Keywords

1 Introduction

When the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements was announced in 2020, after the catastrophic bushfire events in Australia in 2019–2020, then Australian prime minister Scott Morrison said: “we need to look at what actions should be taken to enhance our preparedness, resilience and recovery through the actions of all levels of government and the community, for the environment we are living in” (2020). One of the three priority areas announced in the same media release was “Improving Australia’s preparedness, resilience, and response to natural disasters, across all levels of government” (Morrison, 2020). Preparedness was a key inclusion in the terms of reference, and the prime minister’s initial announcement included community preparedness as part of the overall brief.

However, our analysis of the recommendations from this inquiry, and five other bushfire and flood inquiries commissioned between 2020 and 2022, revealed that preparedness has been less of a focus than resilience, recovery and response. When preparedness was noted, it was in large part focused on government (federal, state, and local) and government bodies (e.g., emergency services and government agencies) with relatively less focus on better preparation of ordinary citizens and communities. While community preparedness is specifically mentioned in the terms of reference of several of these inquiries, it remains aspirational, largely unexplored.

Maguire and Hagan claim that “a creative community may learn from the experience and teach its members how to better prepare for future disasters…so that higher levels of post-disaster resilience are attained” (2007). Yet, to a remarkable extent, art, culture and creativity were largely absent from the inquiries’ recommendations. While creative practice can and does play an important part in a community’s recovery process, it can also play a key role in preparedness.

This chapter is based on an analysis of inquiries responding to a series of major catastrophic events—bushfires in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria in 2019–2020, and the 2022 floods in NSW—in addition to the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements reporting at a national level. Along with heatwaves and cyclones, flood and fire are the deadliest hazards in Australia (Anderson-Berry et al., 2018). According to consultancy firm Deloitte (2017), the average cost over the ten years from 2007 to 2016 was $18.2 billion per year. An update in 2021 stated that natural disasters cost $35 billion per year with an expected increase to $73 billion per year by 2060. Deloitte (2021) claims that 50% of those costs are likely to be caused by bushfires and 31% by floods.

Australia’s approach to emergency management comprises four phases—“prevention/mitigation, preparation, response and recovery” (Jenkins, 2015). Our analysis of inquiry recommendations showed a clear focus on response and recovery. Research has shown that Australian governments have a reactive approach to preparedness (de Vet et al., 2019) and national “resilience strategies in Australia (and elsewhere) heavily skew federal, state, and territory disaster spending towards [response] and recovery, rather than mitigation measures taken in advance of disasters to decrease or eliminate social and environmental impacts” (de Vet et al., 2019). De Vet et al. argue that Australia focuses on post-disaster in its spending priority and pre-disaster funding is limited with preparedness for households primarily focused on insurance—what they call “the politics of insurability” (2019).

Dwyer notes how natural disasters challenge government and industry organisations but stresses that communities are deeply affected and that “[g]overnment, voluntary and private organizations and communities all play a vital role in the [prevention] of, response to and recovery from bushfire” (2022). However, as argued by Cole et al. (2018), there is little of substance in inquiries that targets communities, and, as Dwyer also notes, research into public inquiries has shown that “there is little new that emerges from their deliberation” (2022) with similar findings and recommendations occurring across multiple inquiries.

The following includes a literature review of scholarly research that has examined recent inquiries in relation to fire and flood events and those that used recommendations as the primary source of data. We then review the relatively sparse literature on the role of art and creativity in relation to extreme events, followed by a discussion on how the recommendations in the reports we assessed deal with preparedness, community, arts, culture and creativity. First, though, we explain the methodology and research design we employed.

2 Methodology and Research Design

In an initial search, we identified inquiries carried out in the last 15 years but then chose to focus on the most recent ones, given that the extent and severity of the fire emergencies of 2019–2020 are generally accepted as having heralded a new quality of climate-induced natural disaster. Of these inquiries, we chose those that included recommendations.

Recommendations from these were analyzed (abbreviations in brackets are reflective of reference in the following discussion):

  • Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements Report: established February 2020, report released October 28, 2020 (ROYAL COMM).

  • ACT Emergency Services Agency Operational Review of the Bushfire Season 2019–2020: commissioned May 2020, report released August 20, 2020 (ACT FIRE).

  • Final Report of the NSW Bushfire Inquiry: established January 2020, report released July 31, 2020 (NSW FIRE).

  • Inquiry into the 2019–2020 Victorian Fire Season—Phase 1 report: commissioned January 2020, report released July 31, 2020 (VIC FIRE 1).

