Slight thread drift I know, but I thought you would like another quote from that wonderful book “Beyond the Blue Horizon” by Guardian journalist Alexander Frater, that documented his attempt to retrace the original 1930’s Imperial Airways route from London to Brisbane in 1983. Here we have him in Darwin and talking to “Ossie” Osgood, owner of Arnhem Air Charter, on Cyclone Tracy:
“I lost one of my engineers that night- his house fell on him. When they found him he was holding his dead baby in his arms. Things were pretty bad at the airport too. All my aircraft were wrecked. One finished up on top of a Friendship and another screwed its tail through the hangar wall. After the storms the looters came. You wouldn’t credit what they stole. I walked around with a pistol in my pocket and slept on a camp bed with an M16 beside me.
Gough Whitlam declared us a national emergency and ordered that all available resources be poured into Darwin. The only thing he hadn’t reckoned on were the civil servants. I went and told them I’d lost my roof and needed some tarpaulins. But they didn’t give me tarpaulins, what they gave me were forms! Forms! It was their finest hour. Then, one sunny day long after Tracy was just a bad memory, a truck pulled up outside and the driver said “Mr Osgood, here are the tarpaulins you indented for- Can you sign here, here, here and here.””