Untold History: We survived when cyclone Tracy smashed Darwin

As cyclone Tracy ripped apart her Darwin home, Gail Fewson huddled with her family under a mattress.

“The roof had gone . . . we were standing in water, there were electric wires sparking together, there was the lightning, thunder,” Ms Fewson said.

“And I remember thinking — the noise was just awful — I thought ‘I am 18 years old and tonight I die’.”

It was early on Christmas morning, 1974.

And 50 years later the haunting event remains embedded in Ms Fewson’s memory.

Somehow the Fewson family survived. But 66 others did not. Countless others were injured.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology says tropical cyclone Tracy was arguably the most significant tropical cyclone in Australia’s history.

“Tracy was a small but intense tropical cyclone at landfall, the radius of gale-force winds being only about 50km.

“The anemometer at Darwin Airport recorded a gust of 217km/h before the instrument was destroyed.

“Tracy was first detected as a depression in the Arafura Sea on December 20, 1974.

“It moved slowly south-west and intensified, passing close to Bathurst Island on the 23rd and 24th.

“Then it turned sharply to the east-south-east, and headed straight at Darwin, striking the city early on Christmas Day.

“Warnings were issued, but perhaps because it was Christmas Eve, and perhaps because no severe cyclone had affected Darwin in many years, many residents were caught unprepared.

“But even had there been perfect compliance, the combination of extremely powerful winds, and the loose design of many buildings at that time, was such that wholesale destruction was probably inevitable anyway,” the bureau says.

In December 1974 Ms Fewson was 18 and living in Darwin with her father Bruce, her mother Norma, and two sisters and a brother.

She worked at a Coles store at the Casuarina shopping centre packaging fruit and vegetables.

She had been looking after and staying in a unit at the time, and had been involved in a motorbike accident on December 24.

A leg was bandaged and stitched, and her parents suggested she go back home with the cyclone approaching.

They had received cyclone warnings before, and little had eventuated.

“This time, they weren’t kidding,” Ms Fewson said.

“Everything was grey, it was raining.

“We all went to bed and, about midnight, my brother got up and said, ‘Dad there’s water coming into my room, it’s pouring down the walls’.

“Dad made us all get up. By that time it was pretty rough.

“It’s the noise, it’s the wind and all the banging.

“Stupid me I ran to the window, to have a look, and Dad yelled ‘get back’ and as I stepped away the wall crumbled.

“They always mention go into the bathroom, so we went there, and all of a sudden the roof went.

“Dad stuck his head out into the passageway, Mum was with him and one of them grabbed a mattress that flew overhead and they said ‘kids come under the mattress’ so we stood under the mattress.”

And as Ms Fewson’s thoughts turned to the worst, the family turned to singing.

“We sang through the cyclone,” she said.

“Mainly church songs — Dad had been a clergyman — and whatever we thought of.

“We were in the passageway. A beam had fallen in Mum and Dad’s room, it had blocked the door enough that it protected us from being hit if something came through the bedroom.

“We weren’t protected other than by the mattress if something conked us on the head from above.”

After a while it went quiet.

“We knew it was the eye of the cyclone,” Ms Fewson said. “Then all of a sudden it came back.”

“The second time was stronger than the first, it was just absolutely horrendous.

“Finally about 6am it finally all died away.

“We climbed out through what used to be windows.

“Everything was demolished . . . and we could see the ocean from our house, which we couldn’t before.”

A friend’s house nearby was the only one with a few walls standing.

“It was very unusually quiet. It was eerily quiet,” Ms Fewson said.

“We were a little bit fortunate, we found a few Chrissie presents.

“My brother had bought me a music box and when I played it, it played ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head’.

“We found some Danish cookies so we went and sat in our car.

“Our neighbour came over and gave us a bottle of rum, so we had biscuits and rum for lunch.”

The unit Ms Fewson had been looking after had been built to withstand earthquakes, so the family headed there.

They slept on the floor, initially ate tinned food and then found their way to a school where a help centre had been set up for food and water, and registered their names for airlifting out.

Her mother and father — who needed urgent medical help after a previous operation — were flown out first, to Perth.

A couple of days later the kids were flown out on a RAAF Hercules aircraft.

In Perth the children were met by volunteer help and then taken to their grandparents’ home where their parents awaited them.

Also caught in the mayhem was Tony Trevisan.

Mr Trevisan, a former member of the Royal Air Force, had migrated to Darwin and joined the then department of civil aviation.

He was not supposed to have been on duty when Tracy hit.

“On Christmas Eve I got a call from the boss who said somebody had reported sick so they called me in on emergency duty,” Mr Trevisan said.

“I had planned to have Christmas Eve with my family, my wife and three children.

“There was a cyclone in the air, at that point in time they had not indicated it was going to hit Darwin.”

He arranged for his family to go and spend the night with the family of a controller also on duty.

Because of the cyclone the airport had been closed for arrivals or departures.

“But the transcontinental airways, which I was in charge of, had control of every single flight in and out of Australia and New Zealand into Asia or the other way.”

