Tracy warning is louder than ever

As with all devastating, unprecedented disasters, it's the images of Cyclone Tracy that have endured the longest. Cars in the swimming pool of Darwin's Travelodge. The flattened suburbs. The trees stripped bare. A man, amid the ruins of his neighbourhood, holding a kitten and a bathroom sink.

And yet the photos and their power are what author Sophie Cunningham would have been happy to leave out of her new book, Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy.

"There's something about the photos which just deaden conversation because they're so unsubtle," she tells AAP.

"There's not a lot to say. Language allows you to get some of that back, while images just stop you in your tracks."

Indeed, the language Cunningham uses to describe the ferocity of the 1974 storm that killed 240 and rebirthed a city conveys the sheer terror that Darwin's residents would have felt.

"It was like a giant running his hands down the side of the house going vvrrrrrrrrr like this, and you could feel the shudder of the wind going along," local Ida Bishop says in the book.

Cunningham describes how a woman saw her dogs flung through the sky on their chains, while elsewhere a piano blew out of a house. Plaster, white and flaking, swirled around a child who imagined she was in a snow dome.

Living rooms disintegrated and the stars came in. Reality altered as walls melted and one man was sucked out of his roofless house as if he were riding a magic carpet.

There's no doubt the storm changed the fabric of Darwin forever, but Cunningham's book, published in advance of its 40th anniversary this Christmas, is intended as a warning against complacency, the belief it could never happen to you.

"It's not just about cyclones, it's about disasters in general," Cunningham says, pointing out that similar books could be written about the bushfires in Victoria or the Queensland floods.

"People do tend to ignore warnings."

Those who survived Tracy aren't complacent but they make up only about 20 per cent of Darwin's population, she says.

And as more severe weather events are recorded, and as poverty and population growth pushes people into unsafe corridors, such as along the edge of the coast across Southeast Asia, or inside Tornado Alley in the central US, a greater danger is posed. But is anyone listening?

"There are fewer safe places," Cunningham says.

"It's one of the things weather is doing to us - the environmental damage is becoming more and more extreme, which makes cities more vulnerable."

She is reluctant to be too critical of the way the aftermath of Tracy was handled, pointing out that protocols are now in place to minimise the stress for residents after future events.

"Disaster experts have said the evacuation is one thing we would never do again," she says.

"It's not necessarily to a town's advantage to have everyone disappear."

About three-quarters of Darwin's population had left the city by New Year's Eve, and women were excluded from the rebuilding process, leaving men on their own in a place that already had too much of a reputation as a boys' town.

"They could have made the women feel they had a role in the community," Cunningham says.

Myths sprung up quickly of Greek men or Chinese men dressing up as women to be taken out of town; paranoia circled as police took to shooting pets, opportunists and the needy looting shops and houses; and residents wondered if the rest of the country really knew what was going on.

The militarisation of Darwin after Tracy also traumatised people.

"The army comes in, 200 people are shoved onto each flight and it was weeks before people knew what was going on," Cunningham said.

"Some people didn't know where their children were or whether they were alive, and that level of chaos really made the stress much, much worse. It was a total breakdown of communication, and that kind of stuff you can avoid having again."

And yet resident Vicki Harris is quoted as saying that ultimately Cyclone Tracy did Darwin a favour.

"It had really blown the cobwebs out of the place, and it had shaken the place out of its doldrums," she says in the book.

"I think some people were nostalgic for the old town, and some people think a modern town emerged and it was a good thing," Cunningham says.

"It's extremely hard to know the answer, because Darwin would have changed, regardless, without Cyclone Tracy."

As Darwin, now a thoroughly modern city of about 130,000 people nears the anniversary, it will have to ask how well prepared it is for the next one.

There will always be another storm, and if any one lesson can be taken from Tracy it is this: heed the warning.

• Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy by Sophie Cunningham is published by Text Publishing.