TRANSCRIPT
“There was a really deep, loud, extremely loud howl.”
“When the storm hit, the wind, it's terrible. I don't ever want to hear again that sort of wind. And the rain comes everywhere. The glass of the house is smashed. In the house there was the water. The water was all around in the house.”
“It was like, 'oh my god, what happened'.... like, like a bomb hit it.”
“No one could believe a capital city could be destroyed in six hours. That was just an impossibility. But it happened.”
Half a century ago on Christmas Day pictures of a flattened city at the top end of Australia, stunned the rest of the country.
For 89-year-old Cesarina Gonzadi, Christmas in Darwin was always filled with joy.
“We were cooking in the street, where I lived. All the families made all different dishes, like me, I'm from Italy. I made dishes from my town.”
In an instant, a city of fewer than 50,000 residents had been almost completely destroyed.
Cesarina's son, Emilio Gonzadi, was six years old when the cyclone hit.
He vividly remembers his father fixing the roof of their home, as the eye of the storm passed.
“He raced out and put his nail bag on and started re nailing the section of the roof that was banging and that's when us as kids learned all our Italian swear words because my mum was very angry at dad and called him every name under the sun. Finally Dad came back in after that, and that's when the second part of Tracy hit and that's when it just got worse. It was just like an instant, it was horrible. It was the wind, the howling and the rain, like Mum said, the rain was just going in every direction.”
Andrew Demetriou was 19 years old.
He'd been out with friends on Christmas Eve, but the most difficult moment was returning home the next morning.
“I could see our house, there were only a few walls standing up but the rest of the house was gone. I panicked, and I ran inside and I couldn't find my mum and dad or my brother. I went into a panic mode. That's probably the biggest impact. It really got to me.”
Tracy was by no means the most powerful cyclone recorded in Australia, but its path directly through Darwin devastated the city.
The weather bureau recorded wind speeds of 217 kilometres an hour before its measuring instrument was destroyed.
Lloyd Stumer was a meteorologist in Darwin, and had been tracking the cyclone as it headed towards the city.
“It's a little bit surreal because you're watching this monster coming towards Darwin and it's got you in its gun sights. You had the observations coming in from the automatic weather stations saying this thing is very dangerous, people will get killed. That's how serious it was, but you're always hoping that this thing is going to turn before it hits you. That's human nature. As this thing was coming in, I was sort of thinking 'no it's got to turn, it's not going to hit me, I'm a good guy, and it's not going to take us out'.”
But as the cyclone came through, Mr Stumer and the rest of his team at the weather bureau felt its raw power.
“Well on the 8th floor, I know a lot of people think people think the met (meteorology) bureau never look out the window but we were certainly looking out the window that night. The walls were sort of moving on the floor - these were pre-stressed concrete walls - and they were flexing. They were moving a couple of inches along the floor. They looked like they were ready to snap. We thought, 'if this goes, we'll go with it.'“
50 years on from the disaster, Mr Stumer still gets emotional recalling when the cyclone hit.
“Around midnight I know one of the meteorologists went into shock. He was talking to his wife and she screamed... and he thought she'd been killed. So against that background, everyone was pretty worried, but we did our duty and fortunately most people survived. But it was very horrendous.”
Samantha Trott had only moved to Darwin eight months prior to the disaster.
She was still a child, but clearly remembers the roof of her house being lifted off by the force of the winds.
“Emotionally it was scary of course because you think a house is built solid. Then physically, the feeling of the whole house shaking until the roof went off and then it was just a thud a really hard thud. It was a little bit like a sudden jerk if you're in a lift. It suddenly jerks at the floor. It was a bit like that but magnify it by ten times or so. Emotionally, I wondered whether I was going to get sucked out of the house, so I was holding onto people, things, whatever I could get my hands on.”
She describes how after the cyclone passed, the city was almost devoid of colour.
“We wondered out and started looking around, and it really did look like some of the pictures you see of war zones. There was just rubble everywhere. The whole scene was almost grey. Everything was in greys. There was very little colour in things. The folded and bent corrugated iron roofing, pieces of walls, broken up walls, pieces of cable from inside those walls everywhere, and clothing and toys. It was all just a big tangled mess, and yes it looked a lot like the pictures you see of a war zone.”
She was among the more than three quarters of the city's population forced to evacuate.
Jared Archibald is the curator of Territory history at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
He says the cleanup and rebuilding effort was a massive operation.
“Everyone worked together to get Darwin cleaned up and then the rebuild began. Building companies and building from all over Australia came to Darwin. Unionists came, no one didn't come. It was actually amazing. The response from the nation was one of the most amazing things. Everyone came and did what they could, and Darwin was basically put back on the map after being rebuilt.”
Within three years, the population had returned.
But as Emilio Gonzadi describes, Darwin wouldn't be the same.
“Darwin is a beautiful city. It's changed. It's completely changed. Everyone remembers how it was before Cyclone Tracy. Tracy changed Darwin but Darwin is Darwin, and it will always be Darwin.”
For those who lived through the cyclone, like Andrew Demetriou... the events of Christmas Day 1974 would be etched their collective memory.
“When I tried to explain to friends, even say ten years ago, I would break out and cry while I'm talking about it, because it all comes back, it all comes back to you. I'm not the only one, a lot of people from Darwin that experienced it, they all say the same thing. The pain doesn't go away. You can put it under control a little bit, but it doesn't go away.”
