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ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 40 | August 1999


The collections

Cyclone Tracy revisited

Darwin photomap

Darwin photomap by the Royal Australian Survey Corps showing the devastation at Cullen Beach, 1975


An atlas of photomaps of Darwin, prepared by the Royal Australian Survey Corps after cyclone Tracy on Christmas Day 1974, has been presented to the Map Section. The Director of Strategic Military Geographic Information, Australian Defence Force, Colonel Doug Stedman, made the donation in May this year, 25 years after the disaster.

Tracy left 115 people dead, with a further 15 missing at sea 1. It caused an estimated $1 billion in damage and required the evacuation of 35 362 residents. The scale of the assistance provided by the Natural Disasters Organisation under the leadership of Major General Alan Stretton was the largest ever given to an Australian community following a natural disaster.

Royal Australian Survey Corps technicians were recalled from Christmas leave for the rapid response task of producing 1 : 5 000 scale photomaps. Working from aerial photography flown in 1972 their work was despatched within 36 hours. However, because the original photographs were incomplete and of poor quality, a second batch was shot by the Royal Australian Air Force on 2 February 1975.

The atlas, which contains 23 photomaps compiled from the 1972 and 1975 flights, was not published by the Royal Australian Survey Corps until 1995. It is a graphic reminder of an event that will never be forgotten by those who lived through it.

1Author's note: This has been shown to be inaccurate, ' the correct figure according to the atlas I reviewed in the article was 51 killed and 15 missing at sea' , Russell Farran, 8 August 2001.

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