March 24, 2025 • 55 mins
Darwin was a vibrant and fun city in the 1970's. At least until Cyclone Tracy blew in on Christmas morning of 1974, carving a path of destruction unlike many we've seen in this country. This week, in an episode written while under the looming spectre of Cyclone Alfred in Brisbane a couple weeks ago, Aaron takes John and Sean through the tale of Australia's most notorious cyclone. Find the video version on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@CheekyTalesPod
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I'm sureif you listen to this podcast,
you've probably heardwhat was happening
while I was writing this episodeon Friday night.
Brisbane is hunkering downin preparation for a cyclone
which never came,
which is so rare here thatwe haven't had one in decades.
Schools, workplaces,public transport and even Maccas
are all closed and the coastis being absolutely battered.
Oh no, not Macca’s!
(00:21):
Not the Mickey's!
Where am I goingto get my chippies?
Gotta go to MacDanalds.
I gotta get my weekly servingof nuggies!
Weekly?
While it's a rarity herein Brisbane,
our friends to the north
are much more acquaintedwith the big spinny boys.
NorthQueensland and Western Australia
certainly have their fair share,
but if you talk about
destructive cyclonesin Australia,
(00:43):
there is one that standsabove the rest.
This particular cycloneruined Christmas for Darwin
in 1974 and left in itswake a level of destruction
that can be barelyunderstood by people today.
This week on specialcyclone edition of Cheeky Tales,
we spin into the storyof Cyclone Tracey.
(01:13):
Oh, you.
Like that oneyou already hit. Upon?
I just know this.I'd like the special edition.
Special at it.Yeah, two weeks later.
But as we await.
I wrote this episodein preparation of us being able
to record on the Sunday.
And then the cyclonewas just like,
I'ma just hold on out herefor a while, and,
it just sort of hungoff the coast
for an extra four days.Just four days or three days.
(01:35):
I can't say it never came.
It did come and did. Yeah,but it didn't sound.
Like you sound like everybodyin the safe suburbs of Brisbane.
The line hada little bit of rain.
We missed out.
Yeah. No, it. HitBrisbane properly.
It hit it as a tropical lot.
It's still ya know
but it still hit Brisbane
like even if it hit itas a tropical low
it dumped like a thousandmiles of rain.
It destroyedhalf of the Gold Coast.
(01:56):
It killed off it, killed WynnumManly, manly West like south
like destroyed their power,their trees, their fences.
It demolishedlike nothing happened.
But it didn't hit the waythat a cyclone hits.
Just it didn't hit as a cyclone.
Ignorant like.
Cyclone Alfred.
I justthought we'd name it. Suggest
(02:18):
Cyclone Alfred or Alfie.
Alf. I've not alfo
go to the pub.
No, you should not. Alfred.
That was a hard no.
Okay, we don't go to the puband get a picture.
Tell says no to Alpo.
There was this whole discussion.
Yes, I know, yeah.
Am I gonna.
You know, this weekI was looking back
(02:38):
through some of our old shorts,and I came across the one.
Oh, yeah? Yeah, I startedtelling a story you like.
Yeah, I know,why are you telling me?
And I.
You're doing it again.
Okay.
Sean and I had an argument aboutwhether
it was part of the Obamaand. Demo.
Or the. Mania that had Palmo.
Aaron's been gaslighting mefor years, that I.
(02:58):
He apparently insists
that I have only ever saidPalmer and not Palmer,
and he thinks thatthat's just normal.
I've never oncesaid Palmer in my damn life,
unless I'mtalking about a Palmer.
And he's been gaslighting me.
Like, now that you're
the one that always says Palmer,I'm like.
Okay, yes,he's been doing that to me.
She swears I used to have barbec
(03:20):
it's only tomato sauce.
It's like literally that.
That's insane.Oh. They're incorrect.
Are you doingtoasted sandwiches?
You put a bit of sauceon the toasted sandwich.
Tomato saucehas five applications ready.
Hot chips,
bakery pastries or treats,depending how you look at it.
Snags at Bunnings alsosnags Bunnings because I can't.
And sports.
Drink I can't remember a fourthone or.
(03:42):
I'd say.
And to make to make other sauce.
That usually I'm just a straightbarbecue sauce.
Yeah, but silver side.
Tomato sauce okay.
Because we're too lazyto make white sauce.
Fair enough.
Yeah I'm a.
But it's also greatfor leftovers the next day I'm.
I like I'm us cream mustard.Yeah I'm a mustard guy.
Check it on alike Macintosh to me.
Oh yeah. It's great. And then.
(04:03):
Yeah tomatosauce with that. It's beautiful.
Yeah I mean yeah, I've neverbeen a big dead horse guy.
I know a lot of people like,love tomato sauce.
And yeah,I'm so specific about it. But
I'm a now I just want a serverside toasted sandwich.
But I want mustard on it.
Let's try it with tomato.
Give it a crack.
Yeah. Okay.
Anyway, you know,it was hard to get in Darwin
after the cyclone. Tomato sauce.
(04:24):
So I got to say,everything was hard.
Yeah, well. Suit.
So before we get into it,because it.
Destroyed a certain percentage
of the buildingsthat we're about to find out.
Yeah, you are.
I watched a documentaryfrom the ABC on Cyclone Tracy.
Congratulations.
Yeah. The footage is like.
Confronting.
Yeah, it's it's wiped out, like.
(04:45):
Yeah,we're going to get into it.
But the just the sheerlike all the,
the wide shots of, like,all the suburbs is insane.
It looks like a war zone.
I really kind of wish my phonewasn't used to record this,
because I kind of want to calldad because he was there.
Yeah, my dad was in the cleanupfor Cyclone Tracy,
and he saidit was very confronting.
I actually thoughtwe should get your dad primed.
(05:07):
But then being the earliestrecording we've ever done.
Yeah, and. They're on. Nine.
Am. Yeah, but my dad's 75.
Yeah,he would have been up at four.
He's already walked tothe servo. Got in the paper.
Yeah. And potentially donea load of washing.
And he's on holiday.
Maybe we could do thatas supplemental content.
We could do that.
Is, is he got.
To do an interview with you,dad? Cool down. Yeah, yeah.
All right, well, whatthe heck is a cyclone anyway?
(05:29):
Tropicalcyclones go by many names.
Hurricanes, typhoons,tropical storms,
cyclonic storms,tropical depressions.
These are all the same name
for tropical cyclonesthroughout the world.
They're basically justbigger storms
that spin around a lowpressure area in the center.
In the southern hemisphere,they rotate clockwise
and in the northerncounterclockwise
(05:50):
they form over large warm
bodies of water,which is why they generally
only formover the tropical regions,
with the cooler waterstowards the poles
blocking their formation,
as wellas some complicated physics
relating to windsand the equator
blocking their formationclose to the equator.
So there's like a bandthat they form in the tropics.
If you've ever seena photo of a cyclone,
you know they have a distinctive
(06:11):
shape with the spiraling cloudsextending from the center
and the characteristic eye
on the center,which often is even cloud free.
I mean, one of the spiralgalaxies. Yes.
Yeah, I it's the same sortof like motion creates them.
Yeah.
So yeah,if you've seen a cyclone
generallyif they've got that eye,
you can see through itand see to the ground below,
(06:35):
from the groundwhen a cyclone goes over
the worstconditions are on the eye edges,
with the strongest windsand heaviest rain.
They're the outer
spiraling clouds containthunderstorms and heavy rain
and also contain
the devastating windsthat cause so much destruction
in the southern hemisphere.
The southern side of a cycloneis the worst.
And in the northern Hemisphere,
the northern sidegets the worst conditions.
(06:57):
So that's where the winds are,like whipped by gravity as well.
Not gravity, but like the.
The the air pressuresand the gravitational
pull of the different partsof the planet. Yeah.
And it also depends which wayit's moving as well.
Yeah. If it's moving east,
if the eastern side is the.
It's the worst. Yes.
The direction west side.
Yeah. The hemisphereplus the direction it's moving.
(07:17):
Yeah. And of coursethat's generally towards land.
Yeah. Yeah yeah.
What about some cyclone records.
Topping the leaderboard for well
bottoming the leaderboardfor smallest cyclone ever
in terms of galeforce winds from the center.
So they measure it by likeway to the gale force winds.
And was tropical stormTropical Storm Marco in 2008,
(07:37):
in the Bay of Campecheat just 18.5km.
And the largest was Typhoon Tipin the northwest Pacific Ocean
at 2220km.
That is large enough to coverthe US from top to bottom.
It ranks Seattle to the bottomof not quite
the bottom of Texas, but likeif you cut off Texas that width.
(07:59):
For all you intrepid
cyclonic fans and check it,tell us listeners
that notice that he just useda totally different terminology.
A hurricane is a strongtropical cyclone
that occursin the Atlantic Ocean
or the northeastern PacificOcean, and a typhoon
is the same thing,
but it occurs
in the northwestern PacificOcean,
in the Indian Ocean,and the south, precisely.
If it hits Asia, it'scalled a typhoon.
(08:20):
If it hits the US
or like the Americas,it's called a hurricane.
And if it hits US soccer.
Yeah.
Well, yeah,if it's the outside of the US.
So Atlantic Ocean. Pacific.
Yeah. Like if it hits the US.
If it hits the North,
if it hits the northwest ofthe US is still a typhoon.
Is it.
They still call them typhoons.The northwestern Pacific Ocean.
(08:42):
Oh, yeah.
So the South Pacific,
California, Texas,everything of that northwest.
Yeah. Of the Pacific.
So like Oregon,
Washington, Alaska,
if it which they don't
necessarily hit that far up,
but that would be a typhoonif it hit up there.
But obviously the landscapeof everything that islands
and stuff and, you know,Russia just doing weird stuff.
(09:04):
Yeah. Russia's too cold for.
Yeah. Russia'sjust like how we got north.
We can't have that. But yeah.
Also,South America doesn't get them.
Yeah, not very often.
If a dark day,but I'll leave it.
Typhoon tip. Bright night. Yes.
And it was massive.
There'll be a graphicthat I put in the,
you know, socialswhere it shows Tip
and Tracey like comparativelycompared to the US.
(09:25):
And the sizedifference is insane.
I'll just feel like
TyphoonTip could be a superhero.
Just just rolls off the tonguelike it's.
It does feel that way.
That maybe it was Tippi Hedren,the Golden Age of Hollywood
actress's alter egowhen she was fight crime.
Cool.
What a what a hot and buttonrelevant reference.
Tippi Hedren got to bein the supplemental content.
(09:48):
Hit me up.
Tippi Hedren and sloppySean on Instagram.
She's very did she's not.
Thank you very. Really?
Yeah. Just very, very alive.
The longest lasting cyclone.
Getting back to our records
was Cyclone Freddyin the Indian Ocean at 36 days.
Highest winds with CycloneOlivia
in Western Australia at 408km/h.
(10:09):
Most rain was Cyclone Hyacinth
in Reunion Island at 6083mm.
That is over six meters of rain.
Jake.
The most expensive
in terms of damage was HurricaneKatrina at 125 bill,
and the most expensivein Australia was Cyclone Yasi
in Queensland at 3.6 billion.
(10:32):
And lastly, the deadliestcyclone ever was the LA odd.
But yeah, I think the wholewho knows cyclone
in East Pakistanat 500,000 deaths.
Wow. Yeah.
I thought you werestopping at 500.
No 500. Wow.
Yeah, 500,000.
So I think if I rememberthat one,
(10:53):
it was like the storm surgewas actually the biggest bit.
So yeah, the thing with cyclonesis it's not just the cyclone.
There'salso because of the low pressure
and like the way they move
and the winds they have,they create a storm surge.
So it's basically a big wavethat just pushes up
over the shore.
Similarto like a how our tsunami would.
Yeah.
But and if that's coupled witha high tide or a tide like that.
(11:17):
Yeah. Pretty bad. Pretty bad.
So yeah, in this caseit was a lot of people drowned.
They didn't get killedby the cyclone. So.
Is it king tidejust a full moon, high tide.
I don't think necessarily.Hang on.
King tide is in a see resultsquoted here.
No Google Galway I don't.
(11:37):
King tide in Cleveland.
Okay.
Sean loves copilot.
That's not copilot isGemini is Gemini.
King tide is an especially highspring tide,
especially in the region.
Spring tides,which occur 3 or 4 times a year.
King tide is not a specificterm,
nor isit used in a specific context.
The expression originatedin Australia and New Zealand
and other Pacific nationsto describe
(11:58):
especially high tides that occura few times a year.
It is now used in North Americaas well.
Definition. King tides.
Tides. Movement of citizens.
Yes. If it correlateswith the other axis.
Like yes and no.
Like cause
like tides are obviously causedby the combined effects
gravitational force of the sunon. The right.
And collapses.
Was it the Perry Perry app?
(12:19):
It's a close one. Yeah. Yeah.
The Kingtide occurs at new and full moon
when the Earth, moon and sun
are aligned at perigeeand perihelion, resulting
in the largest tidal range seenover the course of the year.
So tides are enhancedwhen the Earth is closest
to the sun aroundJanuary 2nd of each year,
they appear and reduced whenit's the furthest from the sun.
Around July the 2nd,
the predictedheights of the king to
(12:40):
AI can be further augmentedby local weather patterns.
Hey yeah.
King tide and the Joker Tide.
King tides occurring a coupletimes a year based around.
Yeah.
I would love to be somewherethat gets those massive tides,
Yeah.Just just quickly on tides.
One thing that kind of, like,blew my mind a little bit,
I heard a while ago was how thetides actually work. Yeah,
like you said, it'sthe gravitational moon and sun,
(13:03):
but all the water on the planetis actually like an oval shape.
