In the arms of a stranger

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In an emergency, would you hand your child over to a stranger you met at a barbecue?

There once was a mother who gave her baby to a stranger.

There had been a big storm and the mother had lost her house. There was nowhere to sleep in the town because almost everyone had lost their house. The town was on the unpopulated northern edge of a country that was on holiday, and the phones were down, and the radio, and the airport's charter planes were on their backs like dead insects.

Something new had entered their world; an elemental creature from over the horizon had broken the old certainties like so much fibro and asbestos cement. With the rain it had scooped from tropical seas, the winds it had cranked in its belly, it had also brought fear, old adversaries of disease, exposure, malnutrition, violence. And old words of plague, looting, mayhem, escape.

No-one knew how the story would end.

The stranger

There was no power. There was some looting. There were feral dog packs. There was an inoculation clinic in a school where people slept and cooked and tried to make sense of the new communal way of living. There was a smell of festive meats rotting in a thousand refrigerators. There was a man on a motorbike on the runway at night shooting dogs and drinking whisky. The deputy prime minister visited. There was a morgue in the post office. The prime minister visited. There was a first aid clinic at the butcher.

There were queues to get out, to be fed, to be inoculated, to wash clothes, to make a phone call.

Imagine the mother gave her child to the stranger to be evacuated; not quite a stranger, a friend of a friend.

They met at a place where people had taken the contents of their fridges - a great feast of perishables amid gathering scarcity. She had told the girl about her two elder sons who had been on holiday with their grandparents and were out of harm's way.

The town was not under military rule, not technically, but an army general had taken command and ruled that anyone who left would not be able to return, not unless they had permission. To get permission you needed to prove you had a house, somewhere to stay, that you could look after yourself.

She asked the girl, "How am I going to get the boys back if somebody doesn't stay here and find a house for them?"

But the town was too dangerous for children. The baby had already walked on glass; he cried when his feet were touched. Elsewhere there was talk of typhoid, of tetanus.

"We don't have a life anywhere else to go to," she said.

"We have to save something of our lives."

The girl was a schoolteacher. She was good with children. She would take the child, who was not yet two, to safety.

Later they bagged the leftovers and sank them in the backyard pool to keep them from the heat and flies.

On the fifth day after the storm the mother gave the child to the girl, along with a rained-on nappy and a jar of baby food. She told her what times he would usually sleep. The child was crying. The sky was overcast. They waited for the airport bus.

She had stuck labels to the boy's clothes listing the addresses and phone numbers of her extended family in each of the capital cities of the country.

They did not know where the evacuation plane would go but wherever it landed there would be some far-flung cousin or aunt or grandparent to wake in the night. Festooned with labels, pinned in a nappy, the baby was ushered out of his mother's care.

The mother retreated to the phone on the fifth floor of an office building. There was no power. She climbed the stairs in the dark. In this building, mould had begun growing on the damp carpets, white grass, fungal spores drifting through the ruins. There she waited, in the highest room of an overgrown tower. By the phone.

It would be 40 years before she would speak with the girl again.

This was a long time ago in 1974. The mother's name was Pamela, the girl's name was Jane, the boy's name was Michael. The prime minister's name was Gough. The town's name was Darwin.

The cyclone's name was Tracy.

Still, no-one knew how the story would end.

I thought the most terrible things ... No news for hours and hours and hours. It all went through my head; whether this bird Jane had abandoned him or wrung his neck in a toilet somewhere. Pamela

The reunion

Jane had wanted to know whether baby Michael was safe but for 40 years she had no way of making contact. She had only known his first name and approximate age. But she got on with her life. She married and had children of her own. She still thought of Michael as baby Michael.

It's midday, 2014 now, and Jane returns to Darwin. She wears a sleeveless dress of bold, modish pattern. Her steel-grey hair is undyed and cut short. She does not smoke; she wears a slim golden watch. She is excited.

"We searched, we made enquiries and came up with nothing," she says in the car from the airport. The day is hot; out to sea great banks of cumulus are massing, and that evening there will be lightning.

"You could call it closure, but it's not that it's necessarily closure."

The suburb is on the outskirts of Palmerston, a satellite city of Darwin, which itself is the capital of the Top End, way up north, back of beyond, 'out there'.

Half-an-hour from the GPO, the city shrinks to a horizon of mining boom apartment blocks, the night-time glow of LNG refrigerators, immigration detention centres, prisons and fly-in fly-out worker camps. The pandanus keeps going forever.

All the dogs are big dogs in this suburb. And in this town all the houses are built with blue steel frames - blue to hold up the sky when a cyclone comes. The front yards have lawns, the lawns have letter boxes but then across the crescent the fire-scorched pandanus palms begin.

