50 years on - Remembering Cyclone Tracy

Remembering the devastation and how the Navy stepped-in.  

On Christmas day in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy destroyed Darwin, there were only three cyclone moorings available to four Navy patrol boats stationed there in defence of Australia’s northern borders.

Two of the ships - HMAS Advance and HMAS Assail got through the storm’s onslaught with minimal damage. Assail’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Chris Cleveland, told the publication, Royal Australian Navy News, there were at least 50 vessels at Darwin’s wharves before the cyclone, but only five afterwards.

The commanding officer of HMAS Advance, Lieutenant Peter Breeze, later wrote: “It was a rather bumpy night at sea .... the teamwork of each of the ships' companies was paramount in surviving the incredible storm”.

One of the of the ships, HMAS Arrow, wasn’t so lucky. It didn’t make it out of port and was wrecked – two on board were killed.

HMAS Attack ran aground, but the crew stayed safely on board until the storm passed.

There’d been heavy rain in Darwin from about midday on Christmas eve, with radio and television announcements warning of a tropical cyclone. But some residents barely noticed – it was the festive season - they were preoccupied and cheerful.      

It was midnight when Darwin started to feel the cyclone’s effects - Tracy had changed direction and was heading straight for the city. It was a Category 4 and crossed the coast about 3.30am. The winds were officially recorded at 217 kilometres per hour before the measuring equipment at Darwin airport was destroyed.  The Bureau of Meteorology estimated the maximum wind speed to have been higher, at 240kph.

Advance’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Peter Breeze spoke of his serious concerns as the storm approached, “I had doubts about this cyclone. We had been tracking it on our radar all afternoon and it looked a very bad one.”

Most people were sleeping when Tracy hit. 

In the end, at least 66 people were killed – 13 of them were lost at sea. Many more were injured. At least seventy per cent of homes in Darwin were destroyed or severely damaged and communications, power, water and sewerage were cut.

The Northern Territory Government put the population of Darwin at about 47,000 at the time - more than 40,000 were left homeless and the majority were evacuated within days or weeks, some never to return.

Cyclone Tracy destroyed the Navy’s Darwin headquarters along with 80% of its patrol boat base and much of its accommodation quarters.

Military communications were also wiped out leaving only Army mobile terminals and the communications systems on board three Navy ships, including Assail and Advance, which had survived Tracy relatively unscathed.

LT Breeze told of how Advance managed to avoid any major damage after he decided to anchor at sea, instead of Darwin’s cyclone moorings "I decided ... to anchor in the harbour. I was scared that if the worst came to the worst, we might not be able to get ourselves away from the buoy”.    

With communications down, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) initially focused on search and rescue on the city’s harbour foreshore and out to Melville Island. The day after the cyclone, a Navy plane delivered Red Cross workers and blood transfusion equipment to the battered city.  

Within days, the RAN officially launched Operation Navy Help and became a major part of the disaster relief and recovery effort. It was the RANs biggest ever peacetime operation, involved 13 Navy ships, 11 aircraft and about 3,000 personnel sent to Darwin. The RAN task force was in the city for a month from 31 December 1974 to 31 January 1975.

Darwin's then-mayor, Harry 'Tiger' Brennan said to the Royal Australian Navy News, “We owe the Navy the greatest debt of all." 

Two months after the disaster, then-prime minister, Gough Whitlam, announced the creation of the Darwin Reconstruction Commission. 

It took about 3.5 years to rebuild the city. More than 2500 homes were built or repaired by the time it officially ended in mid-1978. The buildings were constructed to a higher standard to withstand future cyclones.

But up to sixty per cent of Darwin’s residents who’d fled or were evacuated after Cyclone Tracy, would never return. When the reconstruction was finished, Darwin was a very different city.

HMAS Advance was decommissioned on 6 February 1988, and was transferred to the Australian National Maritime Museum.

HMAS Advance is the only one of the Attack class patrol boats left in Australia that remains in its RAN configuration. The patrol boat has been kept in operational condition and is on display at the Maritime Museum in Sydney.

Advance was also one of the ships used in the television series, Patrol Boat.