Read Online Warning by Sophie Cunningham - Free Book Online Page B

the corner, all very quietly not saying
anything. So I went up, and I said, ‘Is everything okay?’ And Danny Thomas said:
‘No.’ And I said: ‘Who?’ And he just said names, and I said: ‘Oh’ and I walked away.
    Bishop coped by going home and holding onto familiar things. ‘Barbara had won a turkey
on the chocolate wheel in town earlier in the afternoon of Christmas Eve. And so,
as I said, there’s nothing else to do but to continue in routine…’
    Thomas, as it turned out, had spent the morning searching the beaches. He’d found
the drowned body of Koji Yoshanda, Bishop’s former boss and the operations manager
of Northern as well as Don Hoff who had been on the NR Kendall with Yoshanda. An
engineer who’d managed to escape from that boat scaled the cliffs at Larrakeyah and
got himself home. Thomas also found the bodies of people who weren’t colleagues.
In all, Northern Research lost two boats with six badly damaged, from a total of
eighteen. The Gollin Kyokuyo company suffered even worse material losses, losing
seven men and three of six steel-hulled trawlers. The official number of deaths at
sea now sits at twenty-two.
    The families of the Japanese men who worked on these trawlers often didn’t speak
English so their experience of the cyclone was particularly extreme. It’s hard to
imagine the isolation of the women and children after they found out their husbands
and fathers were dead. Ella Stack remembers taking in one woman whose husband had
died. ‘There was nothing the Japanese company could do to take them anywhere. They
were living in cars themselves. They had nowhere, no accommodation, so they just
stayed in one room with us. And we managed with our little bit of English.’ The barge Alanna Fay returned to harbour to find ‘all the boats floating upside down’. Five
boats from around fifty were left in Darwin Harbour and only one patrol boat, the Assail , was in good enough shape to conduct search and rescue duties on Boxing Day.
    People familiar with Darwin will know the glorious Nightcliff pool, which sits on
a cliff overlooking the usually calm seas, its lawns spotted with a few palm trees.
I go there most mornings I’m in Darwin and swim laps before the water heats up beyond
reason. The pool was there in ’74, but come Christmas morning there was a body in
it. Nonetheless, it served as drinking water over the next few days. When the health
department were told about the body, they suggested boiling any water taken from
the pool for twenty minutes. So that’s what people did.
    Half-prepared Christmas food was salvaged before the heat ruined it, and camp stoves
were used to finish the job. People sorted through freezers trying to figure out
what would go off the quickest. All manner of things were eaten over the next few
days, from tins with the labels washed off. A meal might be a salad fashioned from
beetroot and marmalade.
    Over the course of the night the entire Church family had got banged and knocked
about. The worst injury was a deep cut to Julia’s dad’s foot, which soon enough developed
into an ulcer. That morning Julia found a small towel, which she wrapped around herself
as a gesture to modesty before the family headed for Casuarina High. It was on that
walk that they realised that it hadn’t just been them. ‘The entire suburb had been
reduced to a series of platforms—the “dance floors”—all that was left after the walls
and roofs had gone. They looked like oil rigs in the sea. Usually around there was
frangipani and bougainvillea, a riot of colour—but the colour had blown away.’
    Julia witnessed several pretty crazy scenes at relief centres and remembers it now
as a kind of microcosm of a society under stress. Some people were good organisers—guys
with army reserve experience took over—while others were good at taking instructions.
Some people