In Conversation with Bhiamie Williamson

In Conversation with Bhiamie Williamson 

Season 4, Episode 8

Podcast Transcript

Scotia: Welcome to Creative Responders in Conversation, I’m Scotia Monkivitch from the Creative Recovery Network, and this is our monthly interview series where we hear from creative leaders, disaster management experts, artists and community members who are strengthening disaster management through creativity. 

A few weeks ago in Meanjin, Brisbane, a range of people representing all corners of the disaster management ecosystem gathered for the Australian Disaster Resilience Conference. Regular listeners will remember we spoke to Margaret Moreton from AIDR a few episodes back about the focus of the conference this year. 

A few days ahead of the conference – another gathering took place – it was the first of its kind and marks a significant step forward in disaster planning in Australia. 

The inaugural National Indigenous Disaster Resilience Summit brought together hundreds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous disaster planning representatives to share perspectives and discuss how to collaborate into the future.

Today, I’m speaking with the key person behind this gathering who is also one of the leading researchers into the impact of disasters on Indigenous communities – Bhiamie Williamson.

Bhiamie is a Euahlayi man from North West NSW. He is a graduate of the Australian National University and the University of Victoria in Canada. Bhiamie’s rigorous work over many years in this field has led to his current leadership of the National Indigenous Disaster Resilience Project – which sits within Monash University’s Fire to Flourish program.

It was a wonderful opportunity to sit with Bhiamie in person and we caught up at the end of the conference to reflect back on the Summit, the context of Bhiamie’s ongoing research and some of the broader takeaways from the conference. 

You’ll hear a little bit of background noise in this episode – after being indoors in conference rooms for most of the week, we decided to sit outside by the river on a beautiful Spring morning – so you’ll notice a bit of wildlife and the bustle of a busy morning at the Southbank precinct. 

Please enjoy my conversation with Bhiamie Williamson.

Scotia: Welcome to Creative Responders, Bhiamie. I’ll start by acknowledging that we’re on the edge of Maiwar the Brisbane River is such a beautiful spot here to be meeting you face to face on Jaggera Turrbal Country. I acknowledge their Elders past, present and future elders we have some beautiful engagements with here in Meanjin Brisbane. Where are you from Bhiamie, who are your people? 

Bhiamie: Yeah, So I’m Euahlayi, my people come from north west New South Wales and go over the border into south west Queensland. And that’s where I live, out in the little small community of Goodooga. My mother comes from Cloncurry and her mother comes from Normanton and so my mother’s family go into the Gulf country up into Queensland. 

Scotia: Big spread. 

Bhiamie: Big spread. Yeah, really diverse.

Scotia: So I’m speaking with you today at the conclusion of the Australian Disaster Resilience Conference where you were a presenter and earlier this week, on Monday you facilitated the inaugural National Indigenous Disaster Resilience Summit in partnership with Emma McNichol. This was founded through your work with Fire to Flourish. This has been a huge week for you, so I’m really grateful for your time to reflect on this and the ongoing work that you’re doing through that program. But I want to start by talking about the summit. It was a significant step in trying to further a kind of a greater dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners, particularly within the disaster management ecology. Can you share a bit of background around your fire to flourish work and how you came to come into that practice, but also then how it sort of formulated into this summit? 

Bhiamie: Yeah, sure. So Fire to Flourish is a really big transdisciplinary program initiated in the wake of the 2019-20 bushfires so its a partnership between Monash University and a number of philanthropic groups, and it’s really interested in, deep co-design processes with communities that have been impacted, that were impacted by the bushfires in particular, and how to design and deliver a community granting co-granting program that’s from the ground up, whilst also being supported by large infrastructure such as a university or large granting organisation. So within that context, my program of work is the National Indigenous Disaster Resilience Program. So Fire to Flourish also acts as a bit of an incubator for these larger programs of work within the disaster resilience space, identifying those gaps and really providing the initial support and investment to be able to turn ideas into programs. And that’s where the National Indigenous Disaster Resilience Program has come from. 

