Joanne begins to cry. I lift her onto my lap and smooth her hair off her forehead. Dad touches Petey on the back. ‘Sit.’

‘The people here have an unbreakable spirit, despite all they’ve been through,’ Mark says. He talks of the neighbourliness – encouraged by the presence of law-enforcement officials – of the food and medical supplies making their way to the schools, which are now shelters. It’s horribly familiar, words we heard following the flood. But this is worse, as much as disasters can be compared. It’s much worse.

‘All public services have been severed,’ Mark says. ‘There is no electricity, no sewage, no clean water flowing from the taps, and aside from emergency services and the media, there is no way of contacting the outside world.’ He pauses for effect. ‘This is a tragedy of unprecedented scale.’

I don’t think Mark should have let the cameraman shoot footage of the children’s toys and Christmas decorations that litter the ground, soiled and wet, but Mark has told me many times his job is not to show what’s palatable but what’s true.

He interviews a woman called Nan who says she and her children have only the clothes they are wearing.

‘Barney got thrown against the shed wall.’

‘Barney is your dog,’ Mark says.

‘My dog, yeah. Went up like a piece of paper and off down the street. Down there.’ The camera follows her sightline to the end of a ravaged street.

‘And what did you do, Nan? How did you survive?’

‘We went under the caravan, didn’t we? Stayed there in the mud for hours till the wind stopped enough to crawl out. Kids were screaming and we were all a foot in the muck and I thought the caravan was going to come down on top of us. Not much of a Christmas for the kids.’

‘But you made it through,’ Mark says.

The camera moves closer, ready for tears. Nan remains stoic. ‘Can’t find the dog, but.’

Mark speaks with local mechanic Sam who describes his night, saying the rain had been heavy, and the wind immense.

‘Sheets of corrugated iron scraping across the road and smashing into cars. There was an almighty wind, like standing near a plane. Deafening. I watched my kids screaming at me, right in front of me. Couldn’t make out a word.’

‘Well, at least people are getting out,’ I say to Lou. The television shows a crawling line of cars leaving the city on a cleared road.

‘People are fleeing this shattered city by air, land and sea,’ Mark says, ‘leaving those whose job it is to clean and care. People who go by plane are being sent to Alice, Sydney and Adelaide. Those who drive are heading to Katherine and Tennant Creek. Some are heading by sea to parts of north Queensland or down to Brisbane. And no one knows when, or if, they will be coming home.’

He ends his story with a shot of a sign outside the local cinema. It’s fashioned from a piece of old board, with the handwritten words, ‘Gone with the Wind, starring Cyclone Tracy’.