Yeah, and the tide is now
Earth structure rotating.
Within the. Oval and oval,which is just trippy as it's.
Cool.
It's similar to the likeour skeleton
is actually not inside our body.
We're inside our skeleton.Our brain is inside. Yeah, yeah.
Brighton's on the skull.We're driving the skeleton.
We're a.
It. We're we're a bone.
(13:25):
Yeah,we're a bone with the meat.
Meat. Anyway. So.
Oh, I.
Was. Yeah.Wizards with the skin.
Oh, yes. I'd love to.
Bring it back. Supplementalcontent, supplemental content.
This week is going to be like.
I could never find it.
Is that the one with, like,the big tiger?
Yeah. Yeah.
So like
this, like, is zero like I getI had just unlocked a memory.
(13:47):
Yeah, I had the, I hadthe liger and I had, the big
elephant one.
My brother had the elephant,
I had the liger,but it was like more of a model.
He had to build it,I don't remember.
That was the first time I ever.
It took melike, a long time to make it.
It was really. Complicated.
I had a small Megazord
are really
one of the big Megazordthat would come apart
and transformto all the different dinosaurs.
(14:07):
I've got the intensity metricsfor the mathematics
of how the soccer is calculated,and I'm looking at it
and thinking,
I wish I hadmy bloody textbook on me
right now of rain and weatherpatterns.
Yeah, Sean
notoriously loves with radarand loves talking about it.
So I gave him a storm.
Can you pull up the weather
radar right nowand tell us what's happening?
Because I drove throughsome rain on the way here.
I gave Sean, a bit of a baitand switch for Christmas.
(14:30):
He asked for a specific book,and I gave him a book.
But it was.It was a weather up book.
But that was mighty expensive.
If I got the hard copy thatI got, I got a nice, soft,
paper copy.
The hurricane surge indexis a metric of potential damage
a storm may inflictand can represent rain
represented in the equation.
Where V isthe storm's wind speed, R
(14:51):
is the radius of hurricane forcewinds being V divided by 33m/s
to the power of two times,divided by 96.6km.
Basically higher winds.
Lower pressuremeans stronger storm.
Math.
Quick maths.
That's not quick.
There's nothingquick about this.
(15:13):
Can you record that soundbiteand just use that of the feature
to the the sound of my laptophitting this?
Yeah, I can use.Sounds like the NFL dunk.
And then cut that.
Well, getting back to it,let's talk about Darwin Dam.
And I'm sureall of our Australian listeners
know Darwin well.
But for those who don't know,
Darwin is the capital of thenorthern Territory, which is oh
(15:35):
yeah, I said the state,but it's not a state.
The territory in the
central north between Queenslandand Western Australia,
originally named Palmerstonand eventually renamed Darwin
after the bay port Darwin,
in which it sits, which is alsonamed after Charles Darwin and.
Palmerston, is stillwhere I should point out
it didn't like.
Yeah. Storms move it.
(15:56):
No, I think it'sI think Palmerston.
They ended upturning into a suburb of Darwin
or at least a townwithin Darwin,
Tamworth and City of Down.Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So, so youknow, sorry, I just that's
interesting.
The city was founded in 1869.
Nice.
The city has apretty rough history.
We haven't done that for a whilenow. We have a.
City,has a pretty rough history,
(16:16):
with a number of key events
affecting a huge portionof the population.
The city has had to be rebuiltalmost entirely four times,
with cyclones destroying muchof the city in 1897 and 1937,
and the Japanese,
also having their waywith Darwin in World War Two.
More bombs dropped in dominantPearl Harbor. Yep.
(16:39):
Of course, the mostrecent time is Cyclone Tracy.
It's a wonder that anyonestill lives there, but today,
the city is home to over 139,000people and holds the title
as both the smallest and wettestcapital city in Australia.
It's just a sovereign city.
In 1974, the city
had a populationof around 43,500 people,
(17:01):
with roughly 12,000 homesto live in.
As you can imagine, buildingstandards were a little more lax
in those days.
And so while some considerationwas given to cyclone
protection,most buildings in the area
were not built to withstanda direct hit from a cyclone.
It was also, almosta perfect storm, pun intended,
that would leadto the destruction of Darwin.
(17:24):
Probably doing the thingwas that too much work.
Are moving in, nevermentioning that we're moving.
Yeah, I kind of want to do that.
I talked about what we should dois just like at various points
swap position,like where a cyclone spinning
and just never mentionthat we're doing that.
It's too early for the.
(17:45):
But coffee's only about here.
It has it needs to hit.
Here it is.
It's funny that most episodes
we're drinking a beerat this time.
It's like coffee. Please.
So what about Tracy?
What about Tracy?
The clouds that wouldeventually form into Cyclone
Tracy were first noticedon 20th of December, 1974,
(18:05):
by a United States environmentalsatellite over the Fuera
sea between Indonesiaand Australia.
A day later, the characteristiccircular center had formed
and the first tropical cyclonealert was issued later that day.
The spiraling cloudshad formed around the outside
and the pressure insidethe low had dropped,
and so it was officiallypronounced as a cyclone.
(18:27):
The next day, a weather radarin Darwin would would observe
Tracy for the first time,and the tracking began.
At this point it was some 360KS north of Darwin,
north east, I should say,
over the next few days.
I'm just working that way.
Yeah, North of Capricorniapretty much.
We will have an image on socialsthat shows you the track.
(18:48):
Yeah, of of Tracy.
So you can get an ideaof where it was.
Over the next few days,Tracy would move southwest down
the coastto the Northern Territory,
passing by Darwinto the north on December 22nd.
At this point,there was little thought
given to itin Darwin and the cyclone,
and as the cyclonecontinued to travel south west,
everyone seemed to think thatthere was no cause for concern.
It's going past us.
(19:09):
With the ABCbroadcasting over the radio
that Cyclone Tracy posedno threat to Darwin.
On ABC.
Pulling a Michael Jordanand taking that personally.
Tracy decided on the morning
of the 24th of Decemberto take a hard left,
around the Cape of for Croix,which protrudes out to the north
east or north
west of Darwin, and startheading straight towards Darwin.
(19:31):
No threat. Hey!
Watch this.
What do you. What?
At this point,the cyclone was measured
at a category fourand would continue
at that strength until landfall.
So it's basically a two as itwas coming in towards the north.
And then as it took a top left,it became a fall.
And the categoriesare determined
by the wind speed near the I.
(19:52):
I think it's actually justwind speed.
I don't think they even countthe low pressure I know.
Yeah, it's just thethe highest wind speed of.
Yeah, yeah.
It was also the smallest
tropical cyclonein terms of gale force
wind diameterever recorded at the time.
And to this day is stillthe second only to
tropical cyclone, Tropical StormMarco that I mentioned before.
(20:14):
Despite the warnings now
starting to flood infrom the media,
the residents of Darwinweren't exactly
preparing the wayyou would expect for a cyclone.
Many were continuingtheir Christmas preparations,
going to partiesand preparing food like normal
despite the increasing rainand wind.
Earlier in the month,another cyclone, Cyclone Selma,
had passed by the cityto the north
(20:35):
despite repeated warningsthat it would hit,
leaving everyone feeling quitesure they had another nonevent
on their hands. Okay.
Yes. Tom Richards,an Army veteran from Darwin,
was quoted as saying,
we didn't have a properwarning system back then.
The news said it was coming,but no one thought it
would be that bad.
We tore down what we could,
but nothingcould have stopped Tracy.
(20:57):
Anotherresident, Bob Evans, said
I filled up the car with petrol
and made sure we had candlesand a torch,
but honestly, we thoughtit would just be another blow.
We never expected the whole cityto be wiped out.
So yeah, they're pretty muchjust there like that.
Whatever. Like this stuffhappens. It's going to go by.
Yep. And Just unfortunatethat I had one previous
but did nothingI. Did nothing. Yeah.
(21:17):
And then this one's like.
Yeah, it was boy,it was a boy who cried.
Well, yeah. Yeah.
And I watchedthat ABC documentary
that I mentioned toyou guys before.
Did I mention thatI kind of set it up for failure
as. What do you. Mean?
Like they said,all this is not going to happen.
Yeah, they were all saying that.
They were like, yeah, everyonelike, we had the warnings, but,
(21:39):
they actually had like an alarmthat would go over the radios.
And they were just like, yeah,
you know,that happens all the time.
There's nothing to worry about.
Don't worry about it.We'll be fine.
And I was like, yeah,
we were all kind of gooduntil it like 10 p.m.
things started gettingripped out of the ground.
And then we thought,oh, this is pretty scary.
Yeah.
And by that point, like,
this is pretty,pretty information, right.
But this is analog radio.Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
(22:01):
So a lot of the stationshad literally just switched off.
Yeah.
All the equipment was switchedoff TV.
It was the night of Christmas.
It's Christmas Eve.
So everything had beenturned off
because back then people just,you know, actually stopped.
Yeah. Look at them.Turn off the TV by the anthem.
Turn off the TV.They were like, cool.
That's all really good.And we're all done.
And we can just relax
and spend time with theirfamily instead of going,
(22:22):
I need to watch likenight reruns of The Bachelor.
And it was great.
And but yeah, that meant
that there was no informationgoing in or out.
And so when the destruction hitthe next day,
you got like a crap,how's everyone going to know?
And that leads
into my personal informationsegment for when you're ready.
We will get to that. Thank you.
By the afternoonof the 24th of December,
Darwin was startingto look decidedly more gray.
(22:43):
What? Nothing.
Okay, as the overcast cloudsand strong rain that
precede many cyclonesstarted to set in.
As the afternoon became evening,the wind gusts started
to become seriousand residents started to realize
that it was going tonot just pass by the city,
but directly hit it.
Between 10 p.m.
and midnight,the winds got so bad
that there was seriousdamage done to buildings,
(23:04):
and at 3:30 a.m.
on Christmas Day,the eye of Tracy crossed
the coast at Fannie Bay.
By this
time, the wind gustsrecorded at Darwin Airport.
Nothing funny about thathad reached 200.
Some sunny about it the early.
So by 3:30 a.m.,the wind gust recorded
at Darwin Airporthad reached 217km an hour.
(23:26):
But soon after thisrating the anomaly.
An anemometer, the wind thingand its wind vane destroyed.
I think it's Annie.
Annie? Annie. Anemometer.Anemometer.
There you go.
So, yeah,the wind vane just got.
Ripped. And destroyed.
The animator.
That's the one. The an enemy.
The Bureau of Meteorologywould later
(23:47):
estimatethat speeds reached as high
as 240 K'sand alpha gusts of wind,
but there's no wayto really know for sure.
Yeah, because I broke the thing.Yeah.
That's like with Alfredthat we just had.
Yeah,I know what your experience was.
It was originally Thursdaymorning was meant to hit.
We should point out John lives.
Like, yeah, a border,the rising. Land. Yes.
So our experienceswere vastly different.
(24:08):
They're different. Yeah. Yeah,but it's Thursday morning.
It was originally meant to heat.
We eventually got some windSaturday night about 10:00.
Very similar to Darwin.
We got Friday night wind.
We had oh there was,there was winds. But it's like
when it was making rainfall.
Rainfall, that type of thing.
Is supposed to eventually land.On Saturday morning.
We had we had big wind aroundMorningside, Carina,
(24:31):
this area sort of like early weehours of Friday morning.
Friday night, Saturday morning.Yeah.
Friday nightit was banging my door.
Yeah. I just rememberthe Saturday night
I walked out at about 10:00.
I mean it's reallystill right on.
Easily still.
And then I walk back insideand then I could hear the trees
coming up the roadlike rustling from the wind.
(24:52):
And then I heard my roofgot cracked
because the wind hit, I wentoh no.
And then that was it.
Yeah. It'sjust like that one big initial.
Oh yeah.
And then it,it was windy after that.
But you saidabout the stillness,
it was weird in the daysleading up because
Brisbane like shut downon Wednesday basically.
Yeah.
Everyone was like that's itwhen I'm doing it anymore.
(25:13):
I went to the city on Wednesdayand it was like it was dead.
There was very few peoplein the city,
and then the next two daysnothing happened.
And it was just still.
Yeah, it was quiet at night
and there was no planestaking off anymore.
Like, yeah, it was really weird.
I feel likeit could have been bad.
Oh yeah.
If it had continuedas a category two. Yeah.
(25:36):
Especially after the delayedcrossing
where everything was still.
And like you said, nothingwas happening in the garden.
Well, this is a bit ofif it then just went whack.
Yeah,I think that could have been bad
even though we'd all prepared.
Yeah.
I'm still happy thatwe all prepared.
Oh yes. Yeah.
Because like somy suburb was in the, like
the warning of likeif it hits landfill it's
(25:56):
actually going to go over likehere.
So I'm glad I prepared.
And like,you know, like everyone's like
talking about all my.
What a bloody fuze.
Let we've avoided.
We actually did the right thingfor a change.
It was good.
We prepared because everyother time we don't prepare.
Brisbane like we're kind ofused to everything
else, like floods and stuff,but cyclones, it's like,
(26:18):
oh, God, what do we do?
Yeah,my roof is going to come off.
Versus like these other areasthat like, didn't prepare
and like there's this reasonswhy they didn't prepare.
So Harvey Bay got smacked
and the mayor of Harvey Bayshout out to the mayor of Harvey
Bay look like look, I'mvery sorry for the devastation,
but they were like blamingthe Bureau of Meteorology
for not including themin the emergency warning zone.
(26:41):
It's a it's a moving storm.
They doing their best like.
And inside Harvey Bailey.
Really hard to tellwhat this thing was. Yeah.
And you were a coastal doingdonuts. Yeah.