So the National Indigenous Disaster Resilience Program, which I lead, is really interested in identifying the gaps in our knowledge and understanding and how to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who have been impacted by disasters or who will be impacted by disasters and try to identify what needs to be done and triage in what order so that we can really try to provide some foundational support to make sure communities feel confident that they can manage disasters into the future. Because we’ve seen in 2019-20 in particular, that communities were left by themselves. So that’s our programme of work. It’s a research program, but it’s also got a number of activities occurring around it as well, around the core hub of research. And the summit that we held on Monday is one of those core activities. So it’s been really obvious to me over the last few years that I’ve been working in this space that there kind of isn’t a community of practice around this work around Indigenous peoples and disaster resilience specifically. There isn’t really a community practice, there isn’t really a community of practitioners of connected organisations really coordinating and supporting communities in, you know, with any kind of semblance of organisationand so we’re really interested in as part of the first steps to really try to foster that community around Indigenous disaster resilience. 

And that’s what Monday was all about, bringing together Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander leaders who have led through major disasters. So we had people from Tammie Bundle, who’s a former CEO of Mudgee Aboriginal counsel in East Gippsland talk about what happened there in the fires. We had rangers from Burketown, from the Carpentaria Land Council Aboriginal Corporation who led the flood response up in Burketown. 

Learning from their experiences, complementing it with Aboriginal people from non-government organisations. So we heard from the First Nations Recovery network at the Australian Red Cross, one of our Fire to Flourish partner communities, Aunty Helen Gerry spoke from she she’s from Tenterfield. She’s the program lead in Tenterfield is doing really wonderful work designing co-design granting programs in Tenterfield and Aboriginal staff from New South Wales, Aboriginal Affairs and Emergency Recovery Victoria. These are people really on the front lines, you know, doing the work in communities. And we also heard from a young PhD student, Amber Rose Atkinson, and some of her PhD research looking at the nexus between caring for Country resilient landscapes and positive health outcomes for communities. So it’s really to bring us to bring all of those people together with federal, state and territory emergency management and recovery agencies, with non-Indigenous research sectors, with philanthropists, with NGOs, with private industries and charities as well to listen, to learn, to get to know one another, and to just build the connections that we so desperately need. 

Scotia: It’s interesting, you noted in your other presentation that you were interested in getting married, not just being engaged. I thought it was a really lovely kind of framing – can you explain what you mean by that? Like, I’m assuming that from that you’re talking about deeper real relationship development and 

Bhiamie: So it’s a saying that I first heard from a fella called Bradley Muggeridge who’s an Aboriginal water scientist. Yeah. And it’s there’s always a talk of like how we need to engage Aboriginal communities, we need to engage Indigenous communities. Yeah, we just kinda sick of hearing it to be honest. So yeah, that, you know, the saying is we’re sick of being engaged, we want to get married. We’d actually like to have established relationships, functioning, healthy, respectful relationships, not seen as this add on tack on something you do that’s extra that might be inconvenient. Yeah. We need to be really deeply embedded in all of the processes, just as a matter of course. 

Scotia: And did you feel like it was just one day, it was very short time and we were very pressured for time because there’s so much conversation to be had, really. And that’s the baseline is you need time for these richer conversations to be able to find where connections lay. Like, what do you feel from that day? Where might we go from there? As someone coming into that room, what do I take from it for my personal work is one thing, but what do you feel is what we can collectively do to grow that? 

Bhiamie: Yeah so it’s the first time that we had it and we had it. The idea for the summit actually came out. It was a year in the making. Last year at the AFAC conference in Adelaide, there was a there was a morning tea hosted by Fire to Flourish and the Paul Ramsay Foundation. He’s one of our funding partners. Um, there was a breakfast and I chaired a panel and it was the only time at the conference or that week at all where there was just a space dedicated to listening to Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander speakers. Even for an hour there were about 60 people in the room. But everyone noted how wonderful was to sit in those spaces, to listen, to learn, to get connected. And, you know, we asked the question, why can’t we do this, in a bigger way. So that’s kind of where the genesis of the the summit came from. But I still really wasn’t sure how it would be received or how popular it would be or, you know, if there’s enough people really interested in this stuff. It turns out that there are a lot of people really interested in this stuff. We had to change venues a month out from planning because the numbers swelled so much and it was just the demand to come in was just too great, which was a really positive outcome in the end. And what I heard loud and clear throughout the day and especially towards the end of the day is just there’s a deep seated hunger and everyone acknowledges the need to have these conversations on a regular basis and that we’re only at the start of our journey towards understanding. So whilst they I wouldn’t I’d stop short and say that wasn’t a direct action coming from it but there was a very clear call to action that everyone heard loud and clear. 

