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It occurred to us that we also should check on the condition of our friends' house in the next suburb, in case we could salvage some of their belongings. We had no doubt that their house would be badly damaged, being in the hardest hit northern suburbs, but we did not expect to see what we did. Without any landmarks to orientate us it was difficult to find our way to where their house had once been. The whole area had completely changed so you got lost.

Their home was one of the public servant issued type high set on concrete stumps with a concrete block storage room underneath. There was nothing left. We identified it from the house number still on the iron gate post. The whole house, floor and all, had been lifted off its stumps and been impaled on the house next door.

That morning, before the cyclone struck, we had driven the couple and their three young children to the Airport for their annual furlough. They were spending Christmas with their parents in Perth. We had previously discussed cyclones with them, and he had said that under no circumstances would he ever seek shelter for the family in the concrete block storage room downstairs. Since he was a builder with the Darwin Public Works he said he knew that the storage rooms were not reinforced.

Had they been in Darwin that night the whole family would almost certainly have perished. This, I think, is why the death toll was not as high as could have been expected seeing the destruction. At the Christmas school holidays, many public servants, a great number living in the northern suburbs, took their annual furlough as they liked to call it. Darwin almost seemed deserted over these months. For taking a transfer to the Top End away from the major cities, one of the perks was extra leave when you wanted it. I think this saved many lives. The deaths, accounted for, may have only been 71 but hundreds suffered horrendous injuries, probably to die later. Marriages also suffered in the cyclone's aftermath. Separations escalated in the months and years after Tracy.

Amazing and awful things came to light as Bruce and I tried to make contact with friends. It was difficult as everyone was homeless and somewhere else. As we found them we heard their stories of that night. Many of our friends were common to the Playgroup and Kindergarten our children attended.

Cyclone Tracy had been a very intense but also a surprisingly slow cyclone. It had stayed hovering over the city, and was at its worst from midnight to six in the morning. It had rattled and rocked the houses until all the nails, nuts and bolts had come loose so that the buildings just fell apart. With the pressure the structures had just exploded. A huge percentage of Darwin's houses were reduced to rubble most in the northern suburbs area. Most public building were seriously damaged or destroyed.

One family we knew well had a terrifying night as their high set home blew apart. They had two little boys same age as ours. When the room they had been sheltering in disintegrated, they raced into the next one only to find it was flying apart too. Each had one boy in their grasp as they fled from one room to the next. Then they thought they would try for the downstairs store room. But they could not get down the stairs. There was stuff flying all around them and the boys were flapping in the wind. They could barely hold on themselves. So they squirmed under their double bed in the remains of the bedroom and prayed hard. The last remaining wall of the house fell across the bed and channelled the winds over them. The bed on the floorboards was all that was left of the house.

I thought we had a bad time but I can't imagine the panic and desperation of running from one place to the next desperately hanging on to child.

It was reported that "people sheltering in cars were picked up into the air, blown a few hundred metres and then dumped down again. Babies were blown from parents' arms." The myriad sheets of corrugated iron flying around with the winds, scraping along the ground, sounded just like a thousand fingernails scratching down a blackboard.

One of Bruce's co-workers spent the entire night with his arms locked at the elbows around a claw foot leg of the cast iron bathtub, with his legs flapping in the wind. The winds had stripped all his clothes off except for his underpants. His housemate was in the bathtub trying hard not to drown in the water from the rain and debris falling on top of him. That bathtub was the only thing left on the swept clean floorboards.

Another couple from Bruce's office had taken shelter in a bedroom cupboard after most of their walls had collapsed. They felt it jolted and buffeted. Suddenly it was flung on its side and they were lying in it as in a coffin. When the winds subsided they opened the door to get out. To their horror they realized they were nowhere near their house but almost a block away. They had been flying through the air in their cupboard along with all the other debris. It took them quite a while to find their house again.

Other friends were not so lucky. They were newly arrived in Darwin from Adelaide and had no idea about the tropics. A fortnight earlier when we'd had a cyclone scare which hadn't eventuated I had sent her and her little, curly redheaded, three year old daughter home. She hadn't realized the threat and turned up at our place for Playgroup as it had been my turn to host it. I told her she needed to go home and prepare. She and her husband were a very pleasant couple, and their little one was a real cutie.

During the cyclone, they had gone into the concrete store room downstairs for shelter. After the eye, when the winds were extreme, the concrete walls had collapsed on her and the little one, seriously injuring them. There was no possibility for him to get help. He spent the next hours, distraught, administering CPR to his wife and his little daughter going from one to the other, not knowing, in the dark, who to attend to best. By the time the winds had subsided at daylight, they were both dead. I can only imagine his feeling of helplessness and despair that night. It really shook us up.

When we saw some of the almost surreal achievements of the wind forces, we were not surprised by the reports at all. We saw at our neighbours' father's home something we did not think possible. In the house remains, we saw what was left of their car. The bonnet had blown off. A 2 by 3 inch piece of wood had pierced, and was still lodged in, the engine block of the car. Amazing to even contemplate! They also had had a good laugh on Christmas morning. His parents had a lodger who had gone to bed drunk that night. His room, and the roof over it, was the only part of the house left intact. The rest of the house was razed. He had slept through the whole thing. They were standing outside his door to see his face as he emerged. It was worth the wait.