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was a roar—I remember thinking: “Why are there
jets taking off? It’s too dangerous.”’ Kate Cairns remained terrified of the noise
of wind for years to come. A friend of hers had a tape of the noise, and brought
it around some time after the cyclone.
    We didn’t have a tape [player]. It was one of the things that we hadn’t replaced
at that time. And he said: ‘Well I can play it on my recorder in the car.’ So we
went out onto the street and he put it in, and played the noise of Cyclone Tracy,
and there was no way I could listen to it. I just couldn’t—I went cold all over.
    The sound of a Category 4 cyclone can, and did in the case of Tracy, lead to psychological
damage, much as the massive roar of a bushfire can, or shells on a battlefield, or
bombs over a city. Thirty years later Bill Wilson returned to this memory, the memory
of the sounds of the cyclone, several times during his extensive interviews with
the Northern Territory Archives.
    The noise stays with me. The noise is in the back of my mind all the time when there’s
a cyclone. It comes back to me and I remember that squealing, screeching, howling
noise…You wanted to scream because of this noise. The wind howling, the tin screeching
as it’s dragging along the road, the branches cracking and whipping off, the rain
pounding. You put all of that together, and that noise is, to me, a cyclone, and
that sticks in my memory loud and clear.
    No one was—nor perhaps could they be—prepared for the ferocity of the returning winds.
Winds that hadn’t built up over several hours as the first half of the cyclone had,
but hit, bang , at over two hundred kilometres an hour. The wind measure at the airport
blew away as the wind speed reached 217 km/h. Peter Spillett, who had survived the
bombing of London and the Burma campaign, described Tracy as ‘the most traumatic
experience’ he’d ever had. Paula Dos Santos, who’d lived through the bombing of Darwin
in 1942, found the experience comparable. It was perhaps even worse for those who
had nothing to compare it to.
    It was now, when the wind returned, that things tipped. Things to that point had
been bad, they’d been indescribable, but it was now that everyone was untethered
from the world they knew. The Harveys’ house lifted from its moorings and dropped
again. Rattled buildings, buildings that had been shaken for hours, exploded into
the night, evaporated into the air. Darwin slipped through the looking glass into
a new kind of reality. A young policeman, Robin Bullock, actually says this—that
he felt his sense of reality shift as the cyclone went on for what ‘seemed like a
lifetime’. 20 Sections of the roof at the Fannie Bay Watch House were blown off and
prisoners were moved from block one to block three. Ted D’Ambrosio’s brother was
out at the Darwin Golf Club and tied himself to a pillar to stop himself flying away.
His son drove home in a small Mazda and when he, somewhat miraculously, made it
home, told his dad he’d seen caravans flying through the air over the Stuart Highway.
Cedric Patterson’s archival interview reads like a dreamscape as he talks of his
house slowly falling apart and the stars coming in. He saw ‘a piece of asbestos cement
about the size of a dinner plate and it was just floating in the passageway. And
I can remember brushing it out of the way with my hand and thinking: “That’s strange.”’
He talks of hiding under the drawer and feeling dazed, of walls collapsing. Walls
are described as ‘melting’ and one man describes being sucked out of his roofless
house as if he were riding a magic carpet. Shards of broken glass swirled around
rooms as if in a giant blender. Everyone started making deals with God, even the
atheists. Some people couldn’t breathe, the wind was so ferocious. Elspeth Harvey,
stuck in her car with her family and a