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sheltered there
for the rest of the night. Bob Collins’ roof had blown off so he gave up on his stereo,
and he and his wife headed for the CSIRO labs at Berrimah. There was so much debris
being hurled around that ‘bits of Berrimah were basically passing over our heads’. 17 The amount of rubbish that got caught under their car had Collins worried they weren’t
going to make it. ‘We got there by the skin of our teeth, when it was basically back
to full fury.’ He found some seventy-odd people sheltering at the labs, including
a few who’d been so drunk when the cyclone hit that family members had had to carry
them there. ‘They had gone to sleep in a lounge chair in their house, and woke up
jammed in with seventy or eighty other people, in a laboratory in Berrimah. Their
complete disorientation was, even at that stage, I have to say, fairly amusing to
the rest of us.’
    Roy Barden returned from his neighbour’s just in time.
    As soon as the eye was over well then we came back and we said alright everybody
button up. Now we’ve got to wait and find out where the wind comes from and instead
of the wind coming from the north-east it suddenly came from the south and so well
it was blowing pretty hard for a while and it was gradually getting a bit worse and
so another chap [Con] and myself we both put our backs up against the door to hold
the door which was in two parts and then all of a sudden we heard a roar that was
like about twenty planes taking off, all at the same time, about twenty jets roaring
away and then all of a sudden it hit us and within a matter of seconds well he [Con]
was blown across the room and I’d been pushing hard against my door and it collapsed
and I fell out onto the verandah and by the time that I’d—I got onto my hands and
knees to look round over my shoulder, the roof, the ceiling and everything was just
disappearing up into the sky.
    Barden grabbed hold of the railing to try and right himself, but every time he tried
to get up he could feel himself being lifted up again so he gave up and lay on his verandah.
He was there for three hours but can’t remember much more because he ‘kept getting
knocked out’. Kim Clough, who was a child at the time, remembers that her entire
family was out in the open, being pelted with debris. Her mother was killed. Her
brother, Perry, was badly injured. She remembers her father, Colin, screaming as
he was hit by flying tin and the metal sank deep into his back.
    When it came to the details, many of which slipped into a vague blur over the days,
indeed years, after Tracy hit, there was one thing the survivors never forgot. The
noise. The sound of the cyclone returning after the eye had passed was described
variously as hundreds of petrol tankers heading up the street, the scream of a banshee,
a jet plane in your garden, forty thousand trains, and ‘rather like an express train
going through a tunnel’ but one that went on for hours and hours. Beth Harvey used
an analogy people also use with bushfires: ‘I’ve never been hit by a steam train,
but that was the sense of power it had.’ Ted D’Ambrosio, the deputy lord mayor, said,
‘The noise was so great and the wind was so devastating, and there was the screaming
of people and so forth, that it was just something out of a horror movie.’ 18 Government
architect Cedric Patterson comments, ‘The thing about the noises that you could hear,
and I couldn’t—you can’t really identify what was making these noises. There was
screeching, ripping, tearing sound but the important thing was, that there were no
echoes. There were no after-sounds. Whatever sound there was, it was sharp, defined
and that was it—bang! Nothing else—no reverberation or that sort of business.’ 19 Kate Cairns put it this way: ‘When I first heard the roar of the cyclone coming back
[after the eye had passed]—and it