In 1974 I was employed as a maintenance Technician at North Sydney Technical College at their TV studio. The studio was used for the training of students working at the various TV stations around Sydney in all aspects of TV operations and maintenance.

One of the technical lecturers from the college had recently taken up a position with the newly formed Darwin Community College and he convinced me to apply for a position at the Darwin College in their newly formed Media Production center.

My wife Wendy and 9 Month old daughter Korin and I arrived in Darwin in the first week of December 1974 about three weeks prior to the cyclone. We spent the first couple of weeks in a Hotel room not far from the college, three days prior to the cyclone we moved into a rented house in the suburb of Coconut Grove. Our furniture from Sydney and our vehicle were still in transit and had not reached Darwin at this time, to enable us to get around whist waiting for the delivery of our vehicle we had purchased an old Voltswagen Beetle.

On the evening prior to the cyclone I was not feeling well so I decided to go to Darwin Hospital emergency to get checked. By about 11:30 PM I had not been seen by a Doctor and after the couple of hours wait I was feeling better so decided to give the hospital a miss and drive home. The trip home was terrifying; the VW Beetle was being blown across all three lanes of Bagot Road in the extremely high winds. I eventually made it home and my wife settled me down with a cup of coffee and we went to bed.

About an hour or so latter the wind had increased quite dramatically the noise became deafening , we could hear noises of what we thought was the roof being torn off but was probably bits and pieces of debris from other houses smashing into and across our roof. It was at this time Wendy decided it might be best if we took the baby and sheltered in a built in cupboard in one of the bedrooms she placed a char in the cupboard and one of us sat and nursed our daughter while the other stood holding a leather belt through the cupboard handles to keep the doors closed. It was at this time I thought maybe I should get the Hallicrafters radio that was in the lounge room and bring it into the cupboard with us; we may need it in the morning.

 After several hours the noise of the wind began to drop and I assumed that the cyclone had passed, I left the cupboard and went to the lounge room to see just a couple of broken louvers and a bit of water on the floor, outside was almost calm and we began mopping up with some towels. We were actually in the Eye of the storm. To our great surprise during this calm a brick came flying through one of the windows then a head poked through the broken window and screamed let us in. Our neighbor’s house had been completely destroyed and the two couples living there had been out in the weather being blown across the ground, they were terrified. After we let them in we discovered that the driest place in the house was the bathroom so for the rest of the night we all sheltered in there.

As the eye moved the wind intensified and all of the rubbish and debris that had been blown in one direction came back from the other direction and the real damage began for us. I am not sure at what time we lost the power but it was spectacular event, the power transformer at the end of our street was blown off the pole swinging from its wires in a spectacular fireworks display.

Apart from the noise of part of our roof being torn off the rest of the night was reasonably uneventful. Our house lost about one third of its roof and part of its front wall where it was struck by a large timber beam from a block of flats adjacent. The Hotel rooms where we were previously staying were almost completely destroyed.

When morning arrived the wind was still strong but slowly abating. We were amazed at the sight, the devastation was beyond anything we could imagine, the most lasting memory is that nowhere in the whole of Darwin was there a single tree with a leaf left on, and all vegetation was stripped completely bare. To our amazement people from all around the neighborhood began to appear and we did not hear of any serious injuries in our local area. One of our neighbors went for a short drive and came back and informed us that as far as they could see the entire city had been destroyed.

It was at this time we decided to go to the college and took the Hallicrafters transceiver with us. The transceiver had come through the ordeal unscathed however the power supply which was a homebrew device mounted in an old AM Radio case was saturated and the two series capacitors on the 600 volt supply had cardboard insulation that was soaking wet.  To get the radio on the air I removed the capacitors from the chassis and strung them out on the bench on the end of their wires.

