It’s sometimes referred to as ‘The Night That Santa Never Came‘. What came instead were howlling winds of more than 200km an hour, tearing Darwin to pieces and having a similar effect on nearby towns in the Northern Territory.
In the end, the death toll would reach 71, of whom 22 were caught at sea by the storm. It destroyed 80% of all buildings in Darwin and left tens of thousands of people homeless, most of whom were evacuated to other cities.
Cyclone Tracy remains the greatest natural disaster in Australian history. Darwin today bears little resemblance to pre-Tracy Darwin, and although its population has long since surpassed the 49,000 residents at the time of the cyclone, the majority of them are new immigrants to the city or born since 1974.