  • Inquiry into the 2019–2020 Victorian Fire Season—Phase 2 report: commissioned January 2020, report released July 30, 2021 (VIC FIRE 2).

  • NSW 2022 Flood Inquiry full report: established March 2022, report released July 29, 2022 (NSW FLOOD).

The documents were imported into NVivo, and thematic analysis was employed as the analytical framework. A thematic approach enables a researcher to build “a comprehensive, contextualized, and integrated understanding” (Bazeley, 2013) of key themes in the data. While the analysis was designed to allow themes to emerge from the coding, we also included words that are key to our analytical focus, including response, recovery and preparedness as well as individual, community/communities, culture, art and creative/creativity. A further word search was carried out of the entire documents, not just the recommendations, for art, culture and creativity to see if there were any references in the reports themselves (outside of the recommendations) to any of those terms.

3 Literature Review

3.1 Inquiries and Recommendations

Eburn and Dovers’ overview of official Australian inquiries noted that since “1939, there have been over 30 inquiries into wildfires and wildfire management and at least another 14 into floods, storms, other natural hazards, and emergency [management] arrangements” (2015). Since then, natural disasters have continued and so have inquiries. The scholarly literature analysing disaster inquiries has examined how to enhance resilience (Goode et al., 2012), how effective inquiries are (Eburn & Dovers, 2015), common themes in recommendations (Cole et al., 2018), how recommendations influence policy (Mintrom et al., 2020) and how to make sense of catastrophic events with formal inquiries (Dwyer, 2022; Dwyer & Hardy, 2016; Dwyer et al., 2021). Other research has focused on missed opportunities from inquires (McGowan, 2012), insurance as a key area recommended for preparedness (de Vet et al., 2019) as well as the development of Australia’s hazard warning system (Anderson-Berry et al., 2018), which, according to Anderson-Berry et al., represents “a transition from a crisis response model to one of community preparedness, disaster mitigation and more recently, disaster risk reduction” (2018).

Cole et al. (2018) contend that managing to achieve better outcomes is a key aspect of reviews and inquiries into disasters and emergencies in Australia. Reviews and inquiries assist the emergency management sector, the government and individuals to prepare, respond to and recover from disasters and have a common objective: “to identify the cause and consequences of disasters and recommend future practices for better outcomes. In some cases, they attribute responsibility or blame for failings” (Cole et al., 2018). Cole et al. (2017, 2018) conducted research into whether recommendations from disaster inquiries were valuable for Australian emergency services and useful as a national information resource. They examined 1336 recommendations from 55 major event inquiries between 2009 and 2017 to discover if there were recurrent themes and found 32 common themes in the recommendations, ranging from better coordination between agencies to better community warnings and communication, to government’s role, funding, volunteers and personal responsibility (see Cole et al., 2018 for a full list). Community education and preparedness was a recognised theme and included in 25 of the examined inquiries with 58 recommendations overall, as was pre-fire season preparation in 16 inquiries (with 30 recommendations). Cole et al. also note the theme personal responsibility, which covers the emerging policy of shared responsibility, but found that there were few recommendations that targeted communities and community members. It is also telling that there is no mention of creativity, culture or creative arts either in preparing for catastrophic events, which is our area of interest, or in response and recovery.

In 2012, McGowan claimed that there was a “serious gap in disaster management policy in Australia” (2012) because the focus was on response and recovery and not across the full spectrum of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery. McGowan further claimed that there is a disproportionate allocation of resources to response and recovery with prevention and preparation “badly neglected” (2012). This claim is reiterated by de Vet et al., who state that only “3% […] of disaster spending [in Australia] goes towards mitigation” and “[m]ost governments prioritize disaster response and recovery over risk reduction and mitigation” (2019). Despite our 2019–2022 corpus of inquiries including preparation in their terms of reference, clearly the primary focus is on response and recovery in their recommendations. Furthermore, regardless of the increasing understanding of the value of arts, culture and creativity in enabling recovery from catastrophic events, these concepts are rarely included in relation to preparing a community.

