The day Cyclone Tracy unleashed hell on Darwin, leaving 66 people dead, homes destroyed and the city cut off from the outside world. Forty years on a city remembers... and the scars are still raw, It was the last thing that anyone in Darwin expected on their Christmas Eve, exactly 40 years ago.
But 66 people lost their lives and 70 per cent of homes were destroyed in the Northern Territory's capital city in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy unleashed her 217 kilometres per hour winds.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, Tracy was 'arguably the most significant tropical cyclone in Australia's history' and created hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of damage to the city, which was left without power, water and communications.
40 years on, hundreds of people are preparing to come together to remember the storm, that hit the home city of 48,000 people, and acknowledge those who took part in the reconstruction effort and shaped Darwin into the modern city it is today.
Labor Senator Nova Peris, who was three years old when the cyclone hit her grandparent's home, recalled how her family were amongst those who simply did not take the storm warning seriously.
My first clear memory I have of my childhood life is the night of Cyclone Tracy,' Ms Peris wrote in her Facebook post.
'I'll never forget the sound of the wind. It was just howling and howling and the house never stopped moving.
'What was scariest of all is that my Mum wasn't there with us. Like many other adult people in Darwin on that Christmas Eve, she didn't take the cyclone warnings seriously.
'It was going to be just another big storm, everyone reckoned, and the city was used to those storms – so she went out to a Christmas party with some work friends.'
The Olympian went on to describe how a wall caved in on top of her sister's cot and how her mother came to the house to find no roof, no windows and a few walls remaining of the children's room.
'Nana said we were all jammed up together for some time in a walk-in wardrobe. Next minute the louvers were flying out the windows and were crashing onto the floor. During the night we got out of the wardrobe and were all on a mattress under the bed,' Ms Peris said.
Her grandmother was lying on a bed when intuition told her to move: 'Next thing a big sheet of iron from the roof of her neighbour's house speared through the window, and stuck in the mattress where Nana had been lying.'
'Mum said Grandad was still in shock [when she came home] and still had us kids in the bathroom with a big mattress wrapped around us.'
Ms Peris was amongst the 33,000 people to be evacuated from Darwin, mostly by air, in the country's largest civil evacuation.
'I remember sleeping at the airport waiting for the plane that would fly us south. I remember the airport had half of the roof ripped off, as people back then would know it wasn't much more than a tin shed. I remember clearly the Red Cross people going around and handing out food and blankets to everyone.'
'Nana Peris took my sister and I as well as our two dogs to Adelaide, where we stayed for 6 months at an old folks home.'
Her story is not unlike the one told by Jill McKerchar Kinang, who is planning a number of commemorative events for the 40th anniversary of the storm, after experiencing it first hand at the age of 18.
She recalled flopping backwards onto her bed only a split-second before a telephone box came hurtling through the window.
'If I had not flopped backwards, I would have been decapitated,' Ms Kinang said.
'The telephone box continued through my bedroom and up through the roof ... I was sucked off my bed, down the length of the room and up towards the gaping hole in the roof.'
After her mother pulled her back into the house, she survived the night sitting in a cupboard clutching her cat in her arms, cockroaches crawling on her head to escape the rising water, and wondering how she would die.
Years later, after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from the natural disaster, she has become an unofficial organiser through a Facebook group that has reunited childhood friends she lost track of after the mass evacuations which emptied the city.
'I will not allow myself to be happy, to have a home ... because to me, I'm just going to lose it,' Ms Kinang said. 'I thought there was something wrong with me because it happened so many years ago and I couldn't get over it.'
