Golden oldies

Recently I’ve been trawling around op shops for vinyl records, hoping for that gem. The trouble is everyone else is now doing, so the hope of finding a signed Beatles is non existent. Or even just a copy of The Triffids Born Sandy Devotional. But I have been discovering a lot of golden oldies, music […]

In vino veritas

“Wine makers lose billions annually in natural disasters” was the headline that truly caught my eye. This potentially catastrophic. Well, perhaps not, but serious. It should be a lever to get more investment out of politicians in disaster mitigation surely? The headline did get me thinking about how I have intersected with wine over the […]

Heat

There is a house in suburban Melbourne, it is probably 1973. In the front yard there is a large lilly pilly tree, at the top of the lilly pilly tree is a young boy. He is looking out over red heat shimmering tiled rooftops towards the bay. IT has been hot for days. He is […]

Let’s have a party!

The Pyrennes region of Western Victoria has unsung beauty. Some time ago, I drove up with some colleagues to Elmhurst, a small town on the highway to talk resilience. Road trips are one of my favourite things in this job, generally because it involves music and good company. This was no exception. Unfortunately, I don’t […]

What would Gene Hackman do?

Gene Hackman is one of my favourite actors. Many of his movies are favourites, but two come to mind one wet weekend late last year, The Conversation, and Enemy of the State. In both Hackman plays paranoid surveillance type characters, obsessed with privacy. Both are thrillers, where Hackman is at odds with the powers that […]

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 […]

Connecting

It’s not often you get to enjoy the company of one of the world’s great minds in the area of Post Traumatic Stress. Yesterday I, and many of my colleagues, were able to revel in 3hours of post traumatic stress heaven (if there is such a thing), with Dr Patricia Watson, one of the gurus […]

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 […]