Warning by Sophie Cunningham Page A

George Roewer and David Fealy—were listed as missing until the vessel was
recovered. A fourth crewman, Robert Swann, was not positively identified until 1989.
Those wrecks still remaining in the harbour have joined those from World War Two,
and several Vietnamese refugee boats, to become scuba diving sites.
    Those not known to be dead were ‘missing’: by its very nature a category that’s hard
to pin down. Initially, to avoid vagueness, a ruling went out by telex on 13 January
1975. ‘The only persons who are considered to be missing persons in the true sense
of the word are the persons believed to be missing from the various boats sunk in
the Darwin harbour and whose bodies have not been found.’ At some point this must
have been revised: the current official missing list is a hundred and sixty people.
Seven years after the cyclone those still missing at sea were declared dead, but
of course they were no less ‘missing’ after that.
    When the Booya was discovered in 22 October 2003, intact and lying on its side, the
bodies of the five people who’d been known to be on board were not found. ‘It is
not so much a grave but a living memorial,’ said Rick Weisse, one of the divers who
found the Booya . ‘You look inside and it is crystal clear water and you can see inside
the steering compartment.’ One of the five was Ruth Vincent, a twenty-four-year-old
barmaid and mother of three. She’d gone to the wharf for a party after her Christmas
Eve shift at the Victoria Hotel. When the Booya was finally found Ruth’s sister,
Naomi Senge, was still hoping police divers would find her sister’s remains. ‘You
have thoughts,’ she said. ‘Maybe, just maybe, she’s still alive.’
    Instead, following the 1975 coronial inquest that formally declared Ruth dead, she
had to make do with some small items salvaged from the wreck. ‘Cos you can see her
with the ring on, you know, see her with the purse. Cos they were definitely Ruth’s.’ 19

DOES ANYBODY KNOW THIS HAS HAPPENED TO US?
    WHEN ELIZABETH Carroll stepped outside her house on Christmas morning she saw a plane
flying overhead. ‘The feeling I do remember having was: “Does anybody know this has
happened to us?”’ It was a good question and Carroll wasn’t alone in her fears. A Northern Territory News feature, published twenty years after the cyclone, quotes
one woman: ‘We thought no one knew. Here we were in the catastrophe and they didn’t
know,’ she said. ‘There was this incredible sense of isolation…That we had been abandoned.’ 1
    The extremity of the isolation the people of Darwin experienced is hard to imagine
today. In early February 2011 I got up at three in the morning to read the tweets
of one Carl Butcher, known as ‘Cyclones Update’, to see how Cairns was weathering
Tropical Cyclone Yasi. After the Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 people
managed to use their phones to let rescuers know they were still alive and where
they were. (This was still no guarantee of survival, though it may well have made
those in peril feel less alone.) During the Brisbane floods of 2011 Twitter and Facebook
helped spread information about where floodwaters were expected to be at their worst,
and were also crucial in the coordination of the clean-up. At the time, writer and
journalist John Birmingham described how, as ‘an intense low-pressure system appeared
over the city as a multi-coloured pixel swarm on thousands of smartphones and desktop
computers, the #qldfloods tag on Twitter started to spike.’ 2 According to Associate
Professor Axel Bruns and Dr Jean Burgess from the Queensland University of Technology,
‘In the first place people were passing on the raw footage, the images, the videos
from Toowoomba, and the Lockyer Valley when the flash flooding happened there.’ Professor
Bruns says, ‘But the focus