Imagine this. It is Christmas Eve, 1974. Your parents, your husband, the twins, your daughter and the family dog are all in a rented station wagon. You are pretty convinced that not everyone is getting out of this station wagon alive. Rain lashes the car. It’s powered by winds gusting up to 280km an hour. The downpour slices through the city, shredding trees. Cars, whitegoods and furniture are tossed around like the toys of a giant baby. It’s well past midnight, but outside it’s as bright as a summer noon, lit by constant shards of lightning. The roof of the neighbour’s house becomes airborne at speed. It once provided sanctuary but now is a gigantic knife that could slice a person in half. The sky is full of glass, shattering and flying indiscriminately. Your kitchen has been swept up.
The utensils with which the family had planned to celebrate Christmas have joined this horror show – weaponised in the air.
Darwin’s houses, built mostly on stilts to combat the heat, are easy prey for the storm. The winds rush through the ground level and toss the wooden houses. The humidity is stifling in the car. Nobody can move much. The kids doze off. After a while, it gets quiet – a glorious respite – and then it starts up again. The sound is louder than any machine you’ve heard. You pray that the carport brick wall holds. And you wait, hoping against hope that the reaper will fly past your little family.
The wind drops as dawn approaches. Eventually it’s safe to get out of the car. As you survey this apocalypse, your mum says it reminds her
