Scott McKinnon & Margaret Cook 
Disasters in Australia and New Zealand [PDF ebook] 
Historical Approaches to Understanding Catastrophe

Disasters in Australia and New Zealand brings together a collection of essays on the history of disasters in both countries. Leading experts provide a timely interrogation of long-held assumptions about the impacts of bushfires, floods, cyclones and earthquakes, exploring the blurred line between nature and culture, asking what are the anthropogenic causes of ‘natural’ disasters? How have disasters been remembered or forgotten? And how have societies over generations responded to or understood disaster? As climate change escalates disaster risk in Australia, New Zealand and around the world, these questions have assumed greater urgency. This unique collection poses a challenge to learn from past experiences and to implement behavioural and policy change. Rich in oral history and archival research,
Disasters in Australia and New Zealand offers practical and illuminating insights that will appeal to historians and disaster scholars across multiple disciplines.

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Foreword.- Introduction.- Ch 1. “Best forgotten”: Black Saturday’s difficult stories.- Ch 2. “A bit more respect for nature”: Migrant Voices in bushfire environments.- Ch 3. “I mean they build a memorial for people who die in war and it was like a warzone”.- Ch 4. “Shaken but not stirred”: the aftermath of disasters.- Ch 5. Deluges, Crocodiles and Water Scarcity.- Ch 6. Rise and Fall of a Disaster Policy: Black Saturday and Prescribed Burning Targets.- Ch 7. Decolonising settler hazardscapes of the Waipa: Māori and Pākehā remembering of flooding and fires in the Waikato 1900-1950.- Ch 8. An unnatural disaster: When disaster histories broach a heated subject Conclusion: The Future of Disaster Histories.

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Dr Scott Mc Kinnon is a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong. He is a historian and geographer with a research background in disasters research, geographies of memory, and histories and geographies of sexuality. Scott is the author of
Gay Men at the Movies: Cinema, memory and the history of a gay male community (2016).





Dr Margaret Cook is a Lecturer in History at the University of the Sunshine Coast and Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University and University of Queensland. A freelance historian for many years, her research interests include disasters, water, climate and the cotton industry. Margaret is the author of
A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods (2019).