3.2 Arts, Culture and Creativity

There are several organisations whose work underpins the role that arts, culture and creativity can play, and currently plays, in preparing for, dealing with and recovering from extreme flood and fire events in Australia. For example, Creative Recovery Network (CRN) are dedicated to “collaborate with the creative sector—individual artists, arts workers, and arts organisations—to support the ongoing activation of creative programs in disaster preparedness, response and recovery” (2023). Local Government NSW (LGNSW) have collaborated with CRN and others to form a Creative Recovery Taskforce to “provide recommendations on how the creative arts can assist with disaster management” (LGNSW, n.d.) through all phases of disasters, including preparedness. The Creative Recovery Taskforce’s fourth recommendation specifically states:

Formally recognise creative practitioners and culture and the arts, as an essential component of Australia’s disaster management capacity and a key component of the nation’s preparedness, recovery and resilience capability, delivering trauma informed practice and helping people prepare for and cope with disasters. (LGNSW n.d.)

Other organisations in Australia that have a keen interest in how arts and creativity can play in extreme fire and flood events include Regional Arts Australia, Creative First Aid Alliance, Australian Museums and Galleries Association, Firesticks Alliance Indigenous Corporation, Flood Diaries Citizen Storytelling Project, GLAM Peak and the National Association for the Visual Arts. All these bodies made submissions to some of the 2019–2022 inquiries on which we are concentrating.Footnote 1 These very valuable bodies, though, like their inquiry submissions, tend to focus on resilience and recovery. There is a relative lack of focus on preparation, especially at the grassroots community level. When the focus is on preparation, it is often with respect to local cultural infrastructures and assets rather than broad-based cross-sector and community readiness.

Internationally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States acknowledges the role that emergency workers and managers take in preparing communities for disasters, but they also acknowledge the important role that artists can play: “[It continues with] exploring how we can partner with artists to communicate risk and building a culture of preparedness across the nation” (2020). FEMA claims that, for example, community art can generate meaningful context when educating about and communicating risk. Other forms noted by FEMA include music, performance art, theater and placemaking. West, Balog-Way and Phillips, in a blog on the World Bank Blogs site, note:

Art can inspire people to think about disaster risk and resilience in ways that science, data, and numbers cannot…Poetry, painting, photography, music and performances can all tell stories across cultural barriers, building empathy for communities who are facing increased risk from hazards and climate change. Emotions evoked by art can convey a sense of urgency for preventing and preparing for disasters. (2019)

Scholarly research in this area skews toward a stronger focus on art as part of the recovery process as distinct from preparation. And art in this sense includes music, drama, poetry, creative writing, photography and visual arts such as painting. Researchers have investigated the importance of art in healing from disasters (Green, 2021; McManamey, 2009; Scarce, 2022; Smilan, 2009; Van Laar, 2022), as a tool of resilience and recovery (Garavaglia, 2019; McManamey, 2009), improving health and well-being (Green, 2021; McManamey, 2009), maintaining local knowledge and the history of a community (McManamey, 2009) and community building (Brien & Hawryluk, 2011; Garavaglia, 2019; Van Laar, 2022). The value of art therapy for children after disasters is a key research area (for a summary, see Haring et al., 2018 and Smilan, 2009). Joseph Scarce (2022), in Art Therapy in Response to Natural Disasters, Mass Violence, and Crises, argues that the key is “the nourishment that art-making provides for continued healing and connection to the creative flow process” (2022) and “we bring with us hope through art. We bring communities together and show that there are others who are with them in crisis and that they are not alone” (2022). While Scarce’s collected chapters discuss devastating disasters and the value of art therapy in building communities, the common thread is that that value is manifest in the recovery phase.

McManamey (2009) reinforces this perspective, examining how a book that documented people experiencing the 2006 fires in East Coast Tasmania played a role in the resilience and healing of community members. The book included images, stories, reports, artworks and poetry. McManamey conducted interviews with community members, volunteers, service providers and politicians about their sense of the importance of the book. Several key themes emerged, and, although the majority were concerned with response and recovery, there were two that speak to our argument: support for future preparedness and attention drawn to “non-preparedness.” The first noted how “examples within the publication supported preparedness and enabled community members—empowering the community” (2009). McManamey also found that a major outcome of this community-led initiative was “future preparedness—ongoing motivation and interest in communities to attend further sessions on safety” (2009). While primarily focused on recovery and healing, McManamey notes how written data and visual expression can also “inform on issues pertaining to a number of areas of recovery policy and preparation for future events” (2009).

