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 […]
Read more "Heat"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 […]
Read more "Let’s have a party!"Trains. In downtown cities. We don’t think of them being akin to a bomb. Yet this is what happened in Lac Megantic in Quebec, Canada, in July 2013. A freight train, full of tankers, rolled unattended and derailed, exploding. 47 people died, thousands made homeless and most of the CBD of Lac Megantic was destroyed […]
Read more "Tsunami of fire"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 […]
Read more "What would Gene Hackman do?"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 […]
Read more "Needle in a haystack"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 […]
Read more "What we know now"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 […]
Read more "Connecting"