Cyclone Tracy

Darwin 1974: Daribah Nungalinya stared up into the midday sky. It was Christmas Eve. But the heavens suddenly turned angry. In the distance, dark stormy clouds – grey, green, purple, blue – stretched as high as he could see. They moved slowly across the landscape like huge ghosts, melting into the low-lying black soil country along the Arnhem Highway. Noon turned into night. Daribah kept staring at the tempest. Across its top was a long, wispy mass of cirrus clouds, curling around like huge mare’s tails for thirty or forty kilometres. Bands of other clouds formed a huge wall. They spiralled around for ten or fifteen kilometres and all the way to the ground. Torrential rain poured down. He couldn’t see this but the ten-kilometre centre of the storm – the eye – was cloudless. It looked monstrous. Threatening. But there was something odd about it. It wasn’t racing. It was lumbering destructively across the land towards the tiny city of Darwin. Only a handful of old timers had seen what a cyclone could do. And lots of people didn’t stay in Darwin for more than a few years. They didn’t have a past here. There was no one to tell them stories like the one Daribah's dad told him.