing vigorous growth in infrastructure at the time. “Those were the days when they
were building houses and offices and it was flat out,” recalls John. “The Australian people
had made their decision to populate the north or perish and to look after the Aboriginal
people.”
After a year SAATAS sacked half its staff (some of whom had been ‘industrially active’) and
John Hardy was among them. Undaunted, John returned to his former occupation as a
radiographer at the Darwin Hospital. Then after a month SAATAS called and asked if he
would like his old job back. But John had four kids and he was on good steady money with
the hospital, so he went back to them part-time, flying one day a week.
That lasted three years and was the situation when Tracy raised her ugly head in 1974.
“That night I got called to the hospital by Steve Baddeley to look after this bloke who broke
his ankle,” remembers John. “After I took the x-rays I drove back but the cyclone was now
closer and it became the most exciting ride of my life. Power lines were down and were
bouncing around sparking and the rain was coming in buckets. Because I’m a trained
navigator, I used all my skills to come home in Wanguri in almost zero visibility.”
Wanguri and Nakara were the worst hit. He had five children by then and everyone gathered
in the living room and the storm was still getting worse, with the noise described as otherworldly. The children were terrified. “The wind broke the louvres and the glass was flying into
the fans and the lights went out, so we used flashlights to get into the bathroom. We could
hear the sound of metal tearing and then the roof went.”
They all got out and under the house into the laundry. Then the walls started to go and a
brick fell off the top course and slashed his daughter’s leg, cracking a bone. They spotted
their car and could see it was dry inside, so one by one made their way into the car. “We
shut the doors and the noise stopped and we all fell asleep. When day broke we thought
we’d stay with a neighbour but there were no neighbours with a roof. Nothing was left
standing. It was total devastation,” he recalls.
The Hardys, minus John, were evacuated with one daughter suffering a broken bone and
the baby diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia. John stayed, although no work was awaiting
him at the hospital with all injured flown out. He followed south and after three months
returned with a caravan that the family lived in for some time. Then in late 1975, John Hardy
returned to flying and was offered the job of managing SAATAS, “which didn’t please the
40
Health Department one bit because I was one of a very few radiographers in the Northern
Territory.”
Hardy ran SAATAS for three years until the business was wound up by its owner, putting 60
people out of work. At that time, the Territory Government’s Minister for Transport, Roger
Steele, made an announcement that his government would issue more licences for
operators to replace SAATAS. Then John, backed by Neville Walker, a principal of Henry &
Walker construction, along with a few other influential business people, deciding to start a
new airline following the demise of SAATAS. “We decided to form this company and call it
Airnorth,” he recounts. “I chose the name. It was easy and catchy. We didn’t have an
aeroplane but we had a name.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
John stayed on as manager of Airnorth until 1991during its rapid growth period. It is now
Australia’s oldest operating regional airline. John then kicked off a new airline, Hardy
Aviation, starting from humble beginnings with just two light aircraft in 1991. The company
now boasts a fleet of 25 and over 100 employees including ground staff, pilots and
engineers. Four of John and Marie Hardy’s five children work in the business.
It is a long way from that unforgettable night that the house came down around them and the
family car became their shelter from the storm.
41
George Voukolos – Fishing and Outdoor World
Surviving the Night from Hell
The shop is chock-a-block with customers eager to buy. Darwin’s Fishing and Outdoor World
on Cavenagh Street is buzzing with economic activity. Punters are here to choose from the
thousands of lures, rods reels and other gear that seems to take up every available
centimetre of space in this remarkable shop. It is an understatement to say that the
customers are keen to get out there amongst the barramundi.
What’s the reason for all this economic energy? A good wet season that sparked a strong
’run-off’, says shop owner George Voukolos. That’s when the monsoonal rainfall pours
across the savannah, sending all varieties of nutrients running off into the Top End
waterways. There that organic stew is greeted by a feeding frenzy of ravenous barramundi.
For anglers, the run-off is the time to get out there. “It was a short run-off this year but a
good run-off compared to last year,” observes George. “There’s lots of good size fish this
year and that’s good for business. If the fish are biting fishermen will go out.” And they’ll stop
at Fishing and Outdoor World on the way, just like they have for the past 42 years.
Fishing and Outdoor World was launched in 1972 by George and his partner Colin Stringer,
then both employees of competing sporting goods stores. “It started off as a joke,” George
recalls. ”I couldn’t get a day off to go fishing and he couldn’t get a day off so we decided to
start up a little shop that sells hunting, fishing and camping stock – no sporting goods.”