Scotia: So this is one step in your bigger programme of activities that you’re doing. And you mentioned that you were going to be doing further research on Country with your different communities. Can you tell me a little bit about what your intent is with that? 

Bhiamie: Yeah. So over the next few years, our intention is to get out into various parts of Australia to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who have been impacted or are forecast to be – to really understand their experiences. What kind of strength already exists in the communities? A bit of social networking, mapping, understanding how the community sees itself, talking to them about their relationships, to the emergency management agencies there, and kind of how they understand the risk to them. Yeah, so trying to learn from best practice what worked well for communities who might have been evacuated in response to a fire or a flood, but also asking communities what would make it a positive experience or a safe experience you know, when these things inevitably happen again. And so we’re really interested to do that at large across the country, multi hazard – so communities you know, where a major hazard might be bushfire might be a flood, might be a cyclone or a heat wave might be king tides, you know, for some of the lower lying islands. And asking them like how they understand the nature of the threat, where does it come from and what goes into their decision making when they’re talking about, responding, evacuating and heaven forbid, relocating. 

Scotia: Yeah, that’s such a big part of it, isn’t it? You were saying when we were talking earlier, we were starting to have a conversation around the nature of disaster and whether we see whether we see things within a same kind of frame of reference, because we have a very clear delineated notion of disaster within a Western culture around kind of machinations of what we call the disaster management system. But potentially that’s not the case in a First Nations perspective is it? 

Bhiamie: No. Yeah, that’s right. And there’s stories that have come out about communities in Arnhem Land who, you know, have Ceremony around cyclones. Cyclones are just a natural part of the land and the climate and they are to be revered but not necessarily feared. Um, and western New South Wales where I’m from, where it’s floodplain country floods are as old as the land itself. It’s a natural part of the land and the land needs to flood to maintain healthy biodiversity and some of our kind of forest systems, some of our medicinal plants only grow in floodplains and so they actually require, you know, flooding on a regular basis to maintain those. 

Scotia: It puts it in a very different context resilience, doesn’t it? And in some ways we mark resilience through disaster management in terms of access to equipment blah blah blah and Indigenous cultures are often in those frameworks of resilience, are seen as very vulnerable, but by their pure existence, they show that they’re not, they’re deeply resilient. and this notion of connection and understanding a cycle rather than seeing it as a disaster is… 

Bhiamie: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, really, and this is one of the core parts of the research is really trying to understand the nature of the risks, the nature of disasters and how that might look different from an Indigenous perspective. You know, is it possible to move from understanding natural hazards as these big scary things to just a natural part of the landscape and natural part of what it is to be Australian, to live in this place. 

Scotia: And to de-escalate the tension and fright around an event so we become clearer in managing, you know, emotions and our psychology. 

Bhiamie: Absolutely, yeah. You know, wouldn’t it be something if a major fire or a major flood went through a community and they are exposed to that hazard, but it wasn’t a disaster, you know? 

We’re really interested to to understand what that might look like. Um, yeah, I think in the context of climate change and increasing hazards, but yeah, certainly it’s my suspicion that that’s how things, that’s how things have always existed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. 

Scotia: And it’s also. It goes to the nature of a transitory community. You go from place to place depending on notions of climate cycle and safety. 

Bhiamie: Yeah, safety and seasons and resources. So obviously we live in a very changed context these days, but some of the fundamental principles of how we relate to place and how we understand these events yeah, there’s healthy soil to be tilled there. 

Scotia: So the session you presented at the conference yesterday with Phoebe Quinn was around a collective piece of research that you were doing together, and that focuses on the set of knowledges and practices around Indigenous healing which you present not as a new concept. It’s been around with a long and rich tradition, varied and unique to each place and each sort of environment within which it’s evolved. Can you talk something about this shared philosophy with the various traditions and cultures that that the frames? 

Bhiamie: Yeah. So in that paper, we’re really interested to explore indigenous notions of healing and how they might be utilised or drawn upon to enhance mainstream disaster recovery processes. And so Indigenous healing, notions of healing yeah, they’re as old and as ancient as us and the land and the Australian landscape. And they have similarities across across groups. But every group applies it and understands, interprets it quite differently. And the difference naturally comes from the lands and waters that groups are that groups come from. 

