(that was before we had heard about skin cancer; I've paid the price for it since)
When Noel Butler flew across from Wewak to spend Christmas with me in Lae in 1974, I had already sold my little gunter-rigged Heron sailing dinghy; so all we could do was to sit on the beach by the yacht club at Vovo Point for our usual game of chess.
I had been busy packing my few belongings into a small messkit which Noel stencilled "P. GOERMAN, RANGOON, BURMA", as I was due to fly out to my next assignment as chief accountant with TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles who had begun drilling for oil in the Arakan Sea.
We had no radio, and even if we had, there would've been little more than static, and so we were both blissfully unaware that Cyclone Tracy had just wiped out Darwin. It was Australia's worst natural disaster - a night of fear and horror with 300-kilometres-per-hour winds of unprecedented savagery and destruction which totally destroyed nearly all of Darwin's buildings and killed more than fifty people.
Nearly fifty years later, I just came across this book in my favourite op-shop in the Bay. Gary McKay was then a captain in the Australian Army and, in early January 1975, was sent to Darwin to assist in the clean-up.
Of course, I picked up the book, together with "Flinders : The Man Who Mapped the Australia" by Rob Mundle; "The Harbour : A city's heart, a country's soul", an 800-page tome about - what else? - Sydney Harbour by Scott Bevan; "Dreamers and Schemers : A political history of Australia" by Frank Bongiorno (who is not, it seems, related to Paul Bongiorno); and Alexis Bergantz's "French Connection" about how the French have been integral to the Australian story since European colonisation which began when the men of the First Fleet saw the two ships of the La Pérouse expedition enter Botany Bay four days later.
It's been raining all day and it's set to continue for at least another day; perfect reading-weather! I've started on "Tracy" to take me back nearly fifty years to that day on the beach at Lae. Better late than never!
