Australia Weather News

The Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) has opened a refreshed collection of work at its popular Cyclone Tracy exhibition ahead of the 50th anniversary of the natural disaster.

The revamped display now features a misspelt slur for Darwin's deadliest-ever cyclone, which killed 66 people on Christmas Day, 1974.

The replica Holden Torana, adorned with the infamous graffiti "Tracey (sic) you b*tch", is one of dozens of new Cyclone Tracy exhibits at MAGNT.

The museum's senior territory history curator, Jared Archibald, said the sculpture was chosen based on the popularity of an image of the car in the old exhibition.

"When you have a disaster like what happened, these things get you through. It's that dark humour," he said.

Mr Archibald and assistant curator Caddie Brain tracked down the owner of the car in the popular photo, John Garner, only to find he was a regular visitor at the museum's in-house cafe.

Together, Mr Garner and the museum team recreated the car as the exhibition centrepiece.

Speaking ahead of the display's opening, Mr Garner recounted pulling out a paint tin after Cyclone Tracy had crushed his beloved Torana.

"A couple of days later, we pulled the car out from under the wall … and found a pot of paint and I thought 'I'll have a go at this'," he said.

"It was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek thing — 'Tracey you bitch' — but being on the highway, people going in and out of Darwin saw it and they would stop and take a photograph of it.

"There's always someone who's got to make their comment and say 'that's not how you spell Tracy ... you don't know to spell ' — I really couldn't care."

Mr Garner said he was thrilled when the museum contacted him about recreating the car.

"They brought me in here and they said 'look, this is what we propose to do, bring this thing back to life'," Mr Garner said.

"I've never been so excited in all my life."

The exhibition first opened at the museum in 1994, 20 years after the disaster, and some long-standing elements of the display remain. 

That includes a darkened sound booth playing a looped audio recording of the cyclone, which has now been enhanced with vibrating walls.

New elements of the new exhibition include a 1970s-era weather bureau, and a restored replica of a doll made famous by a picture on the cover of a Women's Weekly Cyclone Tracy edition.

Ms Brain said it was a unique exhibition to curate.

"It's about the absence of objects, it's about the fact that everything got ruined, trashed waterlogged," she said.

"But people who went through it seem to have a touch-stone object, they've kept something from it.

"In the lead up to the 50th [anniversary] we're finding more and more people have been open to donating their thing — whether it's a Christmas decoration, a toy, a Christmas tree, a table."