Green day

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire in London. Green is the colour that has been adopted by survivors to show courage and strength through this awful, awful disaster. I followed this disaster from afar, attempting to learn from it, as it is my job to bring an understanding of how we […]

Thick stories

So when you think it can’t get any better, then Rebecca Riggs comes along. She’s had three careers, actor, mother (she’s still doing that one) and communicator extraordinaire. She specialises in this thing called narrative based practice. Peter Rekers told me I was going to love it, and I was already in love with it […]

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 […]

And this is what we want you to do

I’m “over West”, in one of my favourite parts of the world, for the Emergency Media and Public Affairs Conference. I was fortunate to have a day here before the conference, and be able to catch up with the team here in Perth, who have been dealing with the complexity of the tragic incident in […]

The right thing to do.

My colleague, collaborator and great friend, Shona Whitton left us a couple of weeks ago, having outgrown what we wanted from her at work. Like me, and Kate Brady, she’s very fascinated by how we make sense of disasters, from the first minutes to the years afterwards. One thing she has made a bit 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 […]