We’re competing with a crow, pretty bloody noisy. Just go. Really? Yeah. Cause it just feels, like. 

So indigenous healing has, I guess that the function and performance of indigenous healing has a lot of similarities across groups, but its application is very different, Um, which makes sense right? Like, what you use for smoking out in western New South Wales where I’m from, it’s going to be very different for yeah, what you might use is smoking here, you know, in, in south east Queensland. Um, yeah, the ecologies are completely different and the land is really different and you’ve got different resources available and the cultures of the people would be very different as well. Um, so yeah, it’s the some of the, some of the high level shared philosophies of healing include, you know, like it’s they’re holistic approaches to wellness, it’s a, it’s a, um, I guess a treatment model that’s based on wellness, not illness. Treats people as a whole person and person is connected with the systems around them, places themselves within country and within their communities and you know, that it’s, it’s more about my understanding of it is there’s always been, it’s about, um, you know, making sure that the composite parts that make up who we are and how we function and orient ourselves in the world are balanced and healthy and well maintained. And so principles of like seeking to find where imbalance exists and rectifying that so… and that’s necessarily a communal process as much as it is an individual process. 

Scotia: Yeah, and so communally you look at that within the context of Country and therefore that relationship within a disaster management context is if you have balanced people, there’s more potentiality to be able to balance the impacts of what might brew climactically. 

Bhiamie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, and it’s just sort of, you know, like healing really engages with, you know, with the, you know, the self at a spiritual level as well, which is really deeply important for Aboriginal people. Like we’re really deeply spiritual people and communities of people. Western medical conventions just don’t account for that at all. You know, we don’t we it’s just not possible to really go to a hospital and get treated for any spiritual ailments and you know, they can be quite violent places for Aboriginal people. Not I’m not saying that there’s not a need for that. And certainly, you know, if you if you, you know, playing football and you bust your leg, you know, you do want to go and get people get help and support from people who understand how all of that system works. Um, but, um, but you’re not going to go there and get kind of feel a sense of spiritual renewal of, you know, cultural renewal. It just doesn’t trade that in for a lot of people. These things are, you know, how we maintain a healthy, healthy sense of self is one of the most important and, you know, important foundation blocks, you know, in what we consider wellness. So yeah, and a lot of it’s around obviously connection with country, connection with community, making sure that where we have healthy functioning, thriving relationships with the things that sustain us things and people that sustain us, but also, you know, that we maintain a healthy sense of self and self-determination is embedded. And, you know. People are always supported to maintain their dignity. 

Scotia: Yeah. And the vital role that your cultural and creative practices bring bring to that. And it’s kind of such a gift to us here at Creative Recovery Network trying to advocate for the deep role that culture and creativity have or need to have, you know, for us to be resilient. Yeah. And that we’re having to argue the place of creativity and arts engagement. 

Bhiamie: No, no, that’s exactly right. Creative spaces, are just they’re necessary, but they’re such an amazing way for people to understand, to explore, you know, what they’ve been through, what their needs are, and to be able to communicate those needs in ways that make sense to them and that’s a wonderful thing. 

Scotia: Something I’ve heard you’ve raised throughout the week by yourself and in with your colleagues is an awareness of this risk and challenge that this kind of intercultural exchange or the research framework that you’ve putting around can be potentially harmful or extractive. It’s kind of an issue that we’re all needing to understand what that means in the context of our First Nations community. How how do you see that within your practice as a researcher that we that we can work or that our communities can see the value of the kind of research that you’re trying to build. 

Bhiamie: Yeah. So it’s, you know, all the research that we do, it’s within a decolonial framing, central in decolonial framework research framework is understandings of history and of power and you know, power over, I guess. Um, so, you know, Indigenous peoples have been the subject of Western curiosities for millennia, you know, and, and our engagements with research right back from right back to the very first encounters between early explorers. And, you know, I think about some of the people like Burke and Wills travelling through the middle of Australia. Yeah. Um yeah. Some of the colonial quests into then, into Tasmania or then Van Diemens Land, getting through the Blue Mountains, all of these things depended upon local knowledge of the landscape and knowledge of waterholes, knowledge of safe passage, knowledge of resources that can be called upon. And so, you know, to see the generosity of Indigenous peoples being weaponised against them, which is a really perverse thing. But right from the start, relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples has been one of an extractive nature. What can we get from these people that will serve the purposes that, non-Indigenous people define and choose. And you see that, you know, for, for centuries now in research. So I guess decolonial, applying a decolonial lens over that just simply acknowledges that history, acknowledges that research takes place within a set of power structures and processes, and that if these are not named and understood and paid attention to, well then you it heightens the risk for deeply problematic research and for deepening the power differentials between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. But if you understand the process, you can actually turn it to address that as well. And that’s what we’re really interested in – how can you use research in a way that empowers? How can you use research in a way that advocates? How can you use research in a way that’s going to be useful to progress towards, you know like a kind of a sense of justice but justice from an Indigenous point of view. 