Researchers such as Haring et al. (2018) have examined preparation of children for natural disasters through education. They note how the Australian curriculum now contains disaster education but argue for an arts-based curriculum, which includes poetry, and visual and performing arts, as a more effective and age-appropriate way to prepare children.Footnote 2

4 Findings

4.1 Preparedness

The examination of the recommendations from the six reports showed a clear imbalance between preparedness, response, and recovery, with preparedness demonstrably lower. Additional examination further found that preparedness recommendations focused on expectations for, and success of, preparedness by government and government bodies, with much less attention for communities or individuals. This might be explained away by the fact that the primary audience of the inquiry reports were governments, but that is a weak argument when it is considered that community preparedness and even empowerment occurs often in the general language of official reports. Three of the reports’ recommendations had codes that related to preparedness_individual and preparedness_community: the Royal Commission (both), the NSW bushfire inquiry (community), and the NSW flood inquiry (individual). When preparedness was applied to individuals and communities, it was primarily in the form of what the government could do rather than what the community or individual could do:

  • Educating the public about evacuation, essential services, sheltering facilities, and hazard reduction.

  • The government building resilience.

  • The government providing comprehensive information.

  • Ensuring the public understands the risks of living in certain areas.

4.2 Community Preparedness

The Royal Commission did, however, include a chapter on community preparedness called “Community education.” This chapter was seven pages long (0.01% of the total 594-page report) and generated one recommendation out of 80:

Recommendation 10.1 Disaster education for individuals and communities

State and territory governments should continue to deliver, evaluate and improve education and engagement programs aimed at promoting disaster resilience for individuals and communities. (ROYAL COMM, 2020)

This chapter included suggestions on joint responsibility for preparedness, including understanding hazards in their immediate area, protecting themselves and understanding the recovery process as well as the need for comprehensive and ongoing government education programs:

Education is key to informing and empowering communities. Education and engagement programs should account for changing risk profiles and community demographics to ensure that they are fit for purpose and support individual and community resilience to natural disasters. Programs must have all of the information people need to make informed decisions. (2020)

It should be noted that other reports did include references to community, but it was typically minor or in relation to response or recovery. Some examples include liaising with Indigenous communities (NSW FLOOD; NSW FIRE 1), use of social media during disasters (NSW FLOOD), ongoing personal and community effects (NSW FLOOD), community-led recovery (VIC FIRE 2), understanding fuel management (VIC FIRE 1), responsibilities of the community (VIC FIRE 1), building resilience in communities (NSW FIRE), community warning systems (NSW FIRE) and community volunteers (NSW FIRE).

But there is also a discernible shift in the most recent inquiry into the NSW floods:

Preparedness is discussed in relation to emergency management and our natural and built environment. But an important component of preparedness is at a personal or family level. Failure to prepare at this level makes preparations at other levels more difficult and expensive. Targeted public and school education is required to build intergenerational knowledge and enable whole families to engage in disaster readiness. (Fuller & O’Kane, 2022)

It stresses preparedness under uncertainty, which means “Australia’s research [capacity] is critical to improving our ability to imagine and predict what may happen in the future” (Fuller & O’Kane, 2022), and notes, radically, that “community was often more effective at saving community than Government” (Fuller & O’Kane, 2022) and recommends a Community First Responders Program.

4.3 Art(s)

Art did not show up in any of the recommendations, although it was noted several times through a keyword search of the whole document corpus. For example, VIC FIRE 1 noted how cultural burning had promoted “the conservation of all cultural sites in the landscape—for example rock art and canoe trees” (2020) as an example of managing the land or preparing. VIC FIRE 2 discussed funding “new infrastructure such as playgrounds and art murals” (2021) as positive for communities and a way to assist in recovery while also noting CRCs [Community Recovery Committees] and community groups told IGEM [Inspector-General for Emergency Management] that “funding resilience and preparedness projects was more difficult, as this work does not tick a recovery box on an application form” (2021). NSW FLOOD mentioned that creative arts was one way to rebuild economically but, again, as part of the recovery process. The ROYAL COMM included Indigenous art sites as part of Australia’s heritage places, and NSW FIRE noted Indigenous rock art in the Blue Mountains as a high-value cultural asset that needs to be managed in preparation for future bushfires. The ACT FIRE report had no mention of art.

4.4 Culture

There was little mention of culture, in its narrow definition as “artistic and intellectual activities” (Williams, 1981), in the recommendations. However, if we take Raymond Williams’ wider definition into account, with culture defined as “a distinct ‘whole way of life’” (Williams, 1981), there are several mentions of Indigenous cultural practices, particularly instigating cultural burning, and therefore in preparing, as well as within workplaces and organisations. Culture, in this more holistic sense, was noted in both the recommendations and the keyword search.

