Published works

In November 2008, I sat around a table at Warrandyte Primary School with a small group of 10-year-old students. I was interviewing them for my doctoral research on children's knowledge of vulnerability and resilience to bushfire in south-eastern Australia. The children told me what they loved about their beautiful bush suburb on the edge of the city: the trees, the river, the wildlife, and all the great places to play and explore. They also told me about the extreme bushfire risk. 'It's going to be a really bad bushfire season', one of them said. 'It's been a really long drought and the bush around here is really dry. Everything could go up. Just like that'. They all agreed that everyone needed to get prepared before summer arrived. A few months later, on 7 February 2009, the Black Saturday bushfires razed dozens of communities around Victoria: 173 people were killed, including 24 children. Hundreds of people were injured. Over 2000 homes were destroyed. Natural ecosystems were devastated. Everything went up. Just like that.