One of my strongest and enduring memories from my first year of school in 1970 was sitting on the floor during show and tell and our teacher, Mrs Wilson drawing on the black board, the Westgate Bridge. She proceeded to tell us how the bridge had collapsed the day before. She left us with the […]
Read more "The Span Between Pier 10 and 11"It looks like we are inside the curve here in Australia. We are still struggling to understand what its like inside the curve, even as the measures start to settle, and we fall into some sort of rhythm. How do we make sense of it? This is what I am trying to do. Yes, this […]
Read more "Inside the curve"Hello, its Kate Brady again, I’m crashing John’s blog again from maternity leave with the added layers of bunkering down for social isolation in my parents home with 8 month old twins who are on the move and a 4 year old who is missing her dad like crazy and itching to escape the house […]
Read more "Strange times, but we know how to do this."I’m Winston Wolf, and I solve problems, is my favourite line from Pulp Fiction. I’ve used it in presentations on recovery. Break down a disaster, and at the heart of it, they are problems to be solved. Its why we nurses make good disaster managers, we manage a range of people’s problems, all at once, […]
Read more "The R Word"So, things are moving quickly now and have ramped up another notch, as there is a recognition that containment is no longer possible, and we seek to reduce the impacts on the health system. These measures include social distancing and serve to reduce the transmission of the virus. The early evidence suggests that it works, […]
Read more "The distance between us."For the second time in under three months we are inundated by challenging images and uncertainty. The current COVID19 pandemic is a new, and novel situation, and for us, like the bushfire crisis that we faced, there is great uncertainty, and the fear of the unknown. We just don’t know how it will unfold and […]
Read more "With the solvol, Geoffrey*"Like many, I have been watching #toiletpapergate unfold with incredulous eyes. Much has been written about the stupidity of people in buying up toilet paper, when COVID19 doesn’t cause diarrheoa. We are fortunate in the Richardson household, when we ordered toilet paper from Who Gives a Crap, we ticked the box that meant we were […]
Read more "Who gives a?"Silence. There was nothing to hear, I recall someone telling me, after the Black Saturday Bushfires. All those sounds we take for granted were gone. Insects. Birds. Animals, sounds of wind in leaves. Sounds of human movement. Nothing. I felt this as I was in Marysville in those early days. The soundscape had changed, and […]
Read more "This is what we are hearing"Disasters are serious events with serious consequences. Our newsfeeds, our conversations, our days are filled with images of despair, destruction, sadness and anger. As I’ve written previously, this can be overwhelming and paralysing. It’s hard to think about humour and laughter in these circumstances. There have been many times when I’ve shared a laugh in […]
Read more "This is why we laugh"Another blog turn over, this time to Lauren Kerr (another disaster recovery specialist on maternity leave, and one of The Laurens..we had four at one stage in the team), who has some importance reminiscences about her time after the Margaret River fires in WA back in 2011. Over to you, Lauren… I’m disheartened to see […]
Read more "We need to be patient"