Read Online Warning by Sophie Cunningham - Free Book Online

he’d rescued from the ruins
of her house. What was usually a fifteen-minute journey took him three hours.
    Having managed to save his own life, his family’s and indeed his neighbour’s, Laurie
Gwynne ‘sat on a heap of rubble and cried’ 4 before organising to get the family to
the hospital. The children were covered in bruises inflicted by debris, but also
by Shirley, who’d kept pinching them through the night to make sure they were still
alive. All Laurie’s toes were broken. At dawn Janice Perrin got out of her car nearly
naked and walked until a car picked her up and took her to a nearby fire station,
which had become an evacuation centre. That was where she found her mother, who’d
been blown away along with her house and was badly injured. Perrin was given clothes
to cover herself up and then went for a long drawn-out search for tampons or sanitary
napkins. In the end she had to make do with Chux.
    The Northern Territory News , when it returned on 31 December, made light of these
private dilemmas, and took to running a series of stories on how the women left in
Darwin were pining for sunglasses and cosmetics under headlines like ‘A Lift for
the Girls’. The issues were more fundamental and Charles Gurd remembers that ‘things
like women’s sanitary things, you know, no one had them, and we didn’t normally stock
them, but we had to fly them in’. After Perrin was sorted out she went to the hospital
with both her mother and her husband, Warren. ‘Well the hospital was an absolute
mess, there was no power of course and there were a million people everywhere.’ She
stayed and organised tea for people, Warren got his foot stitched up and it was decided
her mother needed to be evacuated.
    Bernard Briec remembers that a story went around about a guy who’d booked himself
into the Mandorah Hotel across the harbour, slept through the entire event, then
woke demanding room service. The lord mayor, Tiger Brennan, was a former miner who’d
once lived in a caravan on the Nightcliff foreshore. Aided by a cocktail of rum,
antihistamines and painkillers, he’d slept through the entire night and woken to
a house that either lost its roof or didn’t, depending on who you believe. Either
way it was a heroic sleep. ‘When I woke up at seven in the morning I looked out and
saw this house over here had disappeared in which the lady who used to do my laundry
used to live. I threw on a singlet, a pair of shorts, and my brothel brogues, and
tore round to see what I could do with it, but she was gone from there.’ 5 After Ted
D’Ambrosio had taken his wife to hospital he went to see how Brennan had fared. He
found the mayor staggering around asking, ‘What’s happened to my town?’ They broke
his fridge open and had a beer. After that Brennan dropped by Harry Giese’s up on
Myilly Point with his usual hat on, and:
    He was dressed in an old pair of shorts which looked as though they’d been used pretty
substantially in removing debris and materials…Tiger had come up to see what the
situation at the hospital was…It’s difficult to explain the feeling that you have,
that you’re probably among very few people who would have survived this sort of blow.
Indeed, before Tiger came along, you had almost the feeling that you might have been
alone. There was a euphoria that you felt, that at least you’d been spared the sort
of situation where you were beside people who were killed or badly injured…I could
feel for those people, many in the northern suburbs… it must have been traumatic
in the extreme.
    Senator Collins, who was a volunteer for St John Ambulance, grabbed a CSIRO vehicle
and drove the fourteen kilometres from Berrimah into Darwin to see what was happening.
He was lucky he could drive—most cars weren’t starting and those that did soon had
their tyres shredded by debris. And there was