Scotia: And that the outcomes are embedded first and foremost for the power of First Nations people. And so in the context of your work, because such such important investigations, particularly when you’re talking about that healing practice. And so if it’s so strongly part of the big push in our colonial community, it couldn’t be seen to be easily adopted and transferred for our needs very immediately. But how do you in your work envisage kind of containing that and having it be this force for social justice change that you are identifying? 

Bhiamie: Sure. So we’ve already reflected on one of them and that’s, you know, being open to framing a problem. Like what? Like what is the nature of the problem rather than going in and saying the problem is fire, the problem is floods. You know, the problem is cyclones, the problem is heatwaves. So go in and ask communities, what’s the problem for you? You know, the when these events come, let’s just talk about them as events and let’s talk about the government of, you know, the spectrum of, you know, planning, preparation, response, recovery, whether that whether that spectrum even exists from an Indigenous perspective and just being open to how people conceptualise it and really be a willingness to engage with and understand what that means. I think that builds agency because it’s engaging with Indigenous worldviews, it’s engaging with their perceptions of reality, with our community’s perceptions of reality and telling the story how we want to want it told or in ways that make sense to us. I think that offers great, one it’s really interesting stuff from a research and intellectual perspective, but it also builds agency and challenges dominant discourses and, you know, around how we how we understand these things. Andhas the potential to really develop a new mode of thinking around, you know, what we might call disaster resilience, but might not actually be call that from an indigenous perspective. So, so respectful ways such as that and certainly privileging Indigenous voices, particularly Indigenous academics who publish in this new in disaster resilience and adjacent fields. 

Scotia: And seeing that the knowledge and leadership is bigger than just cultural burning which is always such a kind of focus but there’s such a bigger swath of contributions

Bhiamie: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s what we’re trying to highlight through the the healing paper that to really show just, you know, that Indigenous contributions to the climate challenge got far beyond cultural burning. Cultural burning is fantastic. And I advocate cultural burning and, you know, it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. It’s a great tool, and it’d be great to see cultural burning as the dominant form of managing Australia’s native landscapes into the future. But Indigenous contributions go much further than that. 

Scotia:Well, we spoke to Darren Moffit last year on this podcast, just as he was wrapping up his role as the Recovery Co-ordinator for Aboriginal Cultural Healing in Bushfire Recovery Victoria. We acknowledged in that conversation that it was the first time Aboriginal cultural healing has been introduced at a sort of systemic government level as one of the five pillars of recovery down there in Victoria. Do you think incorporating specific roles like that is a key part of the pathways, how do you see embedding these efforts or the the findings of your of your research or these bigger conversations in a strategic way being effectual? 

Bhiamie: Yeah, I don’t know if I’d say it’s a key part, but I would say it’s the start. And that’s where we’re at. We’re very much at the starting gate, so we’re just past the starting gates now. Following Monday, I felt like Monday felt like a, you know, the anticipation and then you’re leading up to it and then the gates open and then kind of like, we’re off. That’s certainly my sense of it. And the work that they do around the Aboriginal cultural healing, as the pillars of recovery in Victoria. It has provided a really rich source of experience, of knowledge practice that we otherwise didn’t have. There are similar programs occurring in New South Wales, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, they’ve got an Aboriginal Communities emergency management program. So this is where we need to be. We need to have these programs running designed by Aboriginal people in the public service, designing programs that they know to be positive and but also

Scotia: But also to have a long term vision. I think that one in New South Wales is it’s about ongoing investigation, not just incident specific. And that’s such a big issue, isn’t it? 

