Our People
25 April, 2026
The storm, the church and the man who stayed
ON Christmas Eve, 1974, Terry Dunn wasn’t in Darwin when Cyclone Tracy hit. He had left earlier that night, invited down to Katherine by friends from a church he had only recently become part of. It wasn’t a big decision at the time — just somewhere to enjoy dinner on Christmas Eve. It may have saved his life. He had been living in a caravan at Shady Glen — a young man from Stawell travelling north in an old Kombi with a mate, picking up work where they could and getting used to Darwin.
There had been warnings about the cyclone, but like most people, they didn’t think much of it. Locals shrugged it off — just another storm.
By the time Terry set out to return the next morning, Darwin was gone.
“We reckon we might have been the first vehicle back in,” he said, though getting there was anything but straightforward — roads blocked, debris everywhere, at times driving off-road just to keep moving.
The closer they got, the clearer it became this wasn’t just storm damage.
“There wasn’t a dry eye anywhere,” Terry said.
They made their way back to the caravan park.
Their van was still there — pushed aside and damaged, but upright. Around it, almost everything else had been flattened.
In the days that followed, Terry volunteered for the cleanup.
“There was about 100 of us,” he said. “We went through every house, every building, with armed guards.”
They checked for bodies, gathered valuables and tried to restore some order to a city torn apart overnight. The conditions were confronting — food rotting, debris everywhere, and the work relentless.
“My job was crawling under houses, spraying everything for hygiene,” he said. “It was a tough job.”
“We grew up that day.”
Darwin changed him.
“That’s where I matured.”
It’s also where he met Dianne, who would later become his wife.
More than 50 years on, Terry is the pastor of City Heart Church in Stawell — the same church he first walked into as a toddler.
“I started here when I was two,” he said.
His mother wanted her children raised in a Christian environment. His father, shaped by what he had seen in World War II, had stepped away from faith, but on his mother’s side the connection to what was then known as Stawell Church of Christ ran deep.
“I remember the sandpit out the back,” Terry said. “We had little figurines and would act out the stories.”
Inside was different.
“You’d walk in and it was frightening as a kid — all these older people.”
Faith came later, during a mission in his mid-teens.
“There was a guest speaker there that really hit the hearts of a lot of young people,” he said.
“I thought, well, the time’s come to put up my hand and say, ‘I’m going for this.’”
He was baptised soon after — on September 11, 1971 or 1972, he recalls.
By his early 20s, Terry was already taking on responsibility, building a youth ministry while working as an apprentice painter.
Then, in 1974, he left.
“I’d had enough of Stawell. We just took off.”
He and a mate packed into a Kombi and headed north.
“We wandered wherever the wind took us.”
That road led to Darwin — and everything that followed.
When he returned to Stawell in 1976, Terry came back changed.
He and Dianne built their life there. He returned to painting, but it wasn’t long before other responsibilities found him, including volunteering with the State Emergency Service.
His friend Leigh Edwards was the one who drew him in.
“So we were living out at Halls Gap at the time — Dianne and I had bought a block and built our own house,” Terry said.
“Leigh rocked up one day and said, ‘We’ve got a big call-out here.’ There was a hang glider pilot who’d come off Boroka Lookout and got stuck up a tree, about 80 feet up, with a stick through his leg.
“‘Do you want to come with us?’”
“That’s how I got involved in the SES.”
Before long, his colleagues recognised his leadership qualities.
“There was a knock on the door one night — a few of the SES guys,” he said. “They said, ‘We want you to become the controller.’”
The role was a rebuild, and he took it on, learning as he went — a path that eventually led him to the Australian Counter Disaster College.
“I’m sitting there thinking, I’m a painter from Stawell,” he said.
But the lessons stuck.
“I still get value out of that today.”
In the early 1980s, Terry moved into welfare through the Community Youth Support Scheme in Stawell.
“It was in a bad way when I started,” he said.
Within a few years it had turned around, before funding cuts brought it to an end. He returned to painting, later running a furniture and removals business with Dianne for nearly two decades.
“We were busy all the time,” he said. “Hard work. Long hours.”
Through it all, one thing didn’t change.
“This is my home church.”
After the 2006 fires that tore through the Grampians, Terry helped organise volunteer support for smaller properties that had slipped through the cracks.
“We had people coming from everywhere,” he said.
Chainsaws, equipment, donations — all coordinated through church networks. Crews cleared driveways, cut timber and helped people begin again.
By 2014, Terry had stepped back from leadership with the church.
“I just needed a break,” he said.
What followed wasn’t planned.
A pastor appointed to lead the church proved deeply disruptive. People left. Leadership disappeared. The church began to unravel, leaving only a handful of devoted members.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” he said. “But I could see it wasn’t working.”
Eventually, the responsibility landed with him.
“It was basically, make it work or close it.”
There wasn’t really a decision.
“This is my church. It isn’t going to close.”
From 2015, the rebuilding began.
Terry didn’t do it alone. Dianne remained central, particularly in welfare and care, while Jennifer Pearson became a key support.
Together, they worked to rebuild both structure and trust.
“That was probably the hardest part,” he said. “We had a reputation to overcome.”
He was officially ordained as pastor in 2018.
“We said to Churches of Christ Vic/Tas in Melbourne, ‘We need a pastor,’” he said. “They came back and said, ‘We’ve got one — you.’”
He remembers telling Dianne.
“She asked, ‘Who is it?’”
“I said, ‘You’re looking at him.’”
In the years that followed, the church didn’t just stabilise — it changed.
“It’s not the same church it was,” he said.
The rebrand to City Heart Church marked that shift.
People came, steadily.
“We didn’t go chasing them. We just went about what we were doing.”
The congregation grew into something Terry says couldn’t be planned, with new arrivals — including many from overseas — finding a place within the church.
“You can’t plan that,” he said. “But you’ve got to give them a reason to stay.”
That reason is simple.
“We’re a welcoming church,” he said, “but we’ll tell the hard story, the true story. We’re not an entertainment centre as such.
“It’s about faith.”
When the pandemic hit, Terry stood in front of the congregation and told them they could no longer meet.
“That was tough,” he said.
He adapted, sending weekly messages — “From the Pastor’s Desk” — while Dianne and others kept in touch with phone calls and check-ins.
It worked.
“We came out stronger,” he said.
Looking back, Terry doesn’t separate the difficult years from what the church has become.
“If we hadn’t gone through 2014, we wouldn’t be what we are now,” he said.
“I thank God for that.
Now, after years leading the church, Terry is beginning to think about what comes next.
“I don’t want to stay too long,” he said.
For now, though, he’s still there — in the same church he first walked into as a child, doing the work that, in one form or another, has shaped much of his life.
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