In the automotive workshop we found a 2.5KVA petrol generator and put the radio on the air using a random length of wire and a CODAN antenna tuning unit. The initial antenna was tied to a light pole just outside the college administration building where we had decided to set up.  The calls made using my call sign VK2BNN/P8 were initially unsuccessful; it was as we were pondering what to do when Trevor Jones VK8JT arrived on the scene and we decided to put out a call using his call sign he was almost immediately answered by Ken McLaughlin VK3AH.  We decided to retain his call sign to avoid confusion.

One of the early contacts was with a station in Brisbane who I am indebted, unfortunately I cannot remember his call sign he was able to contact my parents and let them know that we were OK, they received a call from him before they had heard of cyclone Tracy occurring.

Within a short period of time a network was established on 14.110 and much traffic was handled between the net control station in Melbourne and Darwin. A police officer from Casuarina Police station was assigned to oversee the operation of our station at the college and to authenticate messages.

On the second day of operation some Low Band VHF units were delivered to us flown in from Mount Isa this allowed us to quickly communicate directly with Casuarina Police station instead of sending runners from the college to the police station. The control station in Melbourne requested that we install a VHF unit into Police headquarters in Darwin City to eliminate double handling of messages but when I arrived in the city to do so an angry police inspector rejected the request and demanded that I instead be co-opted to help repair some police radio equipment, I declined in the same manner to his demand and returned to the college.

On the 27th my old Hallicrafters was relieved of duty and replaced with a Yaesu FT101B flown in from the Koongarra mine site by Owen Marshall VK8OM. Doug McArthur VK8KK also arrived to lend assistance on the same day.

After the station had been closed down as an official communications network we were still receiving a large number of requests from families in Darwin who were anxious about the whereabouts of family members who had been evacuated, Doug MacArthur suggested that we request permission from the Post Master General to allow us handle third party messages of a personal nature about evacuated family members, the reply received stated “The regulations are quite clear”. After another request to the Post Master General and copy to the Prime Minister we received the reply “Go Ahead”.

The Darwin Community college provided a great place to shelter as we had a large number of skilled people sheltering there. We saw people who knew how to do things rise to the occasion. Within a couple of hours of people arriving at the college for shelter we had a cold room up and running. This was achieved by using a car engine mounted on a frame from the automotive workshop with a car air conditioning compressor mounted on it; the refrigeration experts piped this up to the evaporator in the cold room. The cold room was stocked with all the Christmas food that people brought from their homes. Police from the Casuarina Police station took us to the much damaged Casuarina shopping center to gather food from there. A Large quantity of baby food was collected along with a large number of nappies as there were a considerable number of mothers with babies sheltering at the college. Wendy VK2BYL was put in charge of looking after supplies of items for mothers with babies. A Doctor was assigned to the college on the 26th as the college had now become an official cyclone shelter.

I can remember on the first day heating a baby bottle for our daughter with an oxy acetylene torch later a gentleman from a BBQ shop brought a large number of Gas bottles and BBQ and other cooking equipment which relieved our cooking issues.

Our family was evacuated from Darwin about a week after the cyclone and the VW Beetle I left with Doug MacArthur VK8KK . During a radio contact with him some weeks later he said to me that there was some sort of animal living in the sump of the old VW that was chewing off the end of the dipstick as in a couple of days it would not reach the oil.

Some years after the cyclone we were visited by a Canadian gentleman who was investigating disaster communications and he told us that what we had experienced in Darwin was typical of almost all natural disasters. There is usually reasonable communications from the disaster area to the outside world but that there is usually little or no communications within the disaster zone. We only after the event discovered that there were numerous others in Darwin that had communication with the outside world and not one of us knew at the time of the others.

Two lessons we have learnt from this event:

 1. In a time of emergency it is unwise to rely on someone coming to rescue you.

 2. Ordinary people with skills can do extraordinary things.

I am now retired from a lifetime of working in the broadcast industry. We have recently moved to the northern Rivers of NSW and still active on the HF bands Wendy was able to regain her old VK2 callsign VK2BYL however my old call was unavailable.

The old Hallicrafters SR150 is now in the possession of the Northern Territory Museum along with the registration cards we were given at the Enoggera army Barracks in Brisbane after our evacuation.