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menagerie, was so desperate for a piss she
held on to the car door handle and ‘had the fastest pee in the world’, but while
the door was open her cat escaped. 21 Petrol was sucked out of petrol tanks and air
out of car tyres. Houses rocked like boats at sea. People sheltering in cars were
picked up into the air, blown a few hundred metres and then dumped down again. Bead
curtains, all the rage in the early seventies, whipped through the air like stock
whips. One woman was blown out of the house with her five-month-old son in her arms.
They landed uninjured but the baby was dangerously cold and instinct drove the mother
to lick him, much as a cat would, in an effort to keep him warm. 22 Another mother
remembers being blown three blocks from her home with her young daughter in her arms,
the two of them spinning like feathers through the air. Housing girders twisted themselves
into forms of abstract beauty. Thousands of sheets of corrugated iron scraped and
scratched along the ground, sounding like millions of fingernails running down a
blackboard. Ordinary household objects became lethal. Sergeant C. Simpson: ‘I was
struck on the left shin by a china mug and the handle became embedded in my leg…’ 23 A refrigerator wedged itself in the high water tank near the airport.
    At the Wrights’ house things actually became less ferocious after the eye because
everything had already been torn down. Arthur hugged Pat until dawn saying, ‘It’s
all right love, don’t worry, just stay here with me.’ Twenty-eight-year-old barrister
Tom Pauling, lover of theatre and already sporting the flamboyant moustache that
would survive Tracy and many decades beyond into his term as Administrator of the
Northern Territory, played to type by taking to the Courvoisier VSOP cognac. David
McCann, the city’s magistrate, sat in the YMCA with a mattress pulled over his head.
Richard Creswick sat in the bath with three cats, a dozen tinnies and a bottle of
something strong and taught his housemate Eric (who was sitting under the hand basin)
the words to ‘Waltzing Matilda’. At some point Creswick began to crawl towards his
bedroom to grab his duffel coat, only for a lightning flash to reveal the bedroom
had been blown away. Over in Nightcliff, Howard Truran narrowly missed being impaled
by a thirty-foot piece of timber with a pointy end like a javelin that was flying
through the air. It went through the ceiling above him, then stopped four feet from
where he and his wife were lying. Truran believed his wife’s crucifix had protected
them from being speared. The palm in the Botanical Gardens that was about to flower
for the first time in a hundred years that Christmas Day was destroyed.
    As well as these ferocious winds there was 255 mm of rain that night. The wind chill
factor of all that rain and wind meant that, for some, hypothermia set in. And almost
everyone rode out the night wondering why they had been subjected to such terror,
assuming that other people, in other houses, weren’t having such a bad time. Constable
Stephenson expressed what many felt when he said, ‘I thought it was only my house
and kept thinking “why us”.’ 24
    All this: the fear, the destruction, and the noise, finally finished at, as Charles
Gurd put it, ‘the first uncertain light of dawn’. 25 When Tracy was finally done with
Darwin it headed, slowly, southeast across Arnhem Land. A week later the cyclone
petered out over the gulf country of Queensland.

UNCERTAIN LIGHT OF DAWN
    â€˜IT WAS like going to sleep in England and waking up in Alaska,’ was how Ida Bishop
described the shock of stepping outside her house into Christmas Day. Savvas Christodoulou
took in what he saw—his garage survived but his house didn’t—and decided he needed
to take an entire two days off work. Edna Harmer found she hadn’t just lost her crochet,
she’d lost everything she’d ever