Bhaimie: Absolutely. But all of them across the board, whether in Victoria, New South Wales or elsewhere, they’re always built on a foundation of relationships and it put people in positions and these kind of coordination of facilitation positions. But the most important thing is the relationships that they have with communities. If um…without those relationships, you can’t have substantive discussions. Without those relationships, you can’t, you know, be the bada, you can’t kind of create the networked opportunities. You can’t develop resources that are aimed at supporting them if you don’t understand the community. So it’s the one thing that it’s all that all those programs that I’m aware of share, is a commitment and a real genuine desire to get in and establish those relationships and acknowledge that it takes time like it takes years to establish so that requires certainty. It requires certainty and funding and certainty and structure and organisational alignment within the public service agencies themselves. That might be hard to justify if you’re working on three year cycles or four year cycles, election cycles, or even shorter budget cycles. Yeah, these things will only work into the long term. 

Scotia: You know, you’re talking about relationships, but relationship is a key conduit. You can’t just see it as a passing investment. 

Bhiamie: Yeah, I’d say, from an Indigenous perspective. I think the thing that drives most of us in this space is a deep love of Country and a deep love of these lands and a deep respect for our own people, you know, have that have been here, that are still here. Yeah, they’re buried in the land. You know, they they’re, you know, they have grown into the trees, into the into the waterways, into the grasses, you know, like they are the soil. And you know, certainly what drives and sustains me, the deep, deep love of country and wanting to make it safe, enjoyable and sustainable, you know, for my kids, for their kids and for our people for the rest of time. 

Scotia: Because it could be seen as a real weight that’s a big journey for you to hold on your shoulders as a leader and as an embedded member of your family and community, how do you sustain yourself in that? 

Bhiamie: Yeah, that yeah, that’s the perennial question, right? You know, how do you look after yourself and yeah, walk with integrity and spirit and purpose but it’s a climb made easier by sharing it with really amazing people both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Yeah. there’s amazing people around this work. Everyone’s so bloody smart and enthusiastic and strong and have a very clear sense of purpose and very clear understanding of where we are all heading together and are really, really committed to supporting one another on that journey because these are very difficult things to talk about. They’re very difficult, upsetting things to really come to terms with and uncomfortable questions to ask. You know, we live in a time and place of deep uncertainty and high anxiety and we must tread with purpose, but we must tread carefully and with our friends. 

Scotia: Well, given the conversation that’s been happening this week and the first that you’ve offered onto the table, what do you hope that the attendees or the people that you’ve been engaging, in building relationships will take back to their own incorporate into their work? Or what would you like to see us do from here? 

Bhiamie: I think just having these conversations, like that’s where we need to start. You know, it’s really important to advocate for the, you know, Indigenous peoples in disaster resilience, making sure that in any discussions around sort of climate change and adaptation and response that Indigenous peoples are present. And yeah, just sort of, sharing the enthusiasm with everyone like, we really need to build support for this if that’s kind of where we are. Where we’re going is uncertain right now but it’s also that also makes it quite exciting, so whilst you know, we’ve got a compass and it’s pointing us in a certain direction, the path has yet to reveal itself. But we’re just really hoping to take a community of people along with us. And I think that’s the most important thing that we can we can do right now. 

Scotia: Well, thank you for the invitation to walk with you. It’s such a great, great, generosity that you offer. And I really appreciate that. I really appreciate you coming and talking with us today after such a big week. I hope you get some rest. Have a safe drive home and wish you all the best. And I look forward to walking that path with you. 

Bhiamie: Thank you very much. It’s been it’s been great. Thank you. 

Scotia: Thanks for joining me for Creative Responders in Conversation and special thanks to Bhiamie for generously making the time for this reflection after a very busy week. 

I encourage you to check out Fire to Flourish if you are interested in knowing more about this work and we will include a link in the show notes to their website. 

If you’re new to the podcast, you might also be interested in our documentary episodes where we deep dive into communities and projects that are harnessing the arts to strengthen disaster management. 

They’re all in the Creative Responders podcast feed alongside these In Conversation episodes if you scroll back you’ll find them all. There are several episodes looking at Indigenous perspectives on disaster management that you’ll be able to find by their titles. 

You can also find our full archive and transcripts and case studies related to each episode at our website – www dot creative recovery dot net dot au. 

This podcast is produced by me and my Creative Recovery Network colleague, Jill Robson. Our sound engineer is Tiffany Dimmack and our theme was composed by Mikey Squire.

We’ll be back next month with another conversation.