Mayor governed a 'heap of rubble'

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This was published 13 years ago

Mayor governed a 'heap of rubble'

By Peter Jean

A WOMAN in labour, a premonition and a jammed window helped Ella Stack's family survive cyclone Tracy.

The former Darwin GP, who served as the city's mayor (and then lord mayor after Darwin became a capital city), and who moved to Canberra in 1991, was yesterday anxiously watching news reports about cyclone Yasi.

Gut feeling ... Dr Stack with a violin cyclone Tracy broke.

Gut feeling ... Dr Stack with a violin cyclone Tracy broke.Credit: Marina Neil

Dr Stack said she was at the Darwin Hospital with a woman in labour as bad weather began hitting the town on Christmas Eve 1974.

The woman insisted that Dr Stack return home to her own family and leave her in the care of other doctors at the hospital.

Devastated ... Darwin after Tracy had passed through.

Devastated ... Darwin after Tracy had passed through.Credit: Rick Stevens

Arriving at the two-storey home she shared with her husband, Tom Lawler, and their three teenage sons, Dr Stack had a premonition that the second storey of the house was not safe.

She ordered two of the boys downstairs. The upper storey was destroyed by the cyclone and the house was a ''writeoff''.

Dr Stack said it was not uncommon for people caught in natural disasters to be guided by their gut feelings.

''People have premonitions on where they want to go … Often that's the right thing and later they are grateful that's what they did.''

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Darwin after cyclone Tracy.

Darwin after cyclone Tracy.

Dr Stack recalled her husband had been sleeping and she woke him to help her close a kitchen window that had been jammed open.

''I got him out of bed … a piece of the verandah [of the] house next door, a weight-bearing, huge piece of wood [was thrown] up into the air, came through the double thickness of the wall … straight through his bed.''

The family took refuge in a smaller bedroom and spent the next six hours lying on the floor, spending much of that time praying.

''There were no atheists in Darwin that night,'' she said.

A few months later, Dr Stack was elected mayor of what she described as a ''heap of rubble''.

''It was like a patient that needed looking after and that's why I did it,'' she said.

Retired Major-General Alan Stretton, who was in charge of the emergency operation in the disaster, said cyclone Tracy was much smaller than Yasi was predicted to be, but had a similar level of intensity.

He hoped that better preparations and building standards in north Queensland would lessen the impact of Yasi.

The death toll from cyclone Tracy was 71 people on land and at sea. It destroyed or left uninhabitable 90 per cent of the houses in Darwin.

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''The whole lot of it looked like a nuclear bomb had [hit] it,'' Major-General Stretton said.

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