It's the noise and the smell of Cyclone Tracy that linger longest in the memory of Patricia Collins.

The noise was terrifying. Huddled together with her Royal Australian Navy colleagues in a large wardrobe, Collins feared for her life as the wind roared, rain pounded, windows exploded, debris crashed, masonry fell to the ground, and the very roof above them made a godawful screech as it peeled off into the night.

As for the smell, it was unbearable. During the cleanup after the cyclone, Collins and her colleagues laboured in horrific conditions with no protective equipment as food in domestic and commercial fridges and freezers rotted – including 60 tonnes of prawns at a facility on the Darwin waterfront.

Collins was a 19-year-old radio operator with WRANS, the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service, when Tracy hit. She and her colleagues knew that a cyclone was tracking in the general direction of Darwin.

Earlier that month, Cyclone Selma had been lurking in the vicinity of Darwin but had stayed out at sea. Tracy would not be so kind. It made a beeline for the city which then had 47,000 residents, and nobody imagined the hell it would unleash.

Image: Map showing the path of Cyclone Tracy on December 24 and 25, 1974. Source: Wikipedia public domain.

It's 50 years this Tuesday since Cyclone Tracy screamed its way into Darwin, killing 71 people, destroying up to 90% of Darwin's homes, and leaving not a single tree intact. To this day, it is regarded as Australia's most devastating natural disaster.

• Tracy wasn't a big cyclone. In fact it was a very small one and holds the world record for the smallest severe TC/Hurricane with a gale boundary of 48km. Out of all the worlds tropical cyclones on record, only Tropical Storm Marco was smaller, and it was a Cateogry 1. Darwin was exceedingly unlucky to be hit by Tracy.
• While small, Tracy punched way above its weight. The strongest wind gust recorded was 217 km/h, which would only make it a Category 3 under the BoM's cyclone categories which didn't exist back then.
• But that was before the anemometer (wind measuring instrument) at Darwin Airport broke, its needle bent in half. The peak gusts were almost certainly well in excess of what was measured.
• Two BoM meteorologists published a retrospective study of Cyclone Tracy in 2010 and estimated that Tracy packed sustained winds of 175km/h, gusting to 240km/h, which made it a Category 4 cyclone.

The cyclone raged until dawn. As daylight illuminated the scene, Collins could scarcely believe what she saw.

"The damage was just appalling. We couldn't get our heads around what had happened," she told Weatherzone.

"Because of the tornadoes which occurred during the cyclone, I saw a refrigerator 15 metres high in a tree. A hotel had a car in the swimming pool and its number plate was embedded in the brickwork on the fourth floor."

Collins didn't sleep a wink that fateful night. But she and her colleagues got to work immediately searching for survivors. It was draining work, physically and psychologically. She ended up participating in the cleanup for almost three months.

It was a traumatic time. Indeed, Collins says the trying conditions in the cyclone's aftermath caused her more grief than the terrifying night of the cyclone itself. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) wasn’t a widely understood condition in those days, but she and her colleagues were all diagnosed with it in varying degrees 20 or more years later.

Looking back through the 50-year lens, Collins takes enormous pride in the work she and her Royal Australian Navy colleagues put in after Tracy. The Navy had lost people and ships in the disaster, but ships were soon deployed from Sydney with thousands of sailors cutting their Christmas leave short to help.

"We were very shabby, working without gloves or helmets or sunscreen and bathing in fire hydrants, and it was such a relief when that first ship arrived and we saw those brilliant white uniforms."

Image: The patrol boat HMAS Arrow suffered equipment failures and the crew was ordered to abandon ship. Source: billbeee via Wikipedia Commons.

Collins released a book in 2024 about her ordeal. Entitled Rock and Tempest: Surviving Cyclone Tracy and its Aftermath, it tells the tale of the cyclone itself, with a special focus of the often-underplayed role of the Royal Australian Navy in the cleanup.

"The 50th anniversary of Cyclone Tracy is not a happy anniversary," she says. "But I have pride in our little band of WRANS. We were all in our late teens or early twenties and we've all got a bond for life."

Darwin today is a thriving, modern city with a population around 140,000. Strict building codes were enforced after Cyclone Tracy and while several cyclones have tracked close to the NT capital, no severe tropical cyclone since Tracy has made a direct hit. Here's hoping those new building codes never get fully tested.