Cyclone Tracy : picking up the pieces : talking history with Bill Bunbury.

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Introduction; Making deals with God all night : Christmas Eve 1974; Picking up the pieces : the first ten days; We can come back, can't we? : efforts to return in 1975; Darwin is a bit like China : looking back: 1994 to 1974

The whole of Australia was shocked upon waking on Christmas morning, 1974. The unbelievable had happened; Darwin had been wiped out by a cyclone. Over the days, months, and years that followed, the rest of Australia also witnessed, helped and shared in an incredible triumph of will, as a city and the lives of its people were built anew. Now, twenty years after the event, the author revisits some of the heroes of Darwin, and in their own words they tell of the horrors of that night, the despair of Christmas morning, and of the struggles that followed as gradually they set about picking up the pieces. The moving and vivid accounts of these ordinary/extrodinary men and women bring alive the events and aftermath of one of Australia's worst disasters. Darwin 1974 was not only one of the most devastating experiences in Australian history, it was also one of the most extraordinary examples of the courage, resilience, strength and compassion of the Australian people