Free Warning by Sophie Cunningham Page A

normal person can comprehend.’ 10 When Alan Hawkins
got himself to Darwin an entire ten days later he decided to walk from the airport.
‘I got halfway into town, and I just stopped and looked at the devastation. I reckon
I just sat there and cried for about twenty minutes; I just couldn’t take it all
in, it was just too much for me.’
    When Dr Slim Bauer, the first director of the ANU’s North Australia Research Unit,
heard news of Tracy he went to Brisbane, bought a caravan, loaded it with food, tools
and materials, then drove north to Darwin. He got there four days after the cyclone
and, despite having been warned how bad things were, was extremely shocked. ‘The
thing which struck us—the first thing which struck us really forcibly was that when
we topped the rise at Yarrawonga, we could look straight across to Darwin town, to
the downtown area and the Stokes Hill, and of course you never had been able to do
that before.’ 11
    In this strange new world, everyone’s sense of time began to shift. Chronology frayed.
People remember the devastation they awoke to, but after that things blur. Ella Stack
wrote: ‘The days had lost their names: it was no longer Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.’
Beth Harvey describes that first day, and many thereafter, as like ‘a dream’. Harry
Giese was concerned that age was getting to him though his memory was no worse than
many much younger than him. ‘I’ve got, I must admit a very confused memory, whether
this is a result of the shock at that time, or whether it’s a case of old age affecting
memory, I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess.’ Liz Foster can’t remember how many days
after Tracy it was that she thought she saw a ruby sparkling in the rubble and went
to pick it up—only to find that yes, it was a ruby ring, but there was still a finger
in it. The way in which people spoke of what they endured had a liturgical quality.
Elizabeth Carroll: ‘I honestly don’t remember what we did, how we did it. I remember
just these specific things: the rubbish bins, washing my hair. I remember the fear.’ 12 Colleen D’Arcy described it as ‘strange—a time out of your life that you can’t really
explain’. Several men interviewed struggled to remember when their family was evacuated,
and when they got to see them again. Often they ended up confessing to Francis Good,
or whoever interviewed them, that they simply had no idea. Even General Stretton,
who didn’t arrive until late that first night, wrote that he quickly ‘lost all track
of time’. By 27 December, ‘It seemed months ago since I had left my family sitting
down to Christmas dinner at home in Canberra.’
    When Law is sung in Indigenous songs it becomes a way of structuring and interpreting
knowledge as well as communicating it. Boundaries between the past and the present
are fluid and while references will be made to establish a rough time period—‘That
horse and buggy time’ 13 —chronology is less relevant than remembering events in a
way that emphasises their meaning. An extension of this is what Deborah Rose has
described as ‘Year Zero’: 14 the moment that something irrevocable shifts in a culture.
For Indigenous people, ‘Year Zero’ is white settlement.
    A version of this approach to story seems to have been taken up by survivors to Tracy.
Those interviewed about the cyclone, white and black, talk about pre- and post-Cyclone
Tracy. Neroli Withnall described it to the 7.30 Report this way: ‘It was such a cataclysmic
event that everything was dated according to whether it was “before” or “after”.
It was like BC and AD.’ Her now-former husband, John Withnall added, ‘My own feeling
is it’s as if a line was drawn across our previous life. It’s a strange feeling.’
He said, ‘I felt just a little while back talking to you