Today is RU OK? Day, a great initiative formed to get people to check in on each other. Me? I’m not OK. Haven’t been for about 18months or so, but I am now recognising it, calling it out and doing something about it. The work that we do, goes without saying, is stressful. “You work […]
Read more "RU OK? Me, I’m not*"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 […]
Read more "Golden oldies"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?"When I talk about psycho-social preparedness, I often see people start to shift a little bit nervously, eyes darting around the room. “You mean psychological preparedness?” Well, no it’s not, it incorporates psychological preparedness, but it is more. So what is it then? It is the term that we have coined to cover the unique […]
Read more "Psycho- what?"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 […]
Read more "Its a great big world"I am a geographer. It is a bold statement. Particularly when you are filling out your tax return, and are asked for occupation, and there is no “geographer” in the list of hundreds of jobs. In the tax office’s eyes, I don’t exist. Still on the birth certificates of my children, I am listed as […]
Read more "Not lost. Mostly."The national broadcaster is under scrutiny, yet again. The government has announced an efficiency review. It will be interesting to see the terms of reference and how they determine what is valuable and what isn’t. I know what I think is valuable about it for disaster managers. One of the great assets of the ABC, […]
Read more "8 cents a day"We have this great tension over leadership in recovery management. On paper, our principles (which people don’t realise have been around since the late eighties) tell us that it should be community led, which is in line with a participatory approaches to governance, and the role of government is to facilitate. So that’s the theory, […]
Read more "When the Generals Talk"So said the young woman on the supermarket checkout to me this afternoon. We had a wild old night here in Melbourne last night, with some mighty thunder and lightning, and a month’s rain in the day. I was somewhat surprised that I was getting conversation more than the standard Hihowareyouhaveyougotaflybuyscardschequessavingsorcredithaveagoodday incantation, but the young […]
Read more "I woke up with the ceiling in bed"A number of years ago, I had a person working with me on secondment who had a strong service policy background. She worked on reviewing the personal hardship grants for us (the financial assistance the State Government provides those people in need of support). She asked me what was the rationale for the grants. I […]
Read more "What’s in a name"
Sastrugi 