Because they would literally
she did like three donutsfor four.
And it's a
and it's a coastal cityand they didn't prepare at all.
And then they got absolutelysmacked. Smacked.
Oh like.I can understand. Like Mac does.
But they were so far away
(27:03):
that yeah, you probablywouldn't expect to get hit.
So like yeah, it's kind of likeit just happened.
It just happened. Yeah.
I if I'm on an a coastalor coastal region and I'm seeing
everything from like Lismore
through the Gold Coast,through the Sunshine Coast,
get Batten down.
I'm probably going to go.
Storm's landfall.
Fraser Island.
(27:24):
I'm just.
I'm going to. Prepare. Yeah.
So, yeah, at this point,the storm has hit.
Like 330 Christmas morning,three.
30 Am. Everyone's hunkereddown at home.
They were
they were somesome stories that I heard,
so across
the duration of Cyclone Tracy,there was 255 mil of rain.
(27:45):
And a teenagerat the time, resident
Sue Baker,would say of the preparation,
and then surprisedat the damage.
Dad told us to stay insideand not to worry.
We had a few supplies,
but when the roof startedpeeling off,
all we could do was hideand pray.
So there was stories ofpeople like that were in the
they were in their houseand they were like,
oh, you know,we don't need to worry too much.
(28:05):
They on the top floor.And then they were like,
Our windows have smashed andthe roof starting to peel off.
We better get downto the bottom floor.
I mean, that was avery real concern for my place.
Even like like you said,I'm crazy.
Yeah, but my house is,like 100 year old.
Yeah.
And I've only got leg tapping,so I've only got, like, tapping.
Yeah. Holding my thing.
It was a concern that the roofwas going to come off.
(28:26):
I got. A tile roof.
That's a bit heavier than.
Yeah, I know the tiles.
Like one goes in there.
They all go,
but like, not nothing.
He is prepared. And that'swhat was happening in Darwin.
They didn't have any cyclone.
And the rocket was headingfor the Brisbane area.
I think just north of Harvey Bayis not built to a cyclone.
Right it. Yeah.
Once you go north of that,there are building.
(28:48):
To work. I think. Yeah.
Building regulationsthat require certain. Yep.
Building techniquesto prepare for cyclonic winds.
In Broomeevery single building in Broome
basically is made of corrugatediron.
It's a frame with corrugatediron on the outside.
So that way if everything
rips off,it doesn't demolish the
foundationand the framing of the house.
If it just blows everything awayand then they can just
(29:10):
Jackson crap back on.
Even McDonald's is madeof corrugated iron, but.
It's more of like armbracing strapping.
It's like this extra bracingstrapping up north
to be able to withstand.
Yeah, span.
Like screwsthat have these like big three.
Times as many nailsand screws in rooms in towns.
And thenyou've also got your tie there.
So in the southern areaswhere he taught ends
earlier on the bottomflight up north today,
(29:32):
I'd have to go from the bottomplate to the top line.
So it's like onelarge rod. So yep.
Yeah.
Sorry, but the buildingtook it out of my area.
So by 6:30 a.m.
the wind started to die down.
And by 8:30 a.m.the rain had ceased.
The whole event had takenjust one night
and the residents of Darwinwould start
to extricate themselvesfrom the wreckage
(29:52):
and see justhow much devastation
had been wrought by the cyclone.
They didn't expect to be sucha big.
Headed Santa Fe in the cyclone.
Actually, there was one.
There's one interviewI saw and they were like, yeah,
I lived with mymy kid, my dog and my husband,
and my kidwas just really worried about
whetherSanta would get blown away.
It's like they saying thiswhile pictures of Darwin just.
(30:13):
Yeah,I mean. Baxter on the screen.
It's pretty cute.
The kid,like he's worried about Santa.
That's that's kind of.
Yeah. Yeah.
So the first thingthat would become
blindingly obviousin the aftermath
to anyone with eyes, was thatthere was a lot of destruction,
not just some trees overand some powerlines, but
80% of all buildingsin Darwin had been destroyed.
(30:36):
Of the housingthat was in Darwin,
94% had been destroyed, 94%.
If I say there was 12.
12,000 homes.
Yeah, yeah. Suddenly30,000 people in Darwin.
Quick math on that is what.
It was 43,500.
94% of 12,000.
Quick math.
Well, what, 6% of 12,000?
(30:56):
Yeah,
well, I'm just trying to workout, like 10% is 1200
half of that.
So 600 houses left? Yeah.
And they weren't just like,slightly damaged.
It was like rooves offbuildings, down like stuff
everywhere.
They were showing the roadsand like, people couldn't
drive their cars.
They were sayingthey had to get their cars
(31:18):
and put corrugated iron plowson the front and drive through.
Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah.
Six ships had
sunk in the harborwith one, the MV Neptune.
Having its cargo of explosives
detonate inside Stokes HillWharf.
From from the sock like that?
Yeah. Like somethingin the sinking caused it to.
(31:38):
I'm sure there was a shortor something.
Yeah, at the airport, 31aircraft
were destroyedwith another 25 badly damaged.
Electrical poles had beentwisted and sheared off,
and steel house frameshad been bent like spaghetti.
Clearly, this had beena very powerful storm.
So please go to our socialsto see some of the photos of
(31:58):
of the destruction.Yeah, the airport be crazy.
Can I remember thatstorm rolled through Brisbane
wasn't even there,so it was just a bad storm?
Yeah, an archer field.All the planes were like.
Upside. Down.Upside down from it.
Actually, hotelspod for our socials.
I realize we haven't said that
worse still, and Sean'sgoing to comment on this.
I'm sure all communicationsout of the city
had been cut offwith all antenna,
antennae, antenna for long rangeradio services being destroyed
(32:22):
in the cyclone tonight,
with most media outletshaving a skeleton staff
due to it being Christmas Day,
it would be latein the afternoon
before the countrystarted to learn
what was happening in Darwin.
The first communicationslink to be reestablished
afterthe cyclone was at the airport,
with a de Havilland Heronthat had been stashed
in a hangar,having its radio still working.
(32:43):
Pilot David Fredericksonwould contact the Katherine
Flight Service Centerby mid-morning,
and would spend the nextfew hours
relaying messages from emergencyservices,
Navy personnel and airportstaff.
Elsewhere, Bob Hooper and GaryGibson, amateur radio operators,
would help to set up a makeshift
radio stationat the Darwin Community College,
connectingto a network of stations
(33:03):
throughout the country to startcoordinating a response plan.
One of the things that good job,
one of the things that was said
about thiswas they started communicating
with the outside world,and everyone was like, okay,
like, yeah, okay,you've had a cyclone hit.
Can you tell uswhat's really happened?
Like, stopbeing so dramatic about like,
the whole place is flattened.
We need everyone to comehere, please. Yeah, yeah.
(33:26):
So it took like a whileuntil they could get a plane in
to get some filmflight back to Sydney.
They developed it in Sydney,and then they broadcast
the picturesand everyone was like, oh, crap.
Yeah. Wow. Look at that.
They weren't being dramatic.
Yeah. So, Sean,you said you had.
Yeah.
So amateur radio enthusiasts
(33:47):
were able to get in contactwith local radio stations
in particular,that managed to get,
signals down to Alice Springs,
where there is a lot of amateurradio
enthusiasts as well,including my wife's grandfather.
We can't interview him.
Sadly passed awayseveral years ago,
but he was part of the peoplehe was in.
The group of peopleusing his amateur radio antenna
basedin his literally in his shed
(34:07):
that was ableto intercept messages
from Darwinand then transmit them
to emergency services
throughout Queensland,through Longreach,
Winton, down through Brisbane.
The amateur radio community
was like a huge part ofof what got everything together.
They talk about like thatto have one
in the Navy,radios in the Air Force race,
but the amateur radio peoplewere the ones that sent out.
Yeah. So much. Yeah.
The first few days were just
(34:28):
amateur radio enthusiastsdoing the work of communicating.
And if you.
Know anything about the waythat like
the waythat some people have done
nothing,what was called ham radios
or whatever, that shortwaveradio like, you've got
VHF, UHF, high frequency,low frequency,
the way that you transmit highfrequency
is like quite directionaland quite challenging.
(34:48):
So having a good knowledgeof how to do it,
you know, just simply turn it onand hope that it works
like you've got to usedirectional antennas,
you got to use dipoles tocorrectly shoot everything out.
So like the amateur radioenthusiast
for a big part of it,because they understand
how and where they needto send everything.
Johns building expertise,my wiggy radio knowledge.
Yeah.
Very helpful.
I've done a little bit of radiostuff.
(35:10):
Part of working on get on to do
a classical.
Yeah.
So pretty, pretty intense stuff.
(35:31):
They literally couldn'tcommunicate
with the outside worldfor a few hours after it.
And then the outside worlddidn't believe him anyway, so.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
At the hospital, health careworkers were sent into overdrive
with over 500 people needingimmediate treatment.
While it would take until 7 a.m.
for the conditionsto be safe enough
for people
to start arrivingat the hospital,
112 people were admittedto hospital, with,
(35:53):
both operating theatersbeing used constantly.
The local doctors would workwithout break
until late in the day,
when a relief team arrivedfrom Canberra.
There was,
a whole bunch of peoplegot flown out that were injured,
and there was this one guy.
He had his two daughters, and
they all hadto get flown to Sydney,
and they were interviewing himin Sydney,
and he was like, yeah,we were inside the house.
(36:16):
And we were hiding under the bed
and then the roof got ripped off
and that was pretty bad.
And then within half an hour,everything was gone,
including the bedthat we were hiding under,
and we were just laying out
in the yard nextto the foundation of the house
for like four hoursduring the cyclone.
That's crazy. Yeah.
(36:37):
And his wife sadly got bonkedon the head by some debris and,
and passed away.
Oh, yeah.
So that is terrifying to me.Like.
There's nothing left.
You just in the openin the middle of a cycle.
With stuff just pinging around.
In the middleof the pitch of the,
you know, pitch darknessof the night talking. Yeah.
So someone was going to need
to coordinatethe emergency response.
(36:59):
And so a committee wasput together to do just that.
High level public servants,
police and emergencyservices would work together.
Additionally, all defense Forcepersonnel throughout
Australiawould be recalled from leave,
and many were sent to Darwinto help with the cleanup
and bring in supplies,including Sean's dad.
Including my dad.
(37:19):
Who sadly is on holiday,will interview in later.
We'll have a supplementalin some point in the future.
Yeah, maybe that can bepart of episode 100.
The Navy would send 13 shipsto transport supplies,
eventuallycompleting the largest disaster
relief operation ever undertakenby the Australian Navy.
With the incredibly,
(37:40):
creative title of Navy
Help Darwin.
I don't think it wassaid that way, but it was.
I think it was called OperationNavy helped out.
Yeah, but not like Navykept up with Darwin.
Like you said, it.
With somuch of the crew destroyed,
(38:00):
there was roughly 30,000 peoplenow homeless,
and they needed to be set upin emergency shelters,
which would event,
unfortunatelyhave little to no proper hygiene
thanks to the power,water and sewerage systems
being offlinethroughout most of the city,
water would be brought in viatankers, and trench latrines
would be dragged
to a drug dug to allowthe most basic services.
(38:22):
But there were biggerfears of illness outbreaks,
so immunization programs begantargeting typhoid and cholera.
Additionally, the whole citywas sprayed with malathion,
a chemical used to controlthe population of mosquitoes
who I'm sure would be ready fora field day in the drench city.
You say that I feel like,
the mosquitoes that are bredin the water we had from Alfred
(38:44):
have hatched because I was outworking the other day.
The swampy area,
man, I had one Scotch grade
mosquito,and I thought it was a moth.
It was that big.
Like it was humongous.
Yeah, and there were everywhere.
That is the thingwith a lot of these cyclones
is that once it's done, it'snot done.
That's just new thingsthat come along like, suddenly
(39:05):
we have an outbreak of scarletfever or something, like, yeah.
The army was also taskedwith searching for the bodies
of people and petsin the wreckage of houses.
While they were there,they were also asked
to clean out the fridgesand phrases of the city
to ensure
that there would be no rottingfood, adding to the issues faced
once the army had gonethrough a house,
they would spray SNC on the wallfor, searched and cleared.
(39:29):
Despite that immense task,
they would complete that workwithin a single week.
By the end of the yearthat already gone
through every destroyed House.
Of Australian Army. Yeah.
Can you imagine that?
Like, hey, go in there,see if there's a dead body.
Oh, and also clean outthe fridge.
Area from day.
In quite like the fourth day.
Elsewhere, cityofficials would start to attempt
to reconnect essential serviceslater on Christmas Day.
(39:53):
First, they would clear debris
and reestablishpower connections
by rebuilding the downed powerlines.
After this,
they would seal offdamaged water
hydrants and reactivate pumpsthat ran
the city's waterand sewage systems.
This would be essentialfor the recovery to come.
They actually were talking aboutlike the power station
had to deal with itself,
get itself back on line,
but then obviouslythere was no power lines left,
(40:13):
so they had to bring in powerline guys
to just fix every single powerline in the city.
So I had to rebuild poles.
I had to put the lines back up.
They'd connect everything again,like they use.
We had poles. In the end. If you
have a look at the
photos, I have this like twistedpower pole and you're like,
that's a weirdlooking power pole.
So the like I say, use
what's called stubby polesrather than wooden posts.
(40:37):
They're basically steel girderswith concrete in the middle.
Oh, they call the stubby pole.They're very strong.
So when you see the twisted onein the Wigan
particular, the Wikipedia page,it's fully twisted by the storm
you're talking about.
It's like literallytwo humongous steel girders.
It's like there at the base.There is.
Why does that television
with concrete like concretein the middle of them?
