Free Warning by Sophie Cunningham Page B

as if we were almost talking
about some other family, some other place, some other time.’
    When we experience—or learn of—traumatic events the brain can capture this moment
as if it’s a photograph or a series of photographs. These vivid recollections are
described as ‘flashbulb memories’. The intensity of these flashes should not be confused
with accuracy, as I learned that day when I found that the image of the cyclone I’d
carried with me for thirty years belonged to the wrong day. It is now accepted that
accuracy diminishes with time, even if the intensity of the feeling does not. So,
for example, three years after 9/11 people tended to be right about the details of
what happened to them, including how they felt, only fifty per cent of the time but
their confidence in that memory remained high. 15
    People quoted in this book were interviewed as early as the day itself by journalists
on the ground, or as recently as 2013, by me. The interviews conducted for the Northern
Territory Archives—often, but not always, by archivist Francis Good—went on from
the early eighties until into the early 2000s. For some, time had made the events
of Christmas Eve 1974 more vivid, for some, less. More crucially though, there was
the slippage caused by the shock of the night itself, and more was caused by what
was to come. Constable G. Townsend: ‘I was placed in the armory section at the station
and was also the pet destroyer…My hours of duty are not possible to calculate.’ 16 Many people, after that first sleepless night, were to go another night, or even
five nights, without sleep. Oral historian Alessandro Portelli has observed that
chronology is more likely to get blurry if events are endured as one continuous occurrence
rather than a series of discrete episodes. 17
    Given this, some might question the point of even recounting people’s memories of
events, but I’m with oral historian Studs Terkel, who has argued that the impact
of time and memory on personal narratives is not a flaw, but rather one of the things
that make them interesting: ‘The Memory manipulates facts and chronology to various
symbolic and psychological ends. This can be as telling as shifting the truth to
better fit in with a person’s desired version of events. These gaps help us, in fact,
to identify what is important.’ Not all historians find this fluidity of oral history
productive. Patrick O’Farrell wrote in 1979 that oral history was moving into a ‘world
of image, selective memory, later overlays and utter subjectivity…And where will
it lead us? Not into history, but into myth.’ 18
    After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, journalist Steve Fraser wrote that ‘a mythic memory
of communal suffering, self-sacrifice, and mutual aid’ emerges after disaster. ‘These
are not fables, but moving accounts drawn from real life. They offer a kind of hope
in disaster and, consoling as they are meant to be, linger on, sometimes forever.
Meanwhile, interred and resting in peace are often the disaster’s darker doings…’ 19
    And it’s true that myths play a large part in the story of Tracy; but, as with all
myths, there is a kernel of truth at their heart. Hedley Beare’s version of this
myth is a moving one, and indeed, speaks to real experience.
    I understand that when a cyclone or a tragedy occurs, you normally check your immediate
family, the extended family, your neighbours, and you go out into concentric circles.
Since there weren’t those extended families in Darwin everybody started checking
on their friends. And one of the reasons why the place rehabilitated the way it did,
in my view, is that it was—community emerged; people were caring about others. There
were some enormous acts of altruism and kindness that erupted in that week following
the cyclone.
    I have no doubt that some of the people quoted here have misremembered what