vale Macedon

Yesterday I presented at an Emergency Management workshop at the Australian Emergency Management Institute for the last time. You see, in order to save $900,000 a year, the Federal government decided to deprive Australia of its emergency management institute.The institute barely survived Ash Wednesday back in 1983. It served as a relief centre for the […]

London Calling

A day in London, on the way to Devon to visit relatives, I managed to convince my girls that we start the day with a visit to the London Bombings memorial. Not quite what they had in mind, as they were hoping for a shopping day. It did feel a little incongruous (particularly as the […]

Not sure if this is of any interest: 2014 in review!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the […]

Merry Christmas

It’s been a busy couple of months since I last posted. I had a stint in Cali, Colombia at Red Cross’ Global Community Resilience Forum, then followed by a gathering of the national Red Cross’ Preparedness and Recovery Teams in the Blue Mountains (which are still affected by the fires of last year, and following […]

Parallel universe

Over the past three years I’ve been operating in an parallel universe. It’s called Beyond Bushfires, a research study looking at the health impacts of the Black Saturday Bushfires. The reason I call it an alternative reality, as this research stuff is all new to me. It has its own language and rules, and practices, […]

Its a great big world

In Australia, I feel our relationship with the international community on disaster management is very tenuous. Apart from a number of mutual aid agreements on urban search and rescue and forest fire fighting, we had tended not to look at the international community for what practice we can learn. We’re a little bit arrogant, presuming […]

Tables that are round

Yesterday we held the second Red Cross National Resilience Roundtable. The focus of this roundtable was on the role of the not for profit and non-traditional organisations in emergency management. The idea was to draw attention to the range of resources that the not for profit sector has offer. To consider this, we brought together […]

Confession

Warning: Graphic Bushfire Related Imagery Dear Miss Hotston, where ever you are, I have a confession to make. You set Ash Road as our Year 7 English text. I didn’t read it beyond the first couple of pages, because I thought it was boring, and the boys were “old fashioned”. I probably copied my essay. […]

Seen and not heard

I didn’t know it was the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child until our good friends at the Jack Brockhoff Child Health and Wellbeing Program wrote about it here. Like much of emergency management practice, children are as seen as a problem to be managed, a box to be […]

Cool for Cats

It’s a beautiful spring morning here in Melbourne. It’s also the Red Cross Disaster Preparedness Week. This is our third national campaign to promote disaster preparedness amongst Australians. Each year we try to engage with people with different themes, rather than a blunt “You must be prepared message.” Anyone else hated being told to clean […]