(40:57):
Yeah,I've seen. Pictures of that.
Yeah. Don't hit one.
Don't hit one in your car.You have to pay back the state.
If you damage itand it will bankrupt you.
Yeah.
It's probably not yourbiggest concern if you hit one.
That's a supplementalbit of information.
That also just don't hitany, pal.
Yeah, well, they dothat here too. If you hit a,
Yeah.
If for the inspectionand then possibly replacement.
At 100 grandif you just over phone.
(41:18):
Yeah.
And you know what?
It's not that hard to not hita power pole.
Swerve out of control. Likewe're not getting into that.
Check it out. Saysno, it says no.
Thank youto hitting power poles.
But yes,
if you if you if you know,if you see that picture like,
that's a weirdlooking power pole.
H-2b poles. Yeah.
The rest of the country, though,delight in finding out about
the destruction,
would start to fundraiseto assist
(41:38):
in the release of reliefefforts.
Small towns along alongthe roads out of Darwin.
So particularlythe state highway.
Is it the Stuart of the state,Stuart Stuart highway
would offer food,
fuel and rest stopsfor those evacuating by road.
Reception centers were set upin nearby towns and cities
to welcoming the evacueesand help to resettle them.
(41:59):
AliceSprings would raise $105,000
within the first 24 hours,which is the equivalent of 650,
in today's money
to help those relocatingand rebuilding the Boxing Day
Test in Melbourne,part of that summer's ashes
series saw playersfrom both teams collecting money
along the boundary to besent to the victims monthly.
(42:19):
So we're goingto get into the evacuation now.
But thesethese people were saying like
so people evacuating by road,
where were their carsduring Darwin.
Yeah. Outside.
Yeah.
So there's all these carsthat are just smashed
like windscreensgone, the rooves, the stove.
Dean and people like drivingout of Darwin in these cars.
So all these towns,they were just like,
(42:40):
come in, have food,we're going to fix your car.
And they would just like
get the car running againthinking, all right, off you go.
And I piss off to Darwin,to Adelaide or whatever.
Pretty cool stuff.
So about that evacuation.
As you can imagine,it's pretty hard to run a city
when most of the buildingsare now
the equivalent of unbuilt Lego.
So there was going toneed to be some evacuations.
(43:03):
Nice visual board.
Yeah. Well,what it looks like dark.
Yeah,I get it, but I'm being serious.
That's a nice visual. Right.
You can you can picture.
In orderto coordinate the evacuation
and start the recovery,
Major-General Allen Stretton,
the director general of theNatural Disasters Organization
and the Commonwealth Minister
for the Northern Territory,Rex Patterson.
(43:23):
Right now,
I would fly in light onChristmas Day to take control.
They would assess the situationand with the advice of Doctor
Charles Goode,
the director of healthin the Northern Territory,
would decide that a safe levelof population for Darwin in
its currentstate would be 10,500 people.
The evacuation began on the 26th
and was completed by airand by road.
(43:46):
He said it was 40,000,so a quarter.
43,500. Yeah.
So safe populationis a quarter of what it was.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Salvation Army and Red crosswere also taking part
in the evacuation,the Red cross being responsible
for keeping trackof where everyone was going.
So they would be like,what's what's your name?
Where are you going?
(44:06):
What's your new addressgoing to be?
Yeah. People would be like,
We don't know. Yeah.
Maybe Sydney,
priority was given to women,children and the sick
and the elderly.
Men were expected
to stay and help the recoveryif they were physically able.
There were stories of mendressing up as women to try.
And. Oh,so the Titanic evacuated.
(44:26):
Yeah, yeah.
Ansett repay Qantas to repay me.
Repay would send planesto start the evacuation
and those flightswould be oversubscribed.
To helpwith the lack of flights,
the airport was stillexperiencing
communication issues
and so only one planecould take off every 90 minutes.
(44:47):
So some flights took offwith more than 150% capacity.
Where it was storiesof like seven four sevens
taking offwith like 650 people in them,
which was a record in Australiaat the time.
On the 31st of December,there were only 10,638
people left in Darwin,with 25,628
evacuated by airand 9734 by road.
(45:11):
Afterthe evacuation was completed,
a permit system was put in placeto restrict access
to the city to those involvedin the recovery, only.
So essentially
it became like a locked offzone, like do not come here,
which you can kind ofunderstand.
Yeah.
So now they're moving onto the recovery.
So they've got everyone out.
It's like,all right, what do we do
by the end of the weekon December 31st, Major General
(45:33):
Allen Stretton would say that
the immediate recovery,
evacuation and reconnectionof essential essential services
had hit a pointthat local officials
could take overcontrol of the city again.
And so the defense forcewould hand over control back to
the local elected officials.
From here, there would be a longroad to recovery for the city.
The removal of the debris wouldbe the main concern at first.
(45:54):
However, by Februarythe attention had turned
to rebuilding Gough Whitlam,the prime minister at the time.
It's still a long timelike December to February,
just the removal of debrislike that's.
So they had like army bulldozersand stuff
brought in to just scoopeverything up and get rid of it.
Push it into the ocean. Yeah.
There was
(46:14):
there was talk about just going.
To just build a new city.We're not going. To do this.
Like,let's just go somewhere else.
Nobody else here.
But Gough Whitlam was like,absolutely not.
You are going to rebuild.
And so they set up
the Darwin ReconstructionCommission in February of 1975,
with the goal of rebuildingthe city within five years.
(46:35):
Temporary housing was broughtin, along with caravans, hotels
and even an ocean liner to housethose returning to the city.
And by May of 1975,the population
was back to 30,000. US.
By September, very littlehad been rebuilt, with the focus
so far being on infrastructureand temporary housing,
and the commission would facecriticism for its slow response.
(46:56):
By April of 1976, though,
3000 new homes had been rebuiltand repairs
have been completed on all thatremains standing after Tracy.
Part of the delayshad been the need to draw up
new building codes to dealwith the danger of cyclones,
which aimed to ensurethere would be no destruction
like Tracy ever againin the city.
By 1978,the city had rebuilt enough
(47:18):
to recoverto its pre-crisis population,
but in the following yearsup to 60% of those
that had lived in Darwin in 1974had left to resettle again,
not the city's.
So it
was like everyone came backand then slowly they all left.
I guess, just being like, it'snot what it was.
I'm scared. Yeah.
The PTSD
(47:38):
you think in those yearsof rebuilding
is, well, you've got all thetemporary housing and we've got
you got people obviouslyworking to build, rebuild.
I wouldn't imagine there wouldbe too many other jobs to do.
That was one thing that theysaid, though, like, you know,
the people that stayed,
particularlyin that first few months,
they just worked from sunupto sundown, eight and slept.
(47:59):
And there was justnothing else to do.
And so but that night,
surely there had
been some sort of grocery storesand all about food.
Oh yeah, but like other jobs,yeah.
I wouldn'thave nothing else to do.
That is nothing. Else to do.Yeah.
I mean, I imagine school
potentially be happening,but not like it should or.
All the schools weirdly.
Well,one of the things that just
(48:20):
were fine, likebecause they were different,
they would go in differentthings. Yeah, yeah.
It was.
More like
if it was like anything likeQueensland, it's just a visible.
They were the one that I saw
was just like a big concretebuilding. Yeah.
It survived. That'swhat I'm saying. It was like.
Yeah this shot a.
Rectangle a block cube.
Yeah, yeah.
They were showingthis shot of the city
and it's like destroyed houses.
(48:41):
And then the schooljust sitting there.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I imagine thatfirst year was very tough.
And, like, you'd come back
because you want to be there,but then what do you do? Like
there's nothing to supportso you don't get a job.
Yeah.
Another consequence of Tracywas that the governance
of the Northern Territorywould change.
(49:02):
When Tracy hit in 1974,there was a legislative Assembly
which had very limited powers.
The real legislative powerfor the Northern Territory
was still in Canberra,with the federal minister
being given controlof the territory.
After Cyclone Tracy.
It was clear that this approach
had a lot of drawbacks,and so in 1978
the territory
was given self-governance,allowing them
to control their own destiny.
(49:24):
So they're essentially like,
we should probably
have controlof this place, in this place.
So they gave themtheir own control,
which they've still got.
Now, while the Darwin of todayholds little resemblance
to the Darwin that was destroyedon Christmas Day in 1974,
the scars still run deep.
For those that survived.
Many records held bythe government were released
(49:44):
in 2005,
giving some more information
for those that still holdquestions around the recovery.
Just this pastChristmas was the 50th
anniversary,and a memorial was unveiled
at East Point Reserve,where Tracy made landfall.
Despite the destruction,the real memory of the day
is the 66 people who died onwhat should have been
the happiest day of the year.
(50:05):
So despite this destruction,there's only 66 people.
Yeah.
Which is crazy to methat so few died.
Yeah, of a total mercury saidtotal population 40,000.
Yeah.
95% of the houses destroyed.
Like that's.
Yeah.
Not a bad outcome.
It's still sad. Yeah.
It's pretty good to only lose 66when 94% of houses are gone.
(50:29):
Yeah.
Anyway, that's that's Tracy.
That was Tracy.
Yeah.
The, whenever people talk aboutcyclones here, it's like Yasi.
Larry. Yeah. Tracy.
Yasi was the 1 in 10.
Oh, yeah. Debbie was pretty bad.Debbie was big.
Yasi. Yes.He was further. North.
Yeah, I was. Yeah, it'sfurther. North, like Innisfail.
(50:51):
It's Innisfail further north.
Yeah. And it spells furthernorth in Townsville.
It was the bad onein Townsville.
Was it Debbie?
Debbie was sortof. Debbie. Yeah.
Debbiehit Townsville those 2016.
2016. 2016, 2017.
But it hit like itall over the coast.
Yeah, yeah.
It's weird looking at thethe stats of like
the cost of these cyclones likeobviously Josie's number one.
(51:12):
But number four wasn'teven a cyclone.
It was a tropical storm.
Like a it was a low.
It was Oswald in 2012, 2013.
It started like up in the Gulfwhen inland,
like in the Northern Territory
did a loop, came back outand then just ran down
the entire length of Queenslandinto New South.
Wales, just smashing the coast.
(51:33):
No inland. Or even. Low. Yeah.
And it just kept sucking waterin and it just kind of
kept damaging thingsand causing flooding
and like wreckedthe Kingaroy region.
That was one that causedthe 2013 floods in Ipswich.
Yeah.
Because it just came downthe coast and they,
they talk about like cyclonedamage is about who it hits,
like where it hits,not about how strong it is.
(51:53):
Yeah.
So Yasi hit the coastline
and mission basewhich is north of Townsville.
And Debbie hit at Aili beach
which is south of Townsvilleabout four hours. Yeah.
Lovely place to live,I mean, holiday.
I don't know if I'd want to livein Aly Beach.
It really is.
It's a it's like a Paradise.
Yeah, yeah.
Choppy seas sometimes like that.
Yeah. Backpackers.
Cyclone Tracy
(52:14):
one thing I remember too aboutanother big one was Katrina.
They heard a lot about that.
Is I think, a lot of peoplewere surprised how big that was.
That was quite a large cyclone.
A train I got. Yeah.
It was big.
And now I remember there wasa. Cat five that hit New.
Orleans.
Yeah, I remember themoverlaying the entire storm
over Australiaand it like covered the entirety
(52:36):
of mainland Australia.
Just like.
Yeah,that that big boy Hurricane.
Katrina because it got caughtin the Gulf in between, like
stuck in the Gulf of Mexicoand just went
and just, yeah, demolished.
It was likeSonic stuck in a box.
Yeah, it was crazy. Yeah.
And the gulf is quiteshallow and warm,
so it just sucks it out.
You get quite bad onesthere. That's where I'm from.
(52:58):
Recently,Katrina killed 1400 people.
Yeah, well, where the man.
Yeah. Can be scary.
Yeah, $125 billion of damage.
That was the most expensive one.
That's the recordingthat you said.
For the most expensive.It is tied with.
HurricaneHarvey is being the costliest
tropical cyclonein the Atlantic basin.
The 12th tropical cyclone,the fifth hurricane,
(53:19):
and the third major
hurricane of the 2005Atlantic hurricane season,
and the fourth most
intense one to hitthe contiguous United States.
So that means not includingHawaii.
Yeah, yeah.
And like Puerto Rico,I saw that.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So that would have been funfor you writing this
(53:41):
and learningabout all this destruction.
And you love storms.
I love I decided I love.
Weather no no but like yeahwriting all this destruction
and how bad it wasand all that. Wow.
While waiting for it to heat.Yeah I do like the.
Oh yeah, yeah, there's a reasonI wrote this episode and yeah,
we had to.
Obviouslywe couldn't record because,
even though it never really hit,we got some flooding,
(54:01):
so it was kind of awkwardto try and all
get together to record, but,
yeah, they were,like, waiting for it to hit.
I'm writing this story.
I'm like, that's gonna getpretty bad here.
Yeah.
Did it mentionwhat what category was
Tracy when it hit for?
Oh, so it was a categoryfour one.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
So the highest category is five.
(54:23):
That we know of.
There's like a, there is a limitto how powerful they are.
Okay. Yeah.
But yeah, it's it'spretty hectic when they're a cat
five like 250 Kan hour winds or something like.
Yeah.I think we got hundreds here.
And it was like, oh yeah, that'sa, that's a wind.
That's. Yeah. But the wind.
Yeah. Yeah.
(54:45):
Anyway it's tough.
Thanks for flooding uswith that information.
Yeah. Who.
All right.
Let's spin on out of here.Let's wrap it up. You're not.
Good morning.
Take it easy.
You've been listeningto Cheeky Tales podcast.