The house has a backyard pool, a boat, a dog, a street number. It does little to draw attention to itself, tucked among other, similar houses and huddled around its air-con.

Jane rings the doorbell. Rings again. The door opens.

"Look at you," she cries. "You're a strong healthy lad aren't you."

It is Michael, dressed in white, his long black hair tied back in a ponytail.

They have not seen each other in 40 years. He is broad and bearded.

"And you must be Pamela," Jane says, and stoops a little to hug the wiry, older woman standing to one side. They have not seen each other since the bus stop.

But they're not alone; the reunion is for television and since Jane arrived in Darwin she has been accompanied by a camera crew. Michael knew she was coming. There are camera crews on each side of the screen door. Meanwhile, Michael's living room has been converted into a TV studio, excess furniture and loose toys moved out, lights and cameras converging on a single couch.

The mood is surreal, complicated.

Over the years, Michael has had trouble understanding his parents' decision to entrust his life with a stranger. Depending on where he was in life, he says, he has looked at the decision "sometimes more critically and sometimes less critically". Michael has two kids of his own now, the youngest about the age he was during Tracy.

"I've never faced an emergency situation as an adult. But to me it just seems impossible to hand my 18-month-old boy to a 21-year-old lady."

He is a big man who seems to both laugh and cry a little when he talks about private things. He works in food and beverage. He is a solid presence, a husband and father with a fierce curling beard salted with white. When each of his two boys were born he had plaster moulds done of their their tiny feet and hands, and mounted them behind glass on the living room wall; there they are, uniquely wrinkled.

At one point he asks, half-joking, half-serious, with the cameras rolling: "How hard was it, mum, to give me away?"

And Pamela, who apparently does not drink water without tea, who rolls her own cigarettes, who is aware of Facebook but has not yet endorsed its service, who prefers a "real phone" over a mobile, attempts to explain: "There has been quite a few people over the years who've said, 'How could you do it?' But unless you have been in that situation you can't really say."

She pauses. "You do what you have to do."

With Cyclone Tracy survivors, it seems there is often a limit to what non-survivors may understand. "You had to be there," survivors often say.

All this affects the mood of the reunion: two women who were there, a man who was too young to remember and TV crews trying to evoke what it was like for a national audience that mostly was not there. But who somehow feel a part of the story of Cyclone Tracy, Australia's most iconic natural disaster.

With their careful placement of cameras, the choreographed front-door greeting, the TV crews aim to capture and preserve the moment of reunion; the spark that will leap between Pamela and Jane, Jane and Michael.

But they are also going further; perhaps the TV crews are also trying glimpse a moment 40 years ago when Pamela gave her baby to the stranger at the bus stop. Perhaps we will see the emotions buried in two separate hearts for four decades.

It's a moment even Pamela cannot quite describe. "It's a bit hard to relate how I felt at the time." That's how she once put it.

But there is another way of looking at the reunion. Perhaps instead of making the past more real, it forces us to recognise what has been happening all along; time passes, and even the most vivid memories will fade. The greatest survivors will pass away.

Jack McLeod reflects on the night all hell broke loose. John Wolthers recalls the morgue in the post office. Stephanie Brown reflects on 40 years of grief for her lost sister. Fay Karamanakis tells how her family dog helped them escape. And Jill McKerchar-Kinang explains how social media is helping Tracy survivors, 40 years on.

Read their stories

When the doorbell rang and the television crews swung into action, everyone surplus to the production retreated to a bedroom. It was a child's room, fairy curtains hung in the windows. The fairies were brushing pink flowers.

In the swollen pink light, it was easy to wonder whether what the TV crews were doing was more about myth-making than history, whether after 40 years the story of Cyclone Tracy was blurring to the dreamy outline of a fairytale.

This is the 12th in a series of survivor stories the ABC is producing to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the cyclone. Personal tales become part of a broader shared memory.

The leading figures of the recovery are passing away; since the 30th anniversary there have been funerals for several, including Major-General Alan Stretton, who led the evacuation and, just this year, Gough Whitlam, who was prime minister at the time and visited Darwin during the recovery.

Tracy itself has moved inland, into the heart of the country.

"It could be a story about any child from my point of view," Michael says of his own dramatic tale.

"In reality I don't actually have any recollection of it at all."

The reckoning

Pamela, Michael and Jane on the couch, left to right in that order. Pamela is barefoot. The cameras are rolling.

Michael says: "It could be good for mum to - I don't know if it's the right word - but to forgive a part of herself that she might have had judgement on as a younger mother.

