Needle in a haystack

Last year I read Patrick Meier’s Digital Humanitarians. The book focuses on the rapid rise of the use of technology and mapping to improve the information available to humanitarians. It is an interesting read, particularly for this digital skeptic. When the Queensland Police successfully used facebook and twitter, our industry erupted with OMGism, it was […]

What we know now

Over the past 7 years, as many would know, I have been involved in the University of Melbourne’s Beyond Bushfires research project (I’m even called an Honorary Fellow!). It has been an extraordinary experience for me, pushing me well out of my comfort zone, and having to learn a whole new language. I became involved […]

Songs of Calamity

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, Of the big lake they called ‘gitche gumee’ The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead, when the skies of November turn gloomy. So, opens one of the great disaster songs, Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald . This is something I […]

Roof of the world

Gotta get it all done before Christmas is a refrain that I hear so often. Never sure why, because as far as I can tell, the world isn’t going to end on the 26th December. It’s probably so people can go into their break feeling like they have left nothing behind. Working in this industry, […]

Little Saigon

Structure fire. Footscray, was the message on the phone. Then the news said it was a fire in the market. Then it was Little Saigon, the Vietnamese market in Footscray. What was a structure suddenly had a whole new meaning. It was a market place, but it was more, a meeting place, a place of […]

The Dead Are Dead

If you buy no other book on disaster management and dealing with death and survival, then you cannot go past Collective Conviction, by Anne Eyre and Pamela Dix. It tells the story of Disaster Action, an organisation set up by family members after Britain’s “decade of disaster” to support, advocate, lobby, and change the way […]

Koyannisqatsi

These here be crazy times. Like most people, I am stunned that the orange one won. Make no mistake. Americans aren’t stupid, as much as we’d like to portray them that way, the same way we wanted to portray the English and the Welsh for voting to leave the EU. We live in extremely uncertain […]

Powerlines

Recent storms left the state of South Australia, and it’s 1.6 million residents totally without power, after a cyclonic storm blew in. Not before the power was back on, and with the help of some sloppy journalism, the storm had become a political stoush over renewable energy versus fossil fuels, with everyone up and including […]

Aberfan

At 9.15, 50 years ago, perched high above the school at Aberfan in South Wales, after heavy rain a tip gave way and a 13 metre slurry sped downhill at 90 kilometres an hour, striking the school, just as they were preparing for the day’s lessons. 116 children and 28 adults were killed. In an […]

100

As a kid, playing cricket, I always hoped I would score a century. My batting skills put paid to that. My grandfather started to clear a place on his mantelpiece on his 95th birthday for a telegram from the Queen. He made it to 97. I remember the excitement of getting paid in $100 notes […]

Sastrugi

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