(He later called his hugely successful Perth business group Transcontinental.)

Mr Trevisan had to ensure the aircraft — flying at a height above the cyclone — were separated.

The cyclone then showed up on the radar as a mass of cloud coming towards Darwin.

“I realised that we were in trouble,” Mr Trevisan said.

“I tried to call my wife, by this time the wind had gone up to over 100km/h.

“There was no response, the cables had been severed already.

“I was stressed out, with my family out there in the storm and I had all these people in the air.”

As the rain got heavier and heavier, water began to leak through the seals of the windows in the top part of the control tower.

Underneath the timber floor were cables for communications equipment.

“I could see steam rising and I thought ‘this is not good’,” Mr Trevisan said.

“All of a sudden it all went black.

“Next thing I know I was lying on the ground in mud.”

He had fallen from about two storeys high after being being blown out of the tower, along with his colleague.

After coming to and gathering their senses, they crawled to the base of the tower, found a small cupboard and climbed inside.

After the storm passed through and the sun came up Mr Trevisan desperately set out to find his family.

“There were bits of houses, there were fridges, washing machines everywhere,” he said.

“It was absolute chaos. You couldn’t even walk without climbing over something.

“I walked to where my street was, where my house used to be . . . there was no street, there were no buildings left.”

He went over to where his colleagues’ house had been to look for his family.

“They were huddled inside a car,” Mr Trevisan said.

The family then made their way to a nearby pub which still offered some cover.

They ate peanuts, drank some water, Mr Trevisan brushed away glass covering the carpet, and, exhausted, they fell asleep.

But before long he was woken by the commander of the airport — which was a combined military and civil facility — who was desperate for help to organise the airlift needed to evacuate the devastated city.

“He said ‘if you stay back and give us a hand I’ll make sure your family are the first ones out’,” Mr Trevisan said.

“I said OK. My family were on the first aircraft out, the same day.

“We evacuated tens of thousands of people in less than three days.”

Eventually Mr Trevisan was free to leave too.

He drove his Holden to Port Augusta in South Australia and then “turned right” and on to Perth, where his family later joined him from Melbourne.

The cyclone also brought Maria Flavel to WA.

Ms Flavel and her husband were working as teachers in Darwin in December 1974.

They had been on a holiday to Timor and, when they boarded the plane back to Darwin on the morning of the 24th, the pilot said it would be a rough flight because a cyclone was forming.

“We were a little concerned but many people had told us before that many times there were cyclone warnings but nothing ever much happened,” Ms Flavel said.

“We were expecting for the cyclone to turn in a different direction.”

Later that evening they headed out to a Christmas party.

Their children, Michael, 2, and Ingrid, 6, were at home with a babysitter.

“It was already very stormy when we drove home,” Ms Flavel said.

“Even big trees on the side of the road were bending over.”

When they got home they shifted the furniture off the front veranda and put the children to bed.

As the cyclone worsened they woke up the children and then the family — including the babysitter — huddled in the living room.

“All of a sudden the side window as we looked out, part of our pool was flying past the window,” Ms Flavel said.

“Then we knew there was real trouble.”

Within minutes the ceiling collapsed and they sought refuge in the bathroom.

“Then the ceiling came down in the bathroom and the pipes came with it.

“We tried to get under the double bed in our bedroom but it was fairly low and we couldn’t get under.

“The only thing we could think of was the built-in wardrobe.”

They took out the clothes, clambered in and shut the door.

“It was very, very noisy, and we really thought we were going to die,” Ms Flavel said.

“Then after four hours my husband opened the door. It was still. We could see the sky. The roof had gone.

“It was just maybe the weight of five people in that wardrobe that held the wardrobe down.

“Some of our furniture was found two streets away.

“The only thing left in the house was the fridge.

“Everything had blown out, the walls were missing.

“It was more than terrifying, I am still surprised sometimes that we are still alive.

“There was one house standing in the street.

“We went there, they put us down with a pillow on the floor and we all fell asleep after we had a drink.”

As they waited for the chance to join the evacuation, the food in the house ran out and Michael fell ill.

After three days, a desperate Ms Flavel managed to take the two children to a school meeting point to go to the airport.

There was a rush to board when a plane landed. Officials were pushed aside.

“It was nearly uncontrollable by that time,” she said.

“I heard a policeman call ‘Perth, Perth, is there anyone who would want to go to Perth’.”

“I knew nothing about Perth.

“I just went to the policeman and said could I go but I had two children, he said ‘OK, hold your little boy on your knee and I will find someone to look after your daughter’.”

Finally, aboard a US airforce plane, they reached Perth.

“We had been told that we would go to the migrant hostel . . .until we were settled enough to go somewhere else,” Ms Flavel said.

“I didn’t know a soul in Perth . . . and then I heard my name called, ‘Maria, Maria, Maria’.

“It was my next door neighbour from Darwin.

“That made a huge difference.

“We had some connection with someone.”

But the task of rebuilding their life was massive.

“We simply had lost everything,” Ms Flavel said.

But they were safe.

And WA became home.