Warning by Sophie Cunningham

A 2011 report on Indigenous people and Cyclone Tracy
quotes one respondent as saying:
    I mean we know a lot of people that lived in the bush and surrounding areas as they
do today and we reckon there was a lot more people out there unaccounted for that
they just didn’t. They weren’t able to count them. And so when you saw the devastation,
and those 60 odd people, there’s no way that only 60 odd people would have died in
that. I mean there would have been a couple of hundred people living in the long
grass, you know. 16
    It was often said that the Aboriginal people got out of town because they noticed
that the green ants had disappeared along with the birds. Echo Cole: ‘Because of
my Aboriginal identity [I knew]—that something was going to happen to Darwin city
at the time…Everything just went dead. There was no bird life; no movement; even
the trees were still.’ 17 A creature known as the Mandorah Monster (thought to be
a giant manta ray) was spotted in Darwin Harbour in the build-up to the cyclone.
This happened on the Rainbow Serpent dreaming track that stretched from Casuarina
Beach to Mandorah and was seen, in retrospect, as a warning.
    But Cole himself didn’t leave town and I found no particular evidence that Indigenous
people responded very differently from non-Indigenous people. That is, some were
concerned and did their best to be prepared, and others ignored the whole thing.
Some—Indigenous people included—make the distinction in the knowledge held by those
living traditional lives, who did know something was up and got out of town, and
those who were more urbanised.
    In emphasising some kind of innate knowledge, there’s a danger of slipping into a
romantic myth, one that conveniently covers up the lack of attention paid to some
Aboriginal communities around Darwin before and after the cyclone. There were around
twenty-three Aboriginal camps around Darwin—five of them had had permanent residents
for decades. Many of these communities had no radio and wouldn’t have been in a position
to hear the ABC’s hourly warnings. Anthropologist Bill Day has recalled that during
previous emergencies he’d had to relay warnings to various camps, otherwise messages
were unlikely to reach them. He was not around to do that when Tracy hit. ‘I know
that a lot of the traditional mob they actually left because they were reading the
weather signs and the warnings from the animals and things like that. But I do know
a lot of people died because they were never given the warning. Or they couldn’t
understand.’ 18
    In the wake of the cyclone it was also hard to get exact figures on the number of
deaths at sea. According to harbourmaster Carl Allridge’s report dated 4 January
1975, ‘At least 29 vessels were sunk or wrecked, several were driven ashore and later
refloated and at least twenty persons were lost.’ On 7 January thirteen ships were
still missing and twenty people still unaccounted for in Darwin Harbour. William
Woodyatt, engineer, and Robert Wade, cadet fisherman on the Frigate Bird , both died.
But the skipper of the Bird , Bob Joss, and cadet fisherman Bob Dowman were rescued
a day and a half after the cyclone from an air pocket in a life raft in which they’d
been trapped for nearly thirty hours. The skipper of the Arrow , Bob Dagworthy, was
found alive, floating in his life raft, some thirteen hours after he took to sea
in it. Two lives were lost on the Mandorah Queen . That ferry was found in 1981. A
second ferry, the Darwin Princess , was not located until 2004.
    As the fate of these ferries suggests, it was years, and in some cases decades, before
all the boats were salvaged. The Flood Bird was located in May 1975 but it wasn’t
dragged ashore until 1977. Human bones were found in the wreck. The body of one crew
member, Dennis Holten, was found soon after the cyclone, but three of the other four—Captain
Odawara,