Located next door to where it is today, the shop had a ‘huge’ day of trading on Christmas
Eve 1974. They locked up a half hour early and went home.
The cyclone warnings that dominated the radio waves were largely ignored by Darwinites.
“We were very blasé about it,” remembers George. “Every year we had cyclones and they’d
go east and west and all around us, so no one worried about it. But then the Bureau [of
Meteorology] started to forecast Tracy to be a direct hit. In those days we didn’t know the
categories of cyclones so we didn’t know the damage they could do.”
George went to secure his elevated home in suburban Larrakeyah. By 9pm the rain and
wind became intense. By 11:30 a large iron girder crashed right through the roof and ceiling,
exposing the interior to the elements. George, his wife and two in-laws and two cats headed
for the precarious safety of the bathroom. Then the power went off, replaced by the
penetrating, eerie shriek of the storm. Half the roof was gone and the building shook before
the rest of the roof went. “The noise was amazing,” recalls George. “Just hearing things
ripped off the house. It was freezing cold with water pouring over us. We feared for our lives
and I still don’t know how we survived that night from hell.”
They were, however, spared the cyclone’s eye which passed over the airport and northern
suburbs. The eye brought a second, more powerful burst than the initial blow, flattening
countless homes.
By first light the winds eased. George and the survivors went downstairs to discover their
worst fears. “It was like the holocaust,” he says. “Like a nuclear explosion. Every house was
wrecked. We were lucky in that both ends of our house were gone leaving the middle where
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we huddled. It was just utter devastation. We thought it was just our area. We didn’t know
the whole northern suburbs were flattened.”
George got into his Toyota 4WD ute, which had been under the house, and headed for the
tackle shop. He had firearms there and was worried about looters getting in and taking them.
“All guns now have to be chained and locked in a cage but then they were all open on the
racks. I went to town and found the main window had broken, but the guns were all still
there. I wrapped them in blankets and took them to the NT Police station for safe-keeping,”
George recalls.
George and his wife June stayed on, avoiding evacuation, while his business partner and
their family went south. Darwin High School was now the supermarket. The food was all
free, laid out on tables for survivors to help themselves. For fresh, free meat they went to the
butchers, organised by the government for a month following the cyclone.
For the next few weeks George boarded up the shop window, cleaning up the post cyclone
mess. He gave away all the camping gear stock – the gas stoves, tents and blankets – and
eventually changed the glass window and reopened just five weeks after the storm.
Fortunately, the reopening coincided with the first all-services (Army and reconstruction
contractors) R&R. “That’s Rest and Recreation – and they all went fishing! It was
unbelievable because we were so busy so soon after the cyclone,” he remembers.
Since then Fishing and Outdoor World has continued to grow, maintaining its status as an
iconic Territory business. George bought out his partner and today, he lays claim to being
the longest-running tackle store in Australia – and the most popular. “We sell the cheapest
tackle anywhere in Australia,” he says. “We are one of the cheapest tackle shops in
Australia, so everyone comes here. I’d be [fishing tackle manufacturer] Shimano’s biggest
account for any individual shop in Australia.”
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Dwyn Delaney – Delaney’s Country and Western Store
Post-cyclone Wild Times
Delaney’s Store, in Darwin’s CBD, is a Territory retail landmark, the established epicentre for
all things country and western. Its selection of Akubra hats, RM Williams boots, Wrangler
jeans, crocodile products and all varieties of accessories has created a well-known haunt for
visiting ringers and jillaroos from remote Territory cattle stations, interstate rodeo riders and
urban cowboys alike.
But today’s store is the post-cyclone incarnation of the operation that has been a Darwin
institution for 75 years. Delaney’s 2014 store is actually the business’s third generation,
owned and managed by Dwyn Delaney, whose experience during the aftermath of Cyclone
Tracy saw him shaken and jailed. He recalls a wild few months where disaster survivors let
loose and law enforcement was absolute.
But Delaney’s Store had seen destruction before Tracy. It was Dwyn’s father Pat who
established it in 1938. Back then, the store was located in what was considered ‘outer
Darwin’, at the RAAF base gates in suburban Winnellie. A long-time Darwin resident, Pat
drove a flat-bed truck, carting sand that was used in the construction of the elegant Hotel
Darwin before starting Delaney’s – then a roadside general store that acted as a petrol
station, newsagent and supermarket.