If you'd like to see
supplemental imagesrelated to our episodes
or to interactwith us about our episodes,
(55:06):
hit us up on at Cheeky Tell
Pod on Instagram, Facebookand YouTube.
You can
watch our episodes on YouTubeor listen to them on Spotify,
Apple Podcasts, or ever.
You get your podcasts.
I'm sureif you listen to this podcast,
you've probably heardwhat was happening
while I was writing this episodeon Friday night.
Brisbane is hunkering downin preparation for a cyclone
which never came,
which is so rare here thatwe haven't had one in decades.
Schools, workplaces,public transport and even Maccas
are all closed and the coastis being absolutely battered.
Oh no, not Macca’s!
(00:21):
Not the Mickey's!
Where am I goingto get my chippies?
Gotta go to MacDanalds.
I gotta get my weekly servingof nuggies!
Weekly?
While it's a rarity herein Brisbane,
our friends to the north
are much more acquaintedwith the big spinny boys.
NorthQueensland and Western Australia
certainly have their fair share,
but if you talk about
destructive cyclonesin Australia,
(00:43):
there is one that standsabove the rest.
This particular cycloneruined Christmas for Darwin
in 1974 and left in itswake a level of destruction
that can be barelyunderstood by people today.
This week on specialcyclone edition of Cheeky Tales,
we spin into the storyof Cyclone Tracey.
(01:13):
Oh, you.
Like that oneyou already hit. Upon?
I just know this.I'd like the special edition.
Special at it.Yeah, two weeks later.
But as we await.
I wrote this episodein preparation of us being able
to record on the Sunday.
And then the cyclonewas just like,
I'ma just hold on out herefor a while, and,
it just sort of hungoff the coast
for an extra four days.Just four days or three days.
(01:35):
I can't say it never came.
It did come and did. Yeah,but it didn't sound.
Like you sound like everybodyin the safe suburbs of Brisbane.
The line hada little bit of rain.
We missed out.
Yeah. No, it. HitBrisbane properly.
It hit it as a tropical lot.
It's still ya know
but it still hit Brisbane
like even if it hit itas a tropical low
it dumped like a thousandmiles of rain.
It destroyedhalf of the Gold Coast.
(01:56):
It killed off it, killed WynnumManly, manly West like south
like destroyed their power,their trees, their fences.
It demolishedlike nothing happened.
But it didn't hit the waythat a cyclone hits.
Just it didn't hit as a cyclone.
Ignorant like.
Cyclone Alfred.
I justthought we'd name it. Suggest
(02:18):
Cyclone Alfred or Alfie.
Alf. I've not alfo
go to the pub.
No, you should not. Alfred.
That was a hard no.
Okay, we don't go to the puband get a picture.
Tell says no to Alpo.
There was this whole discussion.
Yes, I know, yeah.
Am I gonna.
You know, this weekI was looking back
(02:38):
through some of our old shorts,and I came across the one.
Oh, yeah? Yeah, I startedtelling a story you like.
Yeah, I know,why are you telling me?
And I.
You're doing it again.
Okay.
Sean and I had an argument aboutwhether
it was part of the Obamaand. Demo.
Or the. Mania that had Palmo.
Aaron's been gaslighting mefor years, that I.
(02:58):
He apparently insists
that I have only ever saidPalmer and not Palmer,
and he thinks thatthat's just normal.
I've never oncesaid Palmer in my damn life,
unless I'mtalking about a Palmer.
And he's been gaslighting me.
Like, now that you're
the one that always says Palmer,I'm like.
Okay, yes,he's been doing that to me.
She swears I used to have barbec
(03:20):
it's only tomato sauce.
It's like literally that.
That's insane.Oh. They're incorrect.
Are you doingtoasted sandwiches?
You put a bit of sauceon the toasted sandwich.
Tomato saucehas five applications ready.
Hot chips,
bakery pastries or treats,depending how you look at it.
Snags at Bunnings alsosnags Bunnings because I can't.
And sports.
Drink I can't remember a fourthone or.
(03:42):
I'd say.
And to make to make other sauce.
That usually I'm just a straightbarbecue sauce.
Yeah, but silver side.
Tomato sauce okay.
Because we're too lazyto make white sauce.
Fair enough.
Yeah I'm a.
But it's also greatfor leftovers the next day I'm.
I like I'm us cream mustard.Yeah I'm a mustard guy.
Check it on alike Macintosh to me.
Oh yeah. It's great. And then.
(04:03):
Yeah tomatosauce with that. It's beautiful.
Yeah I mean yeah, I've neverbeen a big dead horse guy.
I know a lot of people like,love tomato sauce.
And yeah,I'm so specific about it. But
I'm a now I just want a serverside toasted sandwich.
But I want mustard on it.
Let's try it with tomato.
Give it a crack.
Yeah. Okay.
Anyway, you know,it was hard to get in Darwin
after the cyclone. Tomato sauce.
(04:24):
So I got to say,everything was hard.
Yeah, well. Suit.
So before we get into it,because it.
Destroyed a certain percentage
of the buildingsthat we're about to find out.
Yeah, you are.
I watched a documentaryfrom the ABC on Cyclone Tracy.
Congratulations.
Yeah. The footage is like.
Confronting.
Yeah, it's it's wiped out, like.
(04:45):
Yeah,we're going to get into it.
But the just the sheerlike all the,
the wide shots of, like,all the suburbs is insane.
It looks like a war zone.
I really kind of wish my phonewasn't used to record this,
because I kind of want to calldad because he was there.
Yeah, my dad was in the cleanupfor Cyclone Tracy,
and he saidit was very confronting.
I actually thoughtwe should get your dad primed.
(05:07):
But then being the earliestrecording we've ever done.
Yeah, and. They're on. Nine.
Am. Yeah, but my dad's 75.
Yeah,he would have been up at four.
He's already walked tothe servo. Got in the paper.
Yeah. And potentially donea load of washing.
And he's on holiday.
Maybe we could do thatas supplemental content.
We could do that.
Is, is he got.
To do an interview with you,dad? Cool down. Yeah, yeah.
All right, well, whatthe heck is a cyclone anyway?
(05:29):
Tropicalcyclones go by many names.
Hurricanes, typhoons,tropical storms,
cyclonic storms,tropical depressions.
These are all the same name
for tropical cyclonesthroughout the world.
They're basically justbigger storms
that spin around a lowpressure area in the center.
In the southern hemisphere,they rotate clockwise
and in the northerncounterclockwise
(05:50):
they form over large warm
bodies of water,which is why they generally
only formover the tropical regions,
with the cooler waterstowards the poles
blocking their formation,
as wellas some complicated physics
relating to windsand the equator
blocking their formationclose to the equator.
So there's like a bandthat they form in the tropics.
If you've ever seena photo of a cyclone,
you know they have a distinctive
(06:11):
shape with the spiraling cloudsextending from the center
and the characteristic eye
on the center,which often is even cloud free.
I mean, one of the spiralgalaxies. Yes.
Yeah, I it's the same sortof like motion creates them.
Yeah.
So yeah,if you've seen a cyclone
generallyif they've got that eye,
you can see through itand see to the ground below,
(06:35):
from the groundwhen a cyclone goes over
the worstconditions are on the eye edges,
with the strongest windsand heaviest rain.
They're the outer
spiraling clouds containthunderstorms and heavy rain
and also contain
the devastating windsthat cause so much destruction
in the southern hemisphere.
The southern side of a cycloneis the worst.
And in the northern Hemisphere,
the northern sidegets the worst conditions.
(06:57):
So that's where the winds are,like whipped by gravity as well.
Not gravity, but like the.
The the air pressuresand the gravitational
pull of the different partsof the planet. Yeah.
And it also depends which wayit's moving as well.
Yeah. If it's moving east,
if the eastern side is the.
It's the worst. Yes.
The direction west side.
Yeah. The hemisphereplus the direction it's moving.
(07:17):
Yeah. And of coursethat's generally towards land.
Yeah. Yeah yeah.
What about some cyclone records.
Topping the leaderboard for well
bottoming the leaderboardfor smallest cyclone ever
in terms of galeforce winds from the center.
So they measure it by likeway to the gale force winds.
And was tropical stormTropical Storm Marco in 2008,
(07:37):
in the Bay of Campecheat just 18.5km.
And the largest was Typhoon Tipin the northwest Pacific Ocean
at 2220km.
That is large enough to coverthe US from top to bottom.
It ranks Seattle to the bottomof not quite
the bottom of Texas, but likeif you cut off Texas that width.
(07:59):
For all you intrepid
cyclonic fans and check it,tell us listeners
that notice that he just useda totally different terminology.
A hurricane is a strongtropical cyclone
that occursin the Atlantic Ocean
or the northeastern PacificOcean, and a typhoon
is the same thing,
but it occurs
in the northwestern PacificOcean,
in the Indian Ocean,and the south, precisely.
If it hits Asia, it'scalled a typhoon.
(08:20):
If it hits the US
or like the Americas,it's called a hurricane.
And if it hits US soccer.
Yeah.
Well, yeah,if it's the outside of the US.
So Atlantic Ocean. Pacific.
Yeah. Like if it hits the US.
If it hits the North,
if it hits the northwest ofthe US is still a typhoon.
Is it.
They still call them typhoons.The northwestern Pacific Ocean.
(08:42):
Oh, yeah.
So the South Pacific,
California, Texas,everything of that northwest.
Yeah. Of the Pacific.
So like Oregon,
Washington, Alaska,
if it which they don't
necessarily hit that far up,
but that would be a typhoonif it hit up there.
But obviously the landscapeof everything that islands
and stuff and, you know,Russia just doing weird stuff.
(09:04):
Yeah. Russia's too cold for.
Yeah. Russia'sjust like how we got north.
We can't have that. But yeah.
Also,South America doesn't get them.
Yeah, not very often.
If a dark day,but I'll leave it.
Typhoon tip. Bright night. Yes.
And it was massive.
There'll be a graphicthat I put in the,
you know, socialswhere it shows Tip
and Tracey like comparativelycompared to the US.
(09:25):
And the sizedifference is insane.
I'll just feel like
TyphoonTip could be a superhero.
Just just rolls off the tonguelike it's.
It does feel that way.
That maybe it was Tippi Hedren,the Golden Age of Hollywood
actress's alter egowhen she was fight crime.
Cool.
What a what a hot and buttonrelevant reference.
Tippi Hedren got to bein the supplemental content.
(09:48):
Hit me up.
Tippi Hedren and sloppySean on Instagram.
She's very did she's not.
Thank you very. Really?
Yeah. Just very, very alive.
The longest lasting cyclone.
Getting back to our records
was Cyclone Freddyin the Indian Ocean at 36 days.
Highest winds with CycloneOlivia
in Western Australia at 408km/h.
(10:09):
Most rain was Cyclone Hyacinth
in Reunion Island at 6083mm.
That is over six meters of rain.
Jake.
The most expensive
in terms of damage was HurricaneKatrina at 125 bill,
and the most expensivein Australia was Cyclone Yasi
in Queensland at 3.6 billion.
(10:32):
And lastly, the deadliestcyclone ever was the LA odd.
But yeah, I think the wholewho knows cyclone
in East Pakistanat 500,000 deaths.
Wow. Yeah.
I thought you werestopping at 500.
No 500. Wow.
Yeah, 500,000.
So I think if I rememberthat one,
(10:53):
it was like the storm surgewas actually the biggest bit.
So yeah, the thing with cyclonesis it's not just the cyclone.
There'salso because of the low pressure
and like the way they move
and the winds they have,they create a storm surge.
So it's basically a big wavethat just pushes up
over the shore.
Similarto like a how our tsunami would.
Yeah.
But and if that's coupled witha high tide or a tide like that.
(11:17):
Yeah. Pretty bad. Pretty bad.
So yeah, in this caseit was a lot of people drowned.
They didn't get killedby the cyclone. So.
Is it king tidejust a full moon, high tide.
I don't think necessarily.Hang on.
King tide is in a see resultsquoted here.
No Google Galway I don't.
(11:37):
King tide in Cleveland.
Okay.
Sean loves copilot.
That's not copilot isGemini is Gemini.
King tide is an especially highspring tide,
especially in the region.
Spring tides,which occur 3 or 4 times a year.
King tide is not a specificterm,
nor isit used in a specific context.
The expression originatedin Australia and New Zealand
and other Pacific nationsto describe
(11:58):
especially high tides that occura few times a year.
It is now used in North Americaas well.
Definition. King tides.
Tides. Movement of citizens.
Yes. If it correlateswith the other axis.
Like yes and no.
Like cause
like tides are obviously causedby the combined effects
gravitational force of the sunon. The right.
And collapses.
Was it the Perry Perry app?
(12:19):
It's a close one. Yeah. Yeah.
The Kingtide occurs at new and full moon
when the Earth, moon and sun
are aligned at perigeeand perihelion, resulting
in the largest tidal range seenover the course of the year.
So tides are enhancedwhen the Earth is closest
to the sun aroundJanuary 2nd of each year,
they appear and reduced whenit's the furthest from the sun.
Around July the 2nd,
the predictedheights of the king to
(12:40):
AI can be further augmentedby local weather patterns.
Hey yeah.
King tide and the Joker Tide.
King tides occurring a coupletimes a year based around.
Yeah.
I would love to be somewherethat gets those massive tides,
Yeah.Just just quickly on tides.
One thing that kind of, like,blew my mind a little bit,
I heard a while ago was how thetides actually work. Yeah,
like you said, it'sthe gravitational moon and sun,
(13:03):
but all the water on the planetis actually like an oval shape.
Yeah, and the tide is now
Earth structure rotating.
Within the. Oval and oval,which is just trippy as it's.
