Warning : the story of Cyclone Tracy / by Sophie Cunningham.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue -- The emergency -- Warning -- Disappeared -- Uncertain light of dawn -- The missing and the dead -- Does anybody know this has happened to us? -- We will get you all out -- Fault lines -- Tracy, you bitch -- Daribah Nungalinya -- The wild north -- The shooting of the dogs -- Winds of change -- I've got to have my trips -- 1975 -- I wasn't worrying about bloody history, I was worrying about the day -- I make this place as I go -- The shape memory takes.

When Cyclone Tracy swept down on Darwin at Christmas 1974, the weather became not just a living thing but a killer. Tracy destroyed an entire city, left seventy-one people dead and ripped the heart out of Australia's season of goodwill. For the fortieth anniversary of the nation's most iconic natural disaster, Sophie Cunningham has gone back to the eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the devastation-and those who faced the heartbreaking clean-up and the back-breaking rebuilding. From the quiet stirring of the service-station bunting that heralded the catastrophe to the wholesale slaughter of the dogs that followed it, Cunningham brings to the tale a novelist's eye for detail and an exhilarating narrative drive. And a sober appraisal of what Tracy means to us now, as we face more-and more destructive-extreme weather with every year that passes.