The furious days: The relief of Darwin

by Alan Stretton

207 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Dallas Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a survivor of Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy, and subsequently a child-evacuee, I have been slowly coming to terms over the course of nearly 50 years with the Christmas Day event that shattered our family. This book filled in a lot of gaps I was too young to know at the time, from the perspective of the man tasked with leading the emergency response, Alan Stretton. In this memoir he gives a minute-by-minute description of the seven days he spent in Darwin overseeing the initial disaster relief. He writes with a clear memory, and an urgency bubbling beneath the surface, of coordinating various local departments to meet the challenge. This is an excellent, on-the-ground read from someone who was as close to the action as possible without being in the disaster himself. An excellent book.