Darwin

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Six Per Cent of the Houses Were Left Standing

Cyclone Tracy crossed Darwin in the early hours of Christmas Day 1974. Wind speeds were officially recorded at 217 km/h before the Bureau of Meteorology's anemometer was destroyed.

The numbers afterwards are hard to take in.

More than 70% of Darwin's buildings were destroyed, including 80% of its houses. Only 6% of homes were left habitable. Of a population of about 47,000, some 25,000 people were left homeless and 35,362 were evacuated in the following week — the largest peacetime evacuation in Australian history. One Boeing 747 flight out of Darwin carried 674 people.

Sixty-six people were killed. Power, water, sewerage and communications were all severed. As many as 60% of those evacuated never came back.

The rebuilding was almost as fast as the destruction. The Darwin Reconstruction Commission was established on 28 February 1975 and oversaw more than 2,500 new homes in three years. By mid-1978 Darwin had regained its pre-cyclone population.

The most important consequence was national. Tracy prompted new building codes across the whole of Australia — requirements that structures be clad against flying debris and that roofs be tied to their foundations. When Cyclone Larry hit Innisfail in 2006 and Cyclone Yasi hit Mission Beach in 2011, both stronger than Tracy, there were no fatalities.

The clock: the Northern Territory rebuilt almost everything about how it constructs a city, and has not touched its clock since 1944.

Darwin runs on UTC+9:30 — the same half-hour zone as Adelaide — and has not observed daylight saving in over eighty years.

Which produces a small oddity every October. Adelaide springs forward to UTC+10:30; Darwin does not. For half the year the two cities share a clock exactly, and for the other half they are an hour apart, without either of them having moved relative to the sun.

At 12° south, there is very little seasonal daylight to save. Darwin's shortest day and longest day differ by little more than an hour. It is the same arithmetic that keeps Bogotá, Honolulu and Queensland where they are.

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