Word On Books
with Jeremy Fenton
Tracy
By Gary McKay, Published by Allen and Unwin
 Christmas day, 1974, is a time that no then resident of Darwin is ever likely to forget. As the song noted: Santa never made it that year!
For the preceding decades (and even as little as three weeks before) the top end city had been lucky to avoid serious confrontation with the tropical cyclones that regularly visit the region.
That luck spectacularly ran out early in the morning on Christmas day as the now infamous cyclone Tracy powered in from the Arafura Sea.
Although a relatively small cyclone by meteorological standards (some have been as big as the Coral Sea!), in just six hours Tracy managed to virtually wipe Darwin from the landscape with vicious wind speeds of up to 300kph.
Sixty-six people died in total – a tragic but remarkably small number given that 90 per cent of the city was flattened.
The 20,000-odd people left homeless were evacuated over the next week from the city of rubble – the site of one of Australia's worst-ever natural disasters.
Gary McKay's new book on Tracy ('the storm that wiped out Darwin on Christmas day 1974') is a riveting account of the devastation that the cyclone wrought.
Primarily pieced together from eyewitness accounts, McKay's narrative is a blow-by-blow description of the short period that led up to the cyclone hitting, the terrifying event itself, and the astonishing aftermath (which witnesses described as looking like a nuclear bomb had hit the city).
It beggars the imagination to think about what many of the people of Darwin went through – exploding houses, flying rooms, whirlwinds of glass, angry seas, heroism and a huge number of what, after reading this book, can only be described as miraculous escapes.
Taut, edge of the seat reconstructive journalism – as befits the incredible stories of those who lived through what can only be described as six hours of hell.
The Devil's Triangle
By Frances M. Boyle, Published by Crawford House
 Some time in the 1980s a couple from Port Lincoln, South Australia, decided to sell up and make the move to the top end to take up the challenge of running a reasonable-size cattle station. What by all rights and expectations should have the adventure of a lifetime soon turned into a personal nightmare of epic proportions.
Although most Australians will have heard the term ‘cattle duffing' (probably assigning it to isolated incidents or earlier days in our colonial past), it will come as a surprise to most that the practice was alive and well on a ‘grand' scale in the last decades of the twentieth century.
It sure did to the poor author of The Devil's Triangle and her husband Lyle Robertson (even though they were light-heartedly warned when purchasing their property that they'd have to nail their cattle to the ground to stop them ‘disappearing').
Soon after buying their Alehvale property in the gulf country of Far North Queensland, they began to discover that they were subject to an ongoing ‘game' of victimisation and harassment from fellow property owners (in particular those from one family who had reputedly being stealing cattle for generations) over their stance against losing their precious livestock.
With over 400 head of cattle going missing in one go (from a total of only a thousand), you begin to understand why they had such a rough trot. And with a prominent member of the local police on side with the duffers, things fast became impossible – and at times life threatening.
You would imagine that it's hard enough doing this sort of farming in the top end without having to deal with what the Robertson's went through – and it's no wonder that by the book's end they have had enough and sell out.
The fact that The Devil's Triangle is an overly long book (and at times in need of some minor editorial guidance structurally) doesn't diminish from what is an exciting and engrossing read from an author who now lives locally.
Recommended reading.
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