"Mum might have to hold down emotions or hold off judgement of her own self for having been in that position and the choices she made."

And mum says, "I must say, if the same situation happened all over again I'd do exactly the same thing again."

Jane interrupts: "Can I say something here? ... I saw Pamela as being desperate. She found someone she could trust.

"It was such a relief for her. It's very hard for any of us to know . . . It was the first time we had such a monumental disaster as Cyclone Tracy."

Leaning across Michael, the former school teacher asks Pamela if she has been traumatised. "You would've been, wouldn't you?"

And with her smoker's voice Pamela concedes, "I was at the time."

Stationed in the building by the telephone, Pamela heard flights taking off, waited four hours, and began ringing family in every city.

"In fact it wasn't the plane that you thought," Jane protests. "We were waiting around for hours. I took him on the bus and he was screaming. It was heart-wrenching for the poor little fellow.

"We waited and waited there in the terminal. I had to gather Michael on the hip and go out through the front doors to a fence. There was somebody out on the tarmac saying, 'Anybody for Brisbane? Anybody for Townsville?'."

Pamela: "We started ringing. It got later and later. All these relatives we're getting them out of bed, saying, 'Haven't you heard anything?' They kept saying, 'No, we haven't heard a thing'.

"I thought the most terrible things, Jane. It was a very, very long time. That's when all the thoughts about 'What have I done?' came to mind.

"We were desperate to get him out. We didn't know what was going to happen: no food, no power.

I feel guilty I wasn't able to phone you earlier Pamela. It was an enormous responsibility. I would get that little boy safely down south. Jane

"No news for hours and hours and hours. It all went through my head; whether this bird Jane had abandoned him or wrung his neck in a toilet somewhere."

Jane: "It was quite a few planes that went. The one that Michael and I were on was much later than that.

Pamela: "That's when the horror set in."

Jane: "I think of that airport. I think particularly of being on the Hercules plane, how sweaty and noisy it was. With condensation dripping on us all the time. Flying sidewards instead of facing forwards.

"It was quite hard for Michael to go to sleep. Sometimes he slept on my lap. Other times we would have him cushioned on a nappy bag on the floor.

"I feel guilty I wasn't able to phone you earlier Pamela. It was an enormous responsibility. I would get that little boy safely down south."

Pamela: "You do what you have to do."

The horizon

On the most remote coast of a continent Europeans had settled less than 200 years before, the largest Australian town for 3,000 kilometres was levelled so cleanly and efficiently there was reportedly debate in government about whether to even rebuild. Only 10 per cent of residents had a home the morning after Tracy.

By the third day - December 28 - the newspapers featured aerial photographs of suburban acreage laid to waste.

The lay-out of straight thoroughfares, cul-de-sacs and crescents was familiar to the national audience. These could be any neighbourhood; the destruction smoothed out the differences. They were without a single standing tree, a picket fence, a car in a driveway, a pitched roof, a letter box, a person.

At least 66 people died and about $1.3 billion worth of property was damaged - $6.1 billion in today's money. By comparison, the bill for the 2010-2011 Queensland floods was about $2.4 billion.

Jane flew out on the fifth day after a 24-hour wait on the tarmac. In Melbourne she delivered baby Michael to an air hostess who was flying on to Launceston, where Michael's grandparents and two brothers collected him at the airport. In February, Pamela and her husband were reunited with their three children in Tasmania. They flew back to Darwin, having secured a small apartment with running water and electricity.

"You got out of the car with your brothers and ran around like a twit, fell over, banged your head on the corner of the bed and had to be taken to Darwin Hospital," Pamela says to Michael.

"You had seven stitches in your head. You'd gone through the cyclone, we looked after you, you came back and you were the only one who had any damage."

The myth of Tracy is often a memory of communal suffering, self-sacrifice and mutual aid emerging after the disaster. It is also nostalgic, flavoured by the mid-1970s and the Whitlam government, the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon, the inaugural cricket World Cup, the first AC/DC album. It seems both of an era, and, because of what was destroyed, the end of one.

But myths change and evolve, and now there is this: the same warming waters that have made more powerful cyclones more frequent in the tropical north have imparted new urgency to the story of what remains the largest evacuation that has ever taken place in Australia. Cyclone Tracy, which was not an act of climate change, seems to be recognisably part of a world of more extreme weather, a world of more fire and drought, flood and cyclone.

Out in Palmerston, way up north, under a built-up sky of high cloud, two try to make sense of the past, and a third looks to the horizon.

"I couldn't let my kids go like that. I couldn't," Michael says.

"It's an extreme act of faith."

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Topics: cyclones, cyclone, disasters-and-accidents, darwin-0800

First posted