But when war broke out Pat joined the RAAF as a navigator on a Beaufighter bomber
(nicknamed ‘Whispering Death’ by the Japanese), flying missions over south-east Asia. At
the war’s end he returned to Darwin to find his store had been obliterated during the
Japanese bombing of the Territory capital. Determined to continue trading, Pat built a
Sydney Williams hut on the same site creating the second generation of Delaney’s Store
selling a wide array of goods and services. Pat and wife Neta became specialists in servicing
the incoming international aircraft passengers with meals, while their planes refuelled for
their Sydney flights.
By the 1970s Delaney’s expanded to another location selling produce and stock feed. That
was when young Dwyn went to work there, piling heavy bags of feed. “Then I got fired. My
driver’s licence was suspended for six months, and Dad didn’t like that, so I went to work for
Darwin Truck Owners,” Dwyn recalls.
1974 found Dwyn working at the Royal Darwin Hospital where he worked as chief catcatcher, given the job of eradicating the plague of cats that inhabited the old hospital. “On
Christmas Eve I went to a party after work and didn’t listen to the radio,” he remembers. “So
it came as a surprise when it got really cold and I got soaked. I was trying to get some sleep
when the roof exploded. So, all the people at the party went onto the veranda. Some of them
got hurt. One guy got hit in the head with debris. I was in my jocks and the wind was blowing
like hell and the noise was astounding.”
In the morning when the weather had calmed, Dwyn crawled out of the wreckage and went
back to his home, which he found to have been destroyed with only the bathroom standing.
There were just floorboards remaining and there was a first-time ocean view, the garden
having been levelled. He went to check on Delaney’s Store. “The shop had all the windows
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and doors blown out but it was basically OK. It wasn’t like the devastation you saw in the
northern suburbs,” he says.
They went to work getting the shop back into operation, but Dwyn and some mates were
distracted and found a car that worked so they decided to drive it to Adelaide. The group
was amazed at the hospitality shown by people along the way for cyclone survivors. “I was
only in Adelaide for about a week and I decided to go back to Darwin,” says Dwyn. “You
could only get back in if you had a place to stay, so I ended up staying on the Patrice luxury
liner, which was moored in Darwin Harbour with a whole line of Greek waiters like in an
Agatha Christie movie. It might have been a luxury liner 70 years ago, but not anymore!”
One saving grace about living on a ship next to the wharf was a cargo of beer and cigarettes
that had been unloaded there. While much of it was written off, there were tonnes of beer
cans still undamaged. “We didn’t buy a bottle of beer for six months at Darwin Truck Owners
– and they drank a lot,” he says. “I used to get a carton for morning tea.”
With thousands evacuated and only the most committed staying on, a no-holds-barred wild
west atmosphere prevailed in post-cyclone Darwin. There was martial law. Armed federal
police were brought in to ensure law and order and eliminate looting. “Blokes were walking
around with guns thinking they were Wyatt Earp,” says Dwyn. “I was walking back to the
boat after having a few beers and stopped at a checkpoint. I asked the bloke there if I could
go through to the boat where I was staying. He said no and I got cranky and told him where
to go so he goes and gets a sawed-off shotgun out of his van. And that really got my back
up, so I started walking past him…..then ‘boom’ - he fires a round over my head.” Dwyn was
later told that the guard had liquor in the check point fridge and was never to be seen again.
What Dwyn then said to the guard cannot be repeated in a government publication. But he
just kept walking, challenging the guard to aim for his back. Someone watching all this said,
“He can’t do that. You should report him.” Delany agreed. Something must be done. “That
was my next mistake,” Dwyn says solemnly. “I went to the next checkpoint and reported the
bloke who had fired at me. But they didn’t believe me so they roughed me up, arrested me
and threw me in the back. Here I am in my footy shorts and not much else, and I go to the
bloody cop shop and I ended up in the slammer overnight. I got out at 8:30am and went to
court and got charged $20.” The martial law authorities never checked on his story of the
guard and the shotgun.
Cyclone Tracy took its toll and Pat Delaney left Darwin and moved to Brisbane after 36 years
in the shop. Dwyn took over Delaney’s with Hunter McPhee and they ran it until 1996 when
Dwyn sold the original business at the RAAF Base and opened the western wear shop in the
Chin Building in Darwin.
Delaney’s is now in its third generation, having evolved into a leading retailer of country and
western apparel, rodeo equipment and crocodile products. But, like many other cyclone
survivors, Dwyn Delaney looks back on those free-wheeling days following the disaster with
a smile. “They were wild times alright,” he says, “but I don’t know if I would ever want to
experience the likes of it again.”
