Cyclone season is underway in Queensland and Griffith University’s Dr Margaret Cook hopes lessons from past disasters will inform how authorities and communities prepare for, deal with and recover from such events.
Dr Cook, an environmental historian, is a research fellow in Griffith’s Australian Rivers Institute researching the dynamics between people and places over time including the fissures that emerge during disasters.
“In moments of crisis societal fissures that lie beneath the surface such as political and economic tensions and social injustices are even more apparent and have an urgency to them,” Dr Cook said.
Dr Cook said that disasters would become more frequent and more intense with climate change.
Her research findings highlight that some of the lessons of the past have been learned, but the cultural, political and economic contexts that disasters occur in make it difficult to change the way they are managed.
She wants to discover why people managing and experiencing disasters are sometimes reluctant to change when the need for change is obvious.
“There are impediments that hold us back. It might be a path dependency, so people question why we would do it differently, or it might be that people are reluctant to change, or it is just too hard,” she said.
“It is always complicated. It is easy to distil disasters to a simple narrative for example in the news media as a dichotomy of choices, but it is never that simple; there are no quick fixes.
“The failure to learn motif that comes through history all the time is not always the case as people do learn.
“We now know where our hazards are; we know where our vulnerable people are; we know what resources we do and don’t have. However, despite knowing that we don’t have enough resources for the next bush fire and that disaster events are escalating, the resources are not growing to match them.”
Her research involves oral histories of those who have been affected by disasters.
“It’s really important to tell stories of the past because while these types of disasters have occurred before things are changing and they are becoming potentially more intense and more frequent,” she said.
“People tell me stories when I do oral histories and I feel they have entrusted me with those insights, and I should do something with them. I owe it to the people who have been flooded before to respect their experience and honour it by telling their stories and stopping others from sharing their fate.”
Dr Cook translates her research findings for policy makers, practitioners and disaster affected communities so that people will more appropriately consider the risks associated with the environment and be better prepared for disasters.
“I hope by learning from the past, it can help inform the present and the future with lessons we can learn and hopefully not repeat,” she said.
Dr Cook is currently working on identifying the lessons from the 2022 floods in Queensland and those findings will be released to the public and academic communities in the middle of 2023.
“Comparing floods is a really good way of looking at what changes have been made and what we can improve on,” she said.
She is the author of “A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods” (UQP 2019) aimed at a broad audience and the co-editor of the book “Disasters in Australia and New Zealand: Historical Approaches to Understanding Catastrophe” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