Cool.
It's similar to the likeour skeleton
is actually not inside our body.
We're inside our skeleton.Our brain is inside. Yeah, yeah.
Brighton's on the skull.We're driving the skeleton.
We're a.
It. We're we're a bone.
(13:25):
Yeah,we're a bone with the meat.
Meat. Anyway. So.
Oh, I.
Was. Yeah.Wizards with the skin.
Oh, yes. I'd love to.
Bring it back. Supplementalcontent, supplemental content.
This week is going to be like.
I could never find it.
Is that the one with, like,the big tiger?
Yeah. Yeah.
So like
this, like, is zero like I getI had just unlocked a memory.
(13:47):
Yeah, I had the, I hadthe liger and I had, the big
elephant one.
My brother had the elephant,
I had the liger,but it was like more of a model.
He had to build it,I don't remember.
That was the first time I ever.
It took melike, a long time to make it.
It was really. Complicated.
I had a small Megazord
are really
one of the big Megazordthat would come apart
and transformto all the different dinosaurs.
(14:07):
I've got the intensity metricsfor the mathematics
of how the soccer is calculated,and I'm looking at it
and thinking,
I wish I hadmy bloody textbook on me
right now of rain and weatherpatterns.
Yeah, Sean
notoriously loves with radarand loves talking about it.
So I gave him a storm.
Can you pull up the weather
radar right nowand tell us what's happening?
Because I drove throughsome rain on the way here.
I gave Sean, a bit of a baitand switch for Christmas.
(14:30):
He asked for a specific book,and I gave him a book.
But it was.It was a weather up book.
But that was mighty expensive.
If I got the hard copy thatI got, I got a nice, soft,
paper copy.
The hurricane surge indexis a metric of potential damage
a storm may inflictand can represent rain
represented in the equation.
Where V isthe storm's wind speed, R
(14:51):
is the radius of hurricane forcewinds being V divided by 33m/s
to the power of two times,divided by 96.6km.
Basically higher winds.
Lower pressuremeans stronger storm.
Math.
Quick maths.
That's not quick.
There's nothingquick about this.
(15:13):
Can you record that soundbiteand just use that of the feature
to the the sound of my laptophitting this?
Yeah, I can use.Sounds like the NFL dunk.
And then cut that.
Well, getting back to it,let's talk about Darwin Dam.
And I'm sureall of our Australian listeners
know Darwin well.
But for those who don't know,
Darwin is the capital of thenorthern Territory, which is oh
(15:35):
yeah, I said the state,but it's not a state.
The territory in the
central north between Queenslandand Western Australia,
originally named Palmerstonand eventually renamed Darwin
after the bay port Darwin,
in which it sits, which is alsonamed after Charles Darwin and.
Palmerston, is stillwhere I should point out
it didn't like.
Yeah. Storms move it.
(15:56):
No, I think it'sI think Palmerston.
They ended upturning into a suburb of Darwin
or at least a townwithin Darwin,
Tamworth and City of Down.Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So, so youknow, sorry, I just that's
interesting.
The city was founded in 1869.
Nice.
The city has apretty rough history.
We haven't done that for a whilenow. We have a.
City,has a pretty rough history,
(16:16):
with a number of key events
affecting a huge portionof the population.
The city has had to be rebuiltalmost entirely four times,
with cyclones destroying muchof the city in 1897 and 1937,
and the Japanese,
also having their waywith Darwin in World War Two.
More bombs dropped in dominantPearl Harbor. Yep.
(16:39):
Of course, the mostrecent time is Cyclone Tracy.
It's a wonder that anyonestill lives there, but today,
the city is home to over 139,000people and holds the title
as both the smallest and wettestcapital city in Australia.
It's just a sovereign city.
In 1974, the city
had a populationof around 43,500 people,
(17:01):
with roughly 12,000 homesto live in.
As you can imagine, buildingstandards were a little more lax
in those days.
And so while some considerationwas given to cyclone
protection,most buildings in the area
were not built to withstanda direct hit from a cyclone.
It was also, almosta perfect storm, pun intended,
that would leadto the destruction of Darwin.
(17:24):
Probably doing the thingwas that too much work.
Are moving in, nevermentioning that we're moving.
Yeah, I kind of want to do that.
I talked about what we should dois just like at various points
swap position,like where a cyclone spinning
and just never mentionthat we're doing that.
It's too early for the.
(17:45):
But coffee's only about here.
It has it needs to hit.
Here it is.
It's funny that most episodes
we're drinking a beerat this time.
It's like coffee. Please.
So what about Tracy?
What about Tracy?
The clouds that wouldeventually form into Cyclone
Tracy were first noticedon 20th of December, 1974,
(18:05):
by a United States environmentalsatellite over the Fuera
sea between Indonesiaand Australia.
A day later, the characteristiccircular center had formed
and the first tropical cyclonealert was issued later that day.
The spiraling cloudshad formed around the outside
and the pressure insidethe low had dropped,
and so it was officiallypronounced as a cyclone.
(18:27):
The next day, a weather radarin Darwin would would observe
Tracy for the first time,and the tracking began.
At this point it was some 360KS north of Darwin,
north east, I should say,
over the next few days.
I'm just working that way.
Yeah, North of Capricorniapretty much.
We will have an image on socialsthat shows you the track.
(18:48):
Yeah, of of Tracy.
So you can get an ideaof where it was.
Over the next few days,Tracy would move southwest down
the coastto the Northern Territory,
passing by Darwinto the north on December 22nd.
At this point,there was little thought
given to itin Darwin and the cyclone,
and as the cyclonecontinued to travel south west,
everyone seemed to think thatthere was no cause for concern.
It's going past us.
(19:09):
With the ABCbroadcasting over the radio
that Cyclone Tracy posedno threat to Darwin.
On ABC.
Pulling a Michael Jordanand taking that personally.
Tracy decided on the morning
of the 24th of Decemberto take a hard left,
around the Cape of for Croix,which protrudes out to the north
east or north
west of Darwin, and startheading straight towards Darwin.
(19:31):
No threat. Hey!
Watch this.
What do you. What?
At this point,the cyclone was measured
at a category fourand would continue
at that strength until landfall.
So it's basically a two as itwas coming in towards the north.
And then as it took a top left,it became a fall.
And the categoriesare determined
by the wind speed near the I.
(19:52):
I think it's actually justwind speed.
I don't think they even countthe low pressure I know.
Yeah, it's just thethe highest wind speed of.
Yeah, yeah.
It was also the smallest
tropical cyclonein terms of gale force
wind diameterever recorded at the time.
And to this day is stillthe second only to
tropical cyclone, Tropical StormMarco that I mentioned before.
(20:14):
Despite the warnings now
starting to flood infrom the media,
the residents of Darwinweren't exactly
preparing the wayyou would expect for a cyclone.
Many were continuingtheir Christmas preparations,
going to partiesand preparing food like normal
despite the increasing rainand wind.
Earlier in the month,another cyclone, Cyclone Selma,
had passed by the cityto the north
(20:35):
despite repeated warningsthat it would hit,
leaving everyone feeling quitesure they had another nonevent
on their hands. Okay.
Yes. Tom Richards,an Army veteran from Darwin,
was quoted as saying,
we didn't have a properwarning system back then.
The news said it was coming,but no one thought it
would be that bad.
We tore down what we could,
but nothingcould have stopped Tracy.
(20:57):
Anotherresident, Bob Evans, said
I filled up the car with petrol
and made sure we had candlesand a torch,
but honestly, we thoughtit would just be another blow.
We never expected the whole cityto be wiped out.
So yeah, they're pretty muchjust there like that.
Whatever. Like this stuffhappens. It's going to go by.
Yep. And Just unfortunatethat I had one previous
but did nothingI. Did nothing. Yeah.
(21:17):
And then this one's like.
Yeah, it was boy,it was a boy who cried.
Well, yeah. Yeah.
And I watchedthat ABC documentary
that I mentioned toyou guys before.
Did I mention thatI kind of set it up for failure
as. What do you. Mean?
Like they said,all this is not going to happen.
Yeah, they were all saying that.
They were like, yeah, everyonelike, we had the warnings, but,
(21:39):
they actually had like an alarmthat would go over the radios.
And they were just like, yeah,
you know,that happens all the time.
There's nothing to worry about.
Don't worry about it.We'll be fine.
And I was like, yeah,
we were all kind of gooduntil it like 10 p.m.
things started gettingripped out of the ground.
And then we thought,oh, this is pretty scary.
Yeah.
And by that point, like,
this is pretty,pretty information, right.
But this is analog radio.Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
(22:01):
So a lot of the stationshad literally just switched off.
Yeah.
All the equipment was switchedoff TV.
It was the night of Christmas.
It's Christmas Eve.
So everything had beenturned off
because back then people just,you know, actually stopped.
Yeah. Look at them.Turn off the TV by the anthem.
Turn off the TV.They were like, cool.
That's all really good.And we're all done.
And we can just relax
and spend time with theirfamily instead of going,
(22:22):
I need to watch likenight reruns of The Bachelor.
And it was great.
And but yeah, that meant
that there was no informationgoing in or out.
And so when the destruction hitthe next day,
you got like a crap,how's everyone going to know?
And that leads
into my personal informationsegment for when you're ready.
We will get to that. Thank you.
By the afternoonof the 24th of December,
Darwin was startingto look decidedly more gray.
(22:43):
What? Nothing.
Okay, as the overcast cloudsand strong rain that
precede many cyclonesstarted to set in.
As the afternoon became evening,the wind gusts started
to become seriousand residents started to realize
that it was going tonot just pass by the city,
but directly hit it.
Between 10 p.m.
and midnight,the winds got so bad
that there was seriousdamage done to buildings,
(23:04):
and at 3:30 a.m.
on Christmas Day,the eye of Tracy crossed
the coast at Fannie Bay.
By this
time, the wind gustsrecorded at Darwin Airport.
Nothing funny about thathad reached 200.
Some sunny about it the early.
So by 3:30 a.m.,the wind gust recorded
at Darwin Airporthad reached 217km an hour.
(23:26):
But soon after thisrating the anomaly.
An anemometer, the wind thingand its wind vane destroyed.
I think it's Annie.
Annie? Annie. Anemometer.Anemometer.
There you go.
So, yeah,the wind vane just got.
Ripped. And destroyed.
The animator.
That's the one. The an enemy.
The Bureau of Meteorologywould later
(23:47):
estimatethat speeds reached as high
as 240 K'sand alpha gusts of wind,
but there's no wayto really know for sure.
Yeah, because I broke the thing.Yeah.
That's like with Alfredthat we just had.
Yeah,I know what your experience was.
It was originally Thursdaymorning was meant to hit.
We should point out John lives.
Like, yeah, a border,the rising. Land. Yes.
So our experienceswere vastly different.
(24:08):
They're different. Yeah. Yeah,but it's Thursday morning.
It was originally meant to heat.
We eventually got some windSaturday night about 10:00.
Very similar to Darwin.
We got Friday night wind.
We had oh there was,there was winds. But it's like
when it was making rainfall.
Rainfall, that type of thing.
Is supposed to eventually land.On Saturday morning.
We had we had big wind aroundMorningside, Carina,
(24:31):
this area sort of like early weehours of Friday morning.
Friday night, Saturday morning.Yeah.
Friday nightit was banging my door.
Yeah. I just rememberthe Saturday night
I walked out at about 10:00.
I mean it's reallystill right on.
Easily still.
And then I walk back insideand then I could hear the trees
coming up the roadlike rustling from the wind.
(24:52):
And then I heard my roofgot cracked
because the wind hit, I wentoh no.
And then that was it.
Yeah. It'sjust like that one big initial.
Oh yeah.
And then it,it was windy after that.
But you saidabout the stillness,
it was weird in the daysleading up because
Brisbane like shut downon Wednesday basically.
Yeah.
Everyone was like that's itwhen I'm doing it anymore.
(25:13):
I went to the city on Wednesdayand it was like it was dead.
There was very few peoplein the city,
and then the next two daysnothing happened.
And it was just still.
Yeah, it was quiet at night
and there was no planestaking off anymore.
Like, yeah, it was really weird.
I feel likeit could have been bad.
Oh yeah.
If it had continuedas a category two. Yeah.
(25:36):
Especially after the delayedcrossing
where everything was still.
And like you said, nothingwas happening in the garden.
Well, this is a bit ofif it then just went whack.
Yeah,I think that could have been bad
even though we'd all prepared.
Yeah.
I'm still happy thatwe all prepared.
Oh yes. Yeah.
Because like somy suburb was in the, like
the warning of likeif it hits landfill it's
(25:56):
actually going to go over likehere.
So I'm glad I prepared.
And like,you know, like everyone's like
talking about all my.
What a bloody fuze.
Let we've avoided.
We actually did the right thingfor a change.
It was good.
We prepared because everyother time we don't prepare.
Brisbane like we're kind ofused to everything
else, like floods and stuff,but cyclones, it's like,
(26:18):
oh, God, what do we do?
Yeah,my roof is going to come off.
Versus like these other areasthat like, didn't prepare
and like there's this reasonswhy they didn't prepare.
So Harvey Bay got smacked
and the mayor of Harvey Bayshout out to the mayor of Harvey
Bay look like look, I'mvery sorry for the devastation,
but they were like blamingthe Bureau of Meteorology
for not including themin the emergency warning zone.
(26:41):
It's a it's a moving storm.
They doing their best like.
And inside Harvey Bailey.
Really hard to tellwhat this thing was. Yeah.
And you were a coastal doingdonuts. Yeah.
Because they would literally
she did like three donutsfor four.
And it's a
and it's a coastal cityand they didn't prepare at all.
