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 […]

On Grief

Today we farewelled an extraordinary woman, Cher, the mother of one of Emily’s closest friends. She, like many women, battled with the breast cancer scourge, and gave it her best shot. Her life’s celebration was in a light filled room down in St Kilda, by the beach, a place that was so much part of […]

Collins St, 5pm

A trip to the National Gallery of Victoria is not complete for me, unless I stand in front of John Brack’s Collins St, 5pm. It’s an iconic, powerful meditation on urban life, as relevant today, as when it was painted in 1957. Stand long enough in front of, and you’ll hear the clack of shoes […]