Free Warning by Sophie Cunningham

sought out injured people and Julia’s mum was one who used her windowless
car to drive people around. Julia helped dig deep trenches for latrines. But other
folks went feral. People built strange fortresses out of cushions and rugs. Agreements
were made to pool the food and share buckets of water—but then some women would drop
used nappies into the buckets. Fridges were set on their sides with doors open to
form a vessel for water, but someone broke glass into that to ruin the water supply.
The basest human reactions were on display. Forty-eight-year-old Irene Cormick, who’d
run a tourist park that had been destroyed overnight, headed into town to help and
saw something similar at the centre set up at the Wagaman School.
    I saw things in humans that I would never ever wish to see again. I saw the panic.
The people that you thought were strong, were weak; and the ones you thought were
weak were strong. It was the grabbing…But you would not believe that people could
change, from people into such horrible creatures. 6
    Some people simply got in their car and drove out of town. People started arriving
in Alice Springs from Darwin around four-thirty or five on Christmas afternoon, which
means they’d headed out through the rubble and ruined streets first thing in the
morning. Their cars were pretty battered. Alan Hawkins, head of Alice Springs Apex,
said, ‘I think it was just instinct that they got in the car and got out as quickly
as they could.’ People were shell-shocked and:
    basically arrived in the clothes they had on their backs. They had no money, no food.
Some of them had the presence of mind to take water, or bring water with them, but
they just arrived. They were worn out physically, and I think just mentally they
didn’t know what was going on. They had no idea what was going on. 7
    The wife of one such couple, he recalls, had cradled her dead baby all the way down
from Darwin. One thousand battered cars arrived in Alice Springs over the next three
days, then were stranded because of the need to get a roadworthy before going further
south. At Tennant Creek, where food was scarce because the wet season had cut supplies,
Indigenous people went and harvested watermelons and rockmelons and brought them
into town to give to people who were driving through. ‘There you are,’ they said,
‘you need food for the people, here it is.’ 8
    Without any landmarks to orientate them people could not find their way to their
houses, or the houses of friends and family. According to Ray Wilkie, ‘The whole
geography of the area had completely changed—the topography nearly had changed—so
you got lost.’ People talk of this time and time again, their intense disorientation
when their town was no longer recognisable to them. ‘Everything looked so different,
there wasn’t a bloody leaf on a tree. You know, there was absolutely nothing, which
meant you could see for miles and miles and miles, something you could never do before.’
There wasn’t much of anything else, either: no sewerage, water, electricity or phones.
    It wasn’t just buildings that fell to pieces, it was people. As journalist Gay Alcorn
put it, ‘The cyclone destroyed not only lives, houses, furniture, photographs and
pets but a way of living and thinking.’ 9 A friend of mine expressed it to me more
bluntly. ‘The cyclone made people psychotic. Not the night itself, but the fact it
destroyed everything.’ Teacher Ruary Bucknall, who was in Alice Springs when the
cyclone hit, returned to Darwin on Boxing Day, on the same flight as the acting prime
minister, Jim Cairns. When he got to Wagaman and saw the damage to his home he sat
down at the house and ‘bawled my eyes out for about—I don’t know—ten minutes or so.
Just couldn’t get over the shock of the whole thing…the complete state of devastation.
I don’t think it’s anything that a