And then they got absolutelysmacked. Smacked.
Oh like.I can understand. Like Mac does.
But they were so far away
(27:03):
that yeah, you probablywouldn't expect to get hit.
So like yeah, it's kind of likeit just happened.
It just happened. Yeah.
I if I'm on an a coastalor coastal region and I'm seeing
everything from like Lismore
through the Gold Coast,through the Sunshine Coast,
get Batten down.
I'm probably going to go.
Storm's landfall.
Fraser Island.
(27:24):
I'm just.
I'm going to. Prepare. Yeah.
So, yeah, at this point,the storm has hit.
Like 330 Christmas morning,three.
30 Am. Everyone's hunkereddown at home.
They were
they were somesome stories that I heard,
so across
the duration of Cyclone Tracy,there was 255 mil of rain.
(27:45):
And a teenagerat the time, resident
Sue Baker,would say of the preparation,
and then surprisedat the damage.
Dad told us to stay insideand not to worry.
We had a few supplies,
but when the roof startedpeeling off,
all we could do was hideand pray.
So there was stories ofpeople like that were in the
they were in their houseand they were like,
oh, you know,we don't need to worry too much.
(28:05):
They on the top floor.And then they were like,
Our windows have smashed andthe roof starting to peel off.
We better get downto the bottom floor.
I mean, that was avery real concern for my place.
Even like like you said,I'm crazy.
Yeah, but my house is,like 100 year old.
Yeah.
And I've only got leg tapping,so I've only got, like, tapping.
Yeah. Holding my thing.
It was a concern that the roofwas going to come off.
(28:26):
I got. A tile roof.
That's a bit heavier than.
Yeah, I know the tiles.
Like one goes in there.
They all go,
but like, not nothing.
He is prepared. And that'swhat was happening in Darwin.
They didn't have any cyclone.
And the rocket was headingfor the Brisbane area.
I think just north of Harvey Bayis not built to a cyclone.
Right it. Yeah.
Once you go north of that,there are building.
(28:48):
To work. I think. Yeah.
Building regulationsthat require certain. Yep.
Building techniquesto prepare for cyclonic winds.
In Broomeevery single building in Broome
basically is made of corrugatediron.
It's a frame with corrugatediron on the outside.
So that way if everything
rips off,it doesn't demolish the
foundationand the framing of the house.
If it just blows everything awayand then they can just
(29:10):
Jackson crap back on.
Even McDonald's is madeof corrugated iron, but.
It's more of like armbracing strapping.
It's like this extra bracingstrapping up north
to be able to withstand.
Yeah, span.
Like screwsthat have these like big three.
Times as many nailsand screws in rooms in towns.
And thenyou've also got your tie there.
So in the southern areaswhere he taught ends
earlier on the bottomflight up north today,
(29:32):
I'd have to go from the bottomplate to the top line.
So it's like onelarge rod. So yep.
Yeah.
Sorry, but the buildingtook it out of my area.
So by 6:30 a.m.
the wind started to die down.
And by 8:30 a.m.the rain had ceased.
The whole event had takenjust one night
and the residents of Darwinwould start
to extricate themselvesfrom the wreckage
(29:52):
and see justhow much devastation
had been wrought by the cyclone.
They didn't expect to be sucha big.
Headed Santa Fe in the cyclone.
Actually, there was one.
There's one interviewI saw and they were like, yeah,
I lived with mymy kid, my dog and my husband,
and my kidwas just really worried about
whetherSanta would get blown away.
It's like they saying thiswhile pictures of Darwin just.
(30:13):
Yeah,I mean. Baxter on the screen.
It's pretty cute.
The kid,like he's worried about Santa.
That's that's kind of.
Yeah. Yeah.
So the first thingthat would become
blindingly obviousin the aftermath
to anyone with eyes, was thatthere was a lot of destruction,
not just some trees overand some powerlines, but
80% of all buildingsin Darwin had been destroyed.
(30:36):
Of the housingthat was in Darwin,
94% had been destroyed, 94%.
If I say there was 12.
12,000 homes.
Yeah, yeah. Suddenly30,000 people in Darwin.
Quick math on that is what.
It was 43,500.
94% of 12,000.
Quick math.
Well, what, 6% of 12,000?
(30:56):
Yeah,
well, I'm just trying to workout, like 10% is 1200
half of that.
So 600 houses left? Yeah.
And they weren't just like,slightly damaged.
It was like rooves offbuildings, down like stuff
everywhere.
They were showing the roadsand like, people couldn't
drive their cars.
They were sayingthey had to get their cars
(31:18):
and put corrugated iron plowson the front and drive through.
Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah.
Six ships had
sunk in the harborwith one, the MV Neptune.
Having its cargo of explosives
detonate inside Stokes HillWharf.
From from the sock like that?
Yeah. Like somethingin the sinking caused it to.
(31:38):
I'm sure there was a shortor something.
Yeah, at the airport, 31aircraft
were destroyedwith another 25 badly damaged.
Electrical poles had beentwisted and sheared off,
and steel house frameshad been bent like spaghetti.
Clearly, this had beena very powerful storm.
So please go to our socialsto see some of the photos of
(31:58):
of the destruction.Yeah, the airport be crazy.
Can I remember thatstorm rolled through Brisbane
wasn't even there,so it was just a bad storm?
Yeah, an archer field.All the planes were like.
Upside. Down.Upside down from it.
Actually, hotelspod for our socials.
I realize we haven't said that
worse still, and Sean'sgoing to comment on this.
I'm sure all communicationsout of the city
had been cut offwith all antenna,
antennae, antenna for long rangeradio services being destroyed
(32:22):
in the cyclone tonight,
with most media outletshaving a skeleton staff
due to it being Christmas Day,
it would be latein the afternoon
before the countrystarted to learn
what was happening in Darwin.
The first communicationslink to be reestablished
afterthe cyclone was at the airport,
with a de Havilland Heronthat had been stashed
in a hangar,having its radio still working.
(32:43):
Pilot David Fredericksonwould contact the Katherine
Flight Service Centerby mid-morning,
and would spend the nextfew hours
relaying messages from emergencyservices,
Navy personnel and airportstaff.
Elsewhere, Bob Hooper and GaryGibson, amateur radio operators,
would help to set up a makeshift
radio stationat the Darwin Community College,
connectingto a network of stations
(33:03):
throughout the country to startcoordinating a response plan.
One of the things that good job,
one of the things that was said
about thiswas they started communicating
with the outside world,and everyone was like, okay,
like, yeah, okay,you've had a cyclone hit.
Can you tell uswhat's really happened?
Like, stopbeing so dramatic about like,
the whole place is flattened.
We need everyone to comehere, please. Yeah, yeah.
(33:26):
So it took like a whileuntil they could get a plane in
to get some filmflight back to Sydney.
They developed it in Sydney,and then they broadcast
the picturesand everyone was like, oh, crap.
Yeah. Wow. Look at that.
They weren't being dramatic.
Yeah. So, Sean,you said you had.
Yeah.
So amateur radio enthusiasts
(33:47):
were able to get in contactwith local radio stations
in particular,that managed to get,
signals down to Alice Springs,
where there is a lot of amateurradio
enthusiasts as well,including my wife's grandfather.
We can't interview him.
Sadly passed awayseveral years ago,
but he was part of the peoplehe was in.
The group of peopleusing his amateur radio antenna
basedin his literally in his shed
(34:07):
that was ableto intercept messages
from Darwinand then transmit them
to emergency services
throughout Queensland,through Longreach,
Winton, down through Brisbane.
The amateur radio community
was like a huge part ofof what got everything together.
They talk about like thatto have one
in the Navy,radios in the Air Force race,
but the amateur radio peoplewere the ones that sent out.
Yeah. So much. Yeah.
The first few days were just
(34:28):
amateur radio enthusiastsdoing the work of communicating.
And if you.
Know anything about the waythat like
the waythat some people have done
nothing,what was called ham radios
or whatever, that shortwaveradio like, you've got
VHF, UHF, high frequency,low frequency,
the way that you transmit highfrequency
is like quite directionaland quite challenging.
(34:48):
So having a good knowledgeof how to do it,
you know, just simply turn it onand hope that it works
like you've got to usedirectional antennas,
you got to use dipoles tocorrectly shoot everything out.
So like the amateur radioenthusiast
for a big part of it,because they understand
how and where they needto send everything.
Johns building expertise,my wiggy radio knowledge.
Yeah.
Very helpful.
I've done a little bit of radiostuff.
(35:10):
Part of working on get on to do
a classical.
Yeah.
So pretty, pretty intense stuff.
(35:31):
They literally couldn'tcommunicate
with the outside worldfor a few hours after it.
And then the outside worlddidn't believe him anyway, so.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
At the hospital, health careworkers were sent into overdrive
with over 500 people needingimmediate treatment.
While it would take until 7 a.m.
for the conditionsto be safe enough
for people
to start arrivingat the hospital,
112 people were admittedto hospital, with,
(35:53):
both operating theatersbeing used constantly.
The local doctors would workwithout break
until late in the day,
when a relief team arrivedfrom Canberra.
There was,
a whole bunch of peoplegot flown out that were injured,
and there was this one guy.
He had his two daughters, and
they all hadto get flown to Sydney,
and they were interviewing himin Sydney,
and he was like, yeah,we were inside the house.
(36:16):
And we were hiding under the bed
and then the roof got ripped off
and that was pretty bad.
And then within half an hour,everything was gone,
including the bedthat we were hiding under,
and we were just laying out
in the yard nextto the foundation of the house
for like four hoursduring the cyclone.
That's crazy. Yeah.
(36:37):
And his wife sadly got bonkedon the head by some debris and,
and passed away.
Oh, yeah.
So that is terrifying to me.Like.
There's nothing left.
You just in the openin the middle of a cycle.
With stuff just pinging around.
In the middleof the pitch of the,
you know, pitch darknessof the night talking. Yeah.
So someone was going to need
to coordinatethe emergency response.
(36:59):
And so a committee wasput together to do just that.
High level public servants,
police and emergencyservices would work together.
Additionally, all defense Forcepersonnel throughout
Australiawould be recalled from leave,
and many were sent to Darwinto help with the cleanup
and bring in supplies,including Sean's dad.
Including my dad.
(37:19):
Who sadly is on holiday,will interview in later.
We'll have a supplementalin some point in the future.
Yeah, maybe that can bepart of episode 100.
The Navy would send 13 shipsto transport supplies,
eventuallycompleting the largest disaster
relief operation ever undertakenby the Australian Navy.
With the incredibly,
(37:40):
creative title of Navy
Help Darwin.
I don't think it wassaid that way, but it was.
I think it was called OperationNavy helped out.
Yeah, but not like Navykept up with Darwin.
Like you said, it.
With somuch of the crew destroyed,
(38:00):
there was roughly 30,000 peoplenow homeless,
and they needed to be set upin emergency shelters,
which would event,
unfortunatelyhave little to no proper hygiene
thanks to the power,water and sewerage systems
being offlinethroughout most of the city,
water would be brought in viatankers, and trench latrines
would be dragged
to a drug dug to allowthe most basic services.
(38:22):
But there were biggerfears of illness outbreaks,
so immunization programs begantargeting typhoid and cholera.
Additionally, the whole citywas sprayed with malathion,
a chemical used to controlthe population of mosquitoes
who I'm sure would be ready fora field day in the drench city.
You say that I feel like,
the mosquitoes that are bredin the water we had from Alfred
(38:44):
have hatched because I was outworking the other day.
The swampy area,
man, I had one Scotch grade
mosquito,and I thought it was a moth.
It was that big.
Like it was humongous.
Yeah, and there were everywhere.
That is the thingwith a lot of these cyclones
is that once it's done, it'snot done.
That's just new thingsthat come along like, suddenly
(39:05):
we have an outbreak of scarletfever or something, like, yeah.
The army was also taskedwith searching for the bodies
of people and petsin the wreckage of houses.
While they were there,they were also asked
to clean out the fridgesand phrases of the city
to ensure
that there would be no rottingfood, adding to the issues faced
once the army had gonethrough a house,
they would spray SNC on the wallfor, searched and cleared.
(39:29):
Despite that immense task,
they would complete that workwithin a single week.
By the end of the yearthat already gone
through every destroyed House.
Of Australian Army. Yeah.
Can you imagine that?
Like, hey, go in there,see if there's a dead body.
Oh, and also clean outthe fridge.
Area from day.
In quite like the fourth day.
Elsewhere, cityofficials would start to attempt
to reconnect essential serviceslater on Christmas Day.
(39:53):
First, they would clear debris
and reestablishpower connections
by rebuilding the downed powerlines.
After this,
they would seal offdamaged water
hydrants and reactivate pumpsthat ran
the city's waterand sewage systems.
This would be essentialfor the recovery to come.
They actually were talking aboutlike the power station
had to deal with itself,
get itself back on line,
but then obviouslythere was no power lines left,
(40:13):
so they had to bring in powerline guys
to just fix every single powerline in the city.
So I had to rebuild poles.
I had to put the lines back up.
They'd connect everything again,like they use.
We had poles. In the end. If you
have a look at the
photos, I have this like twistedpower pole and you're like,
that's a weirdlooking power pole.
So the like I say, use
what's called stubby polesrather than wooden posts.
(40:37):
They're basically steel girderswith concrete in the middle.
Oh, they call the stubby pole.They're very strong.
So when you see the twisted onein the Wigan
particular, the Wikipedia page,it's fully twisted by the storm
you're talking about.
It's like literallytwo humongous steel girders.
It's like there at the base.There is.
Why does that television
with concrete like concretein the middle of them?
(40:57):
Yeah,I've seen. Pictures of that.
Yeah. Don't hit one.
