Til the cows come home

So we moved from the crushing numbers of a hellish US hurricane season to the lush green New Zealand. The New Zealand of earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami, flash flooding. A wonderful place to visit and live. Lee Cowan, from Dairy NZ talked to us about preparedness in NZ with the usual kiwi humour. Small, but mighty […]

4.8 million

Alexandra Travis is the Director of FEMA’s Strategic Communications, a mathematician by training, and this shone through in her presentation, a sense of steely calm in a whirlwind of chaos. She focused on the challenge of managing not one, not two, not three, but four major disasters in 2017. And there were a lot of […]

Wait til the midnight hour

Its almost the midnight hour here in downtown Elwood. Most cats should be asleep, but I’m not. You see, it’s not often you get to participate in a webinar with one of the legends of Psycho-social support, Stevan Hobfall. A decade ago, as critical incident stress debriefing was starting to be questioned as to whether […]

On Grief

Today we farewelled an extraordinary woman, Cher, the mother of one of Emily’s closest friends. She, like many women, battled with the breast cancer scourge, and gave it her best shot. Her life’s celebration was in a light filled room down in St Kilda, by the beach, a place that was so much part of […]

Collins St, 5pm

A trip to the National Gallery of Victoria is not complete for me, unless I stand in front of John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm. It’s an iconic, powerful meditation on urban life, as relevant today, as when it was painted in 1957. Stand long enough in front of, and you’ll hear the clack of shoes […]

May the Fourth

Many years ago my colleague and great friend, Mairead Doyle came to work, and said “Happy Star Wars Day” I looked at her blankly, and she followed up with “Its May the 4th, and I was thinking “yep, I’m not stupid, I can read a calendar” Then she gave me one of those chemical engineer, […]

Here I am: Sastrugi is 5

The other day I was looking for a post, and I kept go back, and back, and back, to 2013, May the Second, the day when I searched up “writing blogs”, created a site, came up with a weird name, and put some words on a file. Feeling pleased with myself, I thought I’m a […]

Morwellian

There’s a little book that has been sitting in my bookshelf for a couple of years, bought one chilly wet night at The Paperback Bookshop in Bourke St Melbourne (probably my favourite bookshop). I have severe Tsundoku (the japanese term for buying books and not reading them). But after hearing journalist Tom Doig speak at […]

That’s a wrap

The Language of Resilience

Maha Sukkar, a senior constable from Victoria Police, opened this session speaking in Arabic, giving people directions and making people feeling uncomfortable and uncertainty, because they did not understand what she was saying. She brilliantly illustrated the point that language, in situations of high stress is important. Penny Egan-Vine spoke about the issues that face […]