Culture was a theme in relation to workplace culture (ACT FIRE, VIC FIRE 1, VIC FIRE 2), the “Australian way” of volunteering (ROYAL COMM, NSW FLOOD), the culture in emergency organisations (NSW FLOOD, ROYAL COMM, NSW FIRE) and Australian identity (ROYAL COMM). It was also noted in how cultural assets were protected (ACT FIRE) during the response phase. Culture was also used in a vague “coverall” statement as one of the outcomes for the Victorian government’s recovery programs: “Victorians are connected to people, places and culture” (VIC FIRE 22021). In regard to preparedness, support for tourism businesses to prepare was also mentioned in the NSW FIRE recommendations.

However, it was in Indigenous cultural practices that culture was primarily noted through the keyword search. The VIC FIRE 2 report included a chapter, “Aboriginal culture and healing,” and bluntly summed up the importance of Indigenous culture: “That past influences the experience of Aboriginal people during emergencies and requires consideration when using the concepts of Aboriginal culture and healing to underpin strategies for their recovery” (2021). While this quote may seem to be about response and recovery only, this chapter also includes a clear mandate for preparedness:

In 2021 the Aboriginal Community Mitigation and Crisis Management Grants were made available to increase the preparedness and resilience of Aboriginal communities to emergencies. There are two streams of funding; one to support Aboriginal organisations to undertake emergency planning and mitigation initiatives on bushfire-affected Country, and the other to support projects that improve Aboriginal infrastructure in a way that increases preparedness for future emergency events. (2021)

The Royal Commission also included a chapter called “Indigenous land and fire management” that recommended engaging with traditional owners to manage the land.

Regarding other forms of Indigenous culture, recommendations in the NSW FIRE, NSW FLOOD and ROYAL COMM specifically noted the importance of engaging with traditional owners to understand land and fire management in preparedness, response and recovery. Other recommendations included engaging with local Aboriginal communities “in emergency planning and preparation” (NSW FIRE, 2020; NSW FLOOD, 2022) and to provide appropriate support during evacuations (NSW FIRE; NSW FLOOD). Other recommendations included “an Indigenous led cultural landscape restoration strategy for the Northern Rivers” (NSW FLOOD, 2022), Indigenous stewardship practices and representation within government bodies.

4.5 Creative/Creativity

Creative and creativity were mentioned once in the NSW Flood Inquiry and it was in relation to a submission where a community member discussed the difficulties of relocating from Lismore and it was to do with recovery:

I adore Lismore and this region generally and believe that it is truly unique and I cannot imagine wanting to live anywhere else but within the broader community here. They have carried me through extremely difficult times with creativity, much laughter and incredible love & generosity and l feel that I have an important place & role here within the Northern Rivers which l do not wish to lose. (NSW FLOOD, 2022)

There were no other instances of creative and creativity in any of the other inquiry documents and none in the recommendations.

5 Conclusion

We conducted a thematic analysis of recommendations from recent government inquiries into catastrophic Australian bushfire and flooding events. A key aim was to discover how important preparedness is within these inquiries but also to find out the role that arts, culture and creativity can play in preparing communities for catastrophic events. What we found is that the inquiries were skewed heavily toward government and government agencies with considerable fewer recommendations focused on communities’ own resourceful agency. With several organisations and some research acknowledging the importance of arts, culture and creativity to prepare communities, it was also notable that the recommendations had little to no mention of these concepts. However, culture, when defined as “a whole way of life” (Williams, 1981) rather than “artistic and intellectual activities” (ibid.), was recognised, particularly First Nations cultural practices.

This chapter has pointed to a dangerous gap in official policy responses to fire and flood emergencies in Australia. Given the lack of focus on preparedness and an almost complete lack of focus on the role that arts, culture and creativity can play in dealing with climate emergencies, it is clear that the case to achieve a step change in preparedness to address the accelerating climate crisis needs the kinds of coordinated approach fusing arts and advanced technology canvassed elsewhere in this book. Without the ability to imaginatively preview what near-future climate shocks could look and feel like, it is almost impossible to believe their likelihood let alone prepare, especially in frontline communities. This presents an opportunity for Australian creatives to partner with scientists and technologists in order to transform disaster depiction from communicating a reactive observation of the aftermath to socialising visceral interactions that sparks the imagination and optimises readiness. Thereby, the community can become an active protagonist safely rehearsing life-saving responses in real time. An approach that focuses on longer-term engagement, using immersive visualisation and associated strategies, with communities of practice ranging from experts in emergency management to first responders embedded in frontline communities, will help to address dangerous gaps in official policy.