45
Helmut and Joy Schimmel – Ironstone Lagoon Nursery
Replanting Darwin
When survivors of Cyclone Tracy emerged from wherever they were sheltering that terrifying
night and surveyed the devastated landscape in the light of day, one of the truly unexpected
sights was the trees and plants. None had survived the storm. Across Darwin, there wasn’t a
leaf to be found on a tree nor a frond left intact on a palm. It was a remarkable phenomenon
that had special relevance for Helmut and Joy Schimmel, owner-operators of the Ironstone
Lagoon Nursery.
The Schimmels opened the nursery in 1971, shortly after they married. Originally on a block
alongside the Stuart Highway, they moved to the property the nursery occupies today. They
went about turning it into a local showplace featuring an unprecedented variety of tropical
plants. Helmut had arrived in Australia from his native Germany seven years earlier, cycling
his way around the globe. But he met an outdoor-loving girl in Darwin who changed his life
and returned to be with her.
A trained horticulturist, Helmut started a landscaping business along with the nursery. “We
were young and enthusiastic,” he recalls. “We worked seven days a week for years. It didn’t
matter how long we worked. Some people say how lucky you are. But quite often with
people who are successful, I always say – maybe you were lucky, but in most cases it was
hard work.”
Darwin was different then, with Helmut asked to quote on jobs that simply would not occur
today. One such job saw him and his crew asked to cut down a giant banyan tree next to the
Police Station behind the Commercial Bank in what is today the new Charles Darwin Centre.
He began cutting the tree with his chainsaw before striking metal, wrecking the chain. He
ended up destroying four more chains on what they found to be a large piece of shrapnel
embedded in the tree since the Japanese bombing of Darwin. “So we came up with an idea:
‘let’s gelignite it’. So we created a safety barrier and told people we would be blowing up the
tree outside the police station. Can you imagine doing that today?” he laughs.
On the night of the cyclone Joy and Helmut were staying in a Sydney Williams ‘donga’ on
their original block along the Stuart Highway, where Allora Gardens Nursery is today. The
block had been acquired by the government, earmarked for use in a proposed railway. With
Joy seven months pregnant, the couple were given time to vacate the property. They also
had visitors. Helmut’s mother and brother were visiting from Germany to attend the birth of
the baby. When the weather began to get wild, the visitors were moved to the main shed at
the nursery down the road. Joy and Helmut started putting tape on the louvers on the donga
when water started coming in. “Everything was going backwards and forwards so we sat in
the wardrobe,” Joy remembers, her voice quaking with emotion. “We sat on two tea chests
with our wedding presents in them. Helmut sat with the black poodle on his lap and I had the
black cat on mine. I also had an umbrella so I didn’t get my hair wet.”
They emerged the next morning to the unforgettable sight of their nursery destroyed. Every
plant was smashed and shredded. But thankfully, no one was hurt. Their new home, under
construction at the back of the nursery, was not damaged but the large shadehouse roof was
now located across the road. The situation was complicated by the fact that they had no
water or power. “After the cyclone, some of our employees who lived in Alawa and their
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families came and moved into the big shed because it wasn’t very badly damaged. But it
took us quite a while to get a generator. It took two months because everyone wanted one,”
says Helmut.
With Darwin flattened and all vegetation destroyed, it seems logical that a horticulturist and
plant nursery would be in demand. Not so says Helmut. “We thought we would be in on the
ground floor but after the cyclone, plants were given free to the public from the government
nursery. We had to lobby the government to stop giving free plants away. It wasn’t just us,
but other nurseries too. People said, ‘why should we buy plants when the government gives
them away free?’ So it was very hard to get back onto our feet after the cyclone.”
It was also hard to get labour. “People who worked in the nursery suddenly became roofers,”
recalls Helmut. “They got paid triple what I could afford. In reality it was very hard getting
back again.”
Eventually the government stopped giving away plants. The Schimmels had to drive to
Queensland to buy tube stock to start up again while Helmut’s mother and brother also
drove to Queensland and filled the truck with coconuts because Darwin’s coconut trees had
been wiped out.
Finally, after a year, government landscaping contracts began to appear with Helmut leading
large crews in the rejuvenation of the Darwin landscape. They went to work rejuvenating the
lagoon and the nursery property, planting 35 000 native trees. The Ironstone Lagoon
Nursery went on to win a host of awards, and is today operated by Joy and Helmut’s son
Hardy – who missed the cyclone by six weeks.
The Schimmels are now retired and migrate between their shady lagoon-side home and their
Adelaide River cattle station. But the cyclone is never far from their thoughts. “It affected
everybody,” observes Helmut. “If it had affected only a few people I think it would have been
worse. But everybody was in the same boat. It was a life-changer.”