Don't hit one in your car.You have to pay back the state.
If you damage itand it will bankrupt you.
Yeah.
It's probably not yourbiggest concern if you hit one.
That's a supplementalbit of information.
That also just don't hitany, pal.
Yeah, well, they dothat here too. If you hit a,
Yeah.
If for the inspectionand then possibly replacement.
At 100 grandif you just over phone.
(41:18):
Yeah.
And you know what?
It's not that hard to not hita power pole.
Swerve out of control. Likewe're not getting into that.
Check it out. Saysno, it says no.
Thank youto hitting power poles.
But yes,
if you if you if you know,if you see that picture like,
that's a weirdlooking power pole.
H-2b poles. Yeah.
The rest of the country, though,delight in finding out about
the destruction,
would start to fundraiseto assist
(41:38):
in the release of reliefefforts.
Small towns along alongthe roads out of Darwin.
So particularlythe state highway.
Is it the Stuart of the state,Stuart Stuart highway
would offer food,
fuel and rest stopsfor those evacuating by road.
Reception centers were set upin nearby towns and cities
to welcoming the evacueesand help to resettle them.
(41:59):
AliceSprings would raise $105,000
within the first 24 hours,which is the equivalent of 650,
in today's money
to help those relocatingand rebuilding the Boxing Day
Test in Melbourne,part of that summer's ashes
series saw playersfrom both teams collecting money
along the boundary to besent to the victims monthly.
(42:19):
So we're goingto get into the evacuation now.
But thesethese people were saying like
so people evacuating by road,
where were their carsduring Darwin.
Yeah. Outside.
Yeah.
So there's all these carsthat are just smashed
like windscreensgone, the rooves, the stove.
Dean and people like drivingout of Darwin in these cars.
So all these towns,they were just like,
(42:40):
come in, have food,we're going to fix your car.
And they would just like
get the car running againthinking, all right, off you go.
And I piss off to Darwin,to Adelaide or whatever.
Pretty cool stuff.
So about that evacuation.
As you can imagine,it's pretty hard to run a city
when most of the buildingsare now
the equivalent of unbuilt Lego.
So there was going toneed to be some evacuations.
(43:03):
Nice visual board.
Yeah. Well,what it looks like dark.
Yeah,I get it, but I'm being serious.
That's a nice visual. Right.
You can you can picture.
In orderto coordinate the evacuation
and start the recovery,
Major-General Allen Stretton,
the director general of theNatural Disasters Organization
and the Commonwealth Minister
for the Northern Territory,Rex Patterson.
(43:23):
Right now,
I would fly in light onChristmas Day to take control.
They would assess the situationand with the advice of Doctor
Charles Goode,
the director of healthin the Northern Territory,
would decide that a safe levelof population for Darwin in
its currentstate would be 10,500 people.
The evacuation began on the 26th
and was completed by airand by road.
(43:46):
He said it was 40,000,so a quarter.
43,500. Yeah.
So safe populationis a quarter of what it was.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Salvation Army and Red crosswere also taking part
in the evacuation,the Red cross being responsible
for keeping trackof where everyone was going.
So they would be like,what's what's your name?
Where are you going?
(44:06):
What's your new addressgoing to be?
Yeah. People would be like,
We don't know. Yeah.
Maybe Sydney,
priority was given to women,children and the sick
and the elderly.
Men were expected
to stay and help the recoveryif they were physically able.
There were stories of mendressing up as women to try.
And. Oh,so the Titanic evacuated.
(44:26):
Yeah, yeah.
Ansett repay Qantas to repay me.
Repay would send planesto start the evacuation
and those flightswould be oversubscribed.
To helpwith the lack of flights,
the airport was stillexperiencing
communication issues
and so only one planecould take off every 90 minutes.
(44:47):
So some flights took offwith more than 150% capacity.
Where it was storiesof like seven four sevens
taking offwith like 650 people in them,
which was a record in Australiaat the time.
On the 31st of December,there were only 10,638
people left in Darwin,with 25,628
evacuated by airand 9734 by road.
(45:11):
Afterthe evacuation was completed,
a permit system was put in placeto restrict access
to the city to those involvedin the recovery, only.
So essentially
it became like a locked offzone, like do not come here,
which you can kind ofunderstand.
Yeah.
So now they're moving onto the recovery.
So they've got everyone out.
It's like,all right, what do we do
by the end of the weekon December 31st, Major General
(45:33):
Allen Stretton would say that
the immediate recovery,
evacuation and reconnectionof essential essential services
had hit a pointthat local officials
could take overcontrol of the city again.
And so the defense forcewould hand over control back to
the local elected officials.
From here, there would be a longroad to recovery for the city.
The removal of the debris wouldbe the main concern at first.
(45:54):
However, by Februarythe attention had turned
to rebuilding Gough Whitlam,the prime minister at the time.
It's still a long timelike December to February,
just the removal of debrislike that's.
So they had like army bulldozersand stuff
brought in to just scoopeverything up and get rid of it.
Push it into the ocean. Yeah.
There was
(46:14):
there was talk about just going.
To just build a new city.We're not going. To do this.
Like,let's just go somewhere else.
Nobody else here.
But Gough Whitlam was like,absolutely not.
You are going to rebuild.
And so they set up
the Darwin ReconstructionCommission in February of 1975,
with the goal of rebuildingthe city within five years.
(46:35):
Temporary housing was broughtin, along with caravans, hotels
and even an ocean liner to housethose returning to the city.
And by May of 1975,the population
was back to 30,000. US.
By September, very littlehad been rebuilt, with the focus
so far being on infrastructureand temporary housing,
and the commission would facecriticism for its slow response.
(46:56):
By April of 1976, though,
3000 new homes had been rebuiltand repairs
have been completed on all thatremains standing after Tracy.
Part of the delayshad been the need to draw up
new building codes to dealwith the danger of cyclones,
which aimed to ensurethere would be no destruction
like Tracy ever againin the city.
By 1978,the city had rebuilt enough
(47:18):
to recoverto its pre-crisis population,
but in the following yearsup to 60% of those
that had lived in Darwin in 1974had left to resettle again,
not the city's.
So it
was like everyone came backand then slowly they all left.
I guess, just being like, it'snot what it was.
I'm scared. Yeah.
The PTSD
(47:38):
you think in those yearsof rebuilding
is, well, you've got all thetemporary housing and we've got
you got people obviouslyworking to build, rebuild.
I wouldn't imagine there wouldbe too many other jobs to do.
That was one thing that theysaid, though, like, you know,
the people that stayed,
particularlyin that first few months,
they just worked from sunupto sundown, eight and slept.
(47:59):
And there was justnothing else to do.
And so but that night,
surely there had
been some sort of grocery storesand all about food.
Oh yeah, but like other jobs,yeah.
I wouldn'thave nothing else to do.
That is nothing. Else to do.Yeah.
I mean, I imagine school
potentially be happening,but not like it should or.
All the schools weirdly.
Well,one of the things that just
(48:20):
were fine, likebecause they were different,
they would go in differentthings. Yeah, yeah.
It was.
More like
if it was like anything likeQueensland, it's just a visible.
They were the one that I saw
was just like a big concretebuilding. Yeah.
It survived. That'swhat I'm saying. It was like.
Yeah this shot a.
Rectangle a block cube.
Yeah, yeah.
They were showingthis shot of the city
and it's like destroyed houses.
(48:41):
And then the schooljust sitting there.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I imagine thatfirst year was very tough.
And, like, you'd come back
because you want to be there,but then what do you do? Like
there's nothing to supportso you don't get a job.
Yeah.
Another consequence of Tracywas that the governance
of the Northern Territorywould change.
(49:02):
When Tracy hit in 1974,there was a legislative Assembly
which had very limited powers.
The real legislative powerfor the Northern Territory
was still in Canberra,with the federal minister
being given controlof the territory.
After Cyclone Tracy.
It was clear that this approach
had a lot of drawbacks,and so in 1978
the territory
was given self-governance,allowing them
to control their own destiny.
(49:24):
So they're essentially like,
we should probably
have controlof this place, in this place.
So they gave themtheir own control,
which they've still got.
Now, while the Darwin of todayholds little resemblance
to the Darwin that was destroyedon Christmas Day in 1974,
the scars still run deep.
For those that survived.
Many records held bythe government were released
(49:44):
in 2005,
giving some more information
for those that still holdquestions around the recovery.
Just this pastChristmas was the 50th
anniversary,and a memorial was unveiled
at East Point Reserve,where Tracy made landfall.
Despite the destruction,the real memory of the day
is the 66 people who died onwhat should have been
the happiest day of the year.
(50:05):
So despite this destruction,there's only 66 people.
Yeah.
Which is crazy to methat so few died.
Yeah, of a total mercury saidtotal population 40,000.
Yeah.
95% of the houses destroyed.
Like that's.
Yeah.
Not a bad outcome.
It's still sad. Yeah.
It's pretty good to only lose 66when 94% of houses are gone.
(50:29):
Yeah.
Anyway, that's that's Tracy.
That was Tracy.
Yeah.
The, whenever people talk aboutcyclones here, it's like Yasi.
Larry. Yeah. Tracy.
Yasi was the 1 in 10.
Oh, yeah. Debbie was pretty bad.Debbie was big.
Yasi. Yes.He was further. North.
Yeah, I was. Yeah, it'sfurther. North, like Innisfail.
(50:51):
It's Innisfail further north.
Yeah. And it spells furthernorth in Townsville.
It was the bad onein Townsville.
Was it Debbie?
Debbie was sortof. Debbie. Yeah.
Debbiehit Townsville those 2016.
2016. 2016, 2017.
But it hit like itall over the coast.
Yeah, yeah.
It's weird looking at thethe stats of like
the cost of these cyclones likeobviously Josie's number one.
(51:12):
But number four wasn'teven a cyclone.
It was a tropical storm.
Like a it was a low.
It was Oswald in 2012, 2013.
It started like up in the Gulfwhen inland,
like in the Northern Territory
did a loop, came back outand then just ran down
the entire length of Queenslandinto New South.
Wales, just smashing the coast.
(51:33):
No inland. Or even. Low. Yeah.
And it just kept sucking waterin and it just kind of
kept damaging thingsand causing flooding
and like wreckedthe Kingaroy region.
That was one that causedthe 2013 floods in Ipswich.
Yeah.
Because it just came downthe coast and they,
they talk about like cyclonedamage is about who it hits,
like where it hits,not about how strong it is.
(51:53):
Yeah.
So Yasi hit the coastline
and mission basewhich is north of Townsville.
And Debbie hit at Aili beach
which is south of Townsvilleabout four hours. Yeah.
Lovely place to live,I mean, holiday.
I don't know if I'd want to livein Aly Beach.
It really is.
It's a it's like a Paradise.
Yeah, yeah.
Choppy seas sometimes like that.
Yeah. Backpackers.
Cyclone Tracy
(52:14):
one thing I remember too aboutanother big one was Katrina.
They heard a lot about that.
Is I think, a lot of peoplewere surprised how big that was.
That was quite a large cyclone.
A train I got. Yeah.
It was big.
And now I remember there wasa. Cat five that hit New.
Orleans.
Yeah, I remember themoverlaying the entire storm
over Australiaand it like covered the entirety
(52:36):
of mainland Australia.
Just like.
Yeah,that that big boy Hurricane.
Katrina because it got caughtin the Gulf in between, like
stuck in the Gulf of Mexicoand just went
and just, yeah, demolished.
It was likeSonic stuck in a box.
Yeah, it was crazy. Yeah.
And the gulf is quiteshallow and warm,
so it just sucks it out.
You get quite bad onesthere. That's where I'm from.
(52:58):
Recently,Katrina killed 1400 people.
Yeah, well, where the man.
Yeah. Can be scary.
Yeah, $125 billion of damage.
That was the most expensive one.
That's the recordingthat you said.
For the most expensive.It is tied with.
HurricaneHarvey is being the costliest
tropical cyclonein the Atlantic basin.
The 12th tropical cyclone,the fifth hurricane,
(53:19):
and the third major
hurricane of the 2005Atlantic hurricane season,
and the fourth most
intense one to hitthe contiguous United States.
So that means not includingHawaii.
Yeah, yeah.
And like Puerto Rico,I saw that.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So that would have been funfor you writing this
(53:41):
and learningabout all this destruction.
And you love storms.
I love I decided I love.
Weather no no but like yeahwriting all this destruction
and how bad it wasand all that. Wow.
While waiting for it to heat.Yeah I do like the.
Oh yeah, yeah, there's a reasonI wrote this episode and yeah,
we had to.
Obviouslywe couldn't record because,
even though it never really hit,we got some flooding,
(54:01):
so it was kind of awkwardto try and all
get together to record, but,
yeah, they were,like, waiting for it to hit.
I'm writing this story.
I'm like, that's gonna getpretty bad here.
Yeah.
Did it mentionwhat what category was
Tracy when it hit for?
Oh, so it was a categoryfour one.
Oh, yeah. Okay.
So the highest category is five.
(54:23):
That we know of.
There's like a, there is a limitto how powerful they are.
Okay. Yeah.
But yeah, it's it'spretty hectic when they're a cat
five like 250 Kan hour winds or something like.
Yeah.I think we got hundreds here.
And it was like, oh yeah, that'sa, that's a wind.
That's. Yeah. But the wind.
Yeah. Yeah.
(54:45):
Anyway it's tough.
Thanks for flooding uswith that information.
Yeah. Who.
All right.
Let's spin on out of here.Let's wrap it up. You're not.
Good morning.
Take it easy.
You've been listeningto Cheeky Tales podcast.
If you'd like to see
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or to interactwith us about our episodes,
(55:06):
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