Edition 35
Surviving
- Published 6th March, 2012
- ISBN: 9781921922008
- Extent: 264 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
In an ever more populous, urbanised and media-saturated world, the rate and scale of disasters sometimes feels straight out of a doomsday movie. Yet behind the official inquiries and memorials of natural catastrophes, war, economic collapse and personal traumas, there are tales of renewal and hope, of those rebuilding lives and communities.
Drawing from official reports and historical records to make sense of things that couldn’t be known at the time, some of Australia’s best authors and journalists unravel the complexity and impact of natural and man-made disasters: Matthew Condon recreates the timeline and lessons from the 2010-11 Queensland floods; Sally Neighbour explores the conflicting narratives behind the Christmas Island tragedy; Sophie Cunningham uncovers the human cost of Cyclone Tracy; and Kathy Marks reports from Pitcairn Island.
Mara Bún finds ways to design sustainable recovery; Tom Griffiths calls for a new language of disaster prevention and management; Michael Gawenda investigates media responsibilities; Sidney Dekker searches for meaning in loss.
Lloyd Jones and Nic Low reflect on Christchurch’s faultlines; Ashley Hay, David Francis and Tom Bamforth find solace in mud, church choirs and aid; Jorge Sotirios reports on the Greek crisis; plus stories, poems and much more.
Surviving reveals the inspiration, myths and beliefs that sustain hope in the wake of crisis.
In this Edition
The path to resilience
GREENSBURG, KANSAS, IN America's agricultural heartland, is by no means a greenie enclave. It's tornado country. On 4 May 2007 an EF5 rated tornado – equivalent to a category 5 cyclone – tore through the area, levelling 95 per cent of the town and...
The language of catastrophe
THERE ARE ENOUGH Black days in modern Australian history to fill up a week several times over – Black Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays – and a Red Tuesday too, plus the grim irony of an Ash Wednesday. Yet we keep being...
Informed consent
'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying...
Disappeared
'On opening the bathroom door, I saw that the roof was off that part of the house and when I opened the door the ceiling of the room also disappeared; we then went to the toilet which was next door to the bathroom and...
Ear to the ground
'If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?' – Erich Fromm'He aha te mea nui? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.'– traditional Maori proverbCHRISTCHURCH. I GREW up in Christchurch. It was a quiet, peaceful place....
Europe’s Trojan horse
HESIOD MIGHT HAVE written the script. The 2004 summer was Greece's last Golden Age. The Athens Olympics focused the world's attention on a small but thriving country in the Mediterranean. In no other nation could the Olympic flame be lit and returned home, as...
When bystanders fail
WINTER IS A hectic time on Pitcairn Island: the arrowroot crop is ready for harvesting, as are the wild beans that sprout in profusion, clambering over bushes and twining themselves around tree trunks. The sugarcane, too, stands tall in the wind, and once cut...
The meaning of a disaster
'NO RUSH.'The obstetrician sounds dead tired through the phone.Shaving foam is clinging to my cheeks, and I bend the handle away from my face to prevent the white fluff from clogging the speaker holes. Behind me, a wet trail of hasty footsteps leads into...
How to survive an earthquake
THE NUMBERS ROSE slowly, like a cricket innings, and the commentators droned. There was little new information and the television news recycled the same repetitive pictures with a boxed scorecard showing a slowly growing body count. An apartment complex in Islamabad had collapsed: fifteen...
Passion in a time of war
'I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets. My overcoat too was becoming ideal. I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! And I was your vassal. Oh dear me! What marvellous loves I dreamed of!'– RimbaudEVENTUALLY IT WOULD be Miriam Papuashvilli, the...
No Jesus man
SISTER CLARA FORD comes at me with eyes deep as sonnets, the whites of them bright as her dress and the black of them black as the shine on her forehead. Fingers that reach forward and touch my pale brow, send me floating backwards...
Occupying armies
I KNOW THREE stories about the Moriori, a long-ago people who survived, in tatters, a determined attempt to eradicate them. The first goes like this: at a time that nobody can remember a group of men, women and children set off from the east...
My mother and murder
I'M MEANT TO be writing a book about murder, a particular murder. It took place five years ago in Lismore, northern New South Wales. The victim was a young woman who came from a small village in Germany. I was initially drawn to her...
Walking underwater
THEY WERE THERE for months, small shapes embedded in the mud at first, and then, as the mud was washed away, small shapes embedded in the grass. A few plastic toys; the shiny white squares of slide frames – some full, most empty; triangular...
Life and death on the high seas
ON A SULTRY mid-December day an Indonesian fishing boat manned only by its skipper chugged out of the port of Muara Angke, in north Jakarta, and headed west along the Javanese coast towards the Sunda Strait, the waterway that separates Indonesia's main island from...
Flooding plains, bursting rivers, human suffering
IN A SKYSCRAPER on Ann Street, Brisbane, behind the sandstone City Hall clock tower, and a stone's throw from a nub of granite at North Quay commemorating the founding of the capital by Surveyor-General John Oxley (who came 'in search of water'), are the...
Interview with
Mara Bún
Was there a reason you looked to Greensburg and New Orleans as post-disaster case studies for your piece above other locations?There are other examples around the world [of sustainability-focused renewal projects] on a smaller scale, but I think the Greensburg example in particular is...
Interview with
Tom Bamforth
How long had you been working in Pakistan before the 2005 earthquake struck?Six months. I was there beforehand, during and after, so I saw the earthquake response right from the beginning through to the end. Then, the way I probably reacted to it and...
Interview with
Sally Neighbour
Is this the first piece you've done for the Griffith REVIEW?Yes, I've been principally writing for newspapers for the last three years, but increasingly I've been writing magazine-length articles. I've been doing a lot of writing for The Monthly. I'm really much more interested,...
Interview with
Lloyd Jones
Your poem offers an honest, sensory recreation of the Christchurch earthquake. Were you in the city when it struck?I wasn't in the city. I live in Wellington half an hour's flight north, but within minutes of the February earthquake I had the television on,...
Interview with
Sidney Dekker
You've written many academic books in the past. How was it to take on a subject that was very emotional and personal?It took the courage to build [to write it] over more than a decade. I have wanted to give this a voice earlier...
Interview with
Matthew Condon
This is a really lengthy, epic piece of writing. How do you go about collecting the information and choosing what to include?It could have been longer. From the outset, I understood intuitively there's an entire book – a non-fiction book – in the [2011]...
Interview with
Colin Mills
Your story offers a vivid portrayal of Japan in the wake of the 2011 tsunami. Were you in the country at the time?The story is totally fictionalised. I grew up in Brisbane and later moved to Japan and lived there for about seventeen years....
Interview with
Kathy Marks
You lived on Pitcairn Island while reporting on the 2004 child abuse trials. What was it like to be so close to the subject you were writing about?KM: It was incredibly intense. I spent six weeks living in this little community of just fifty–...
Interview with
Michael Gawenda
You begin your piece with your personal experience of writing two stories that may have compromised their subjects. Did you feel you needed to reflect on those articles you'd written so long ago?Yes I did. Those stories [about a young Greek-Australian girl and a...
Ghost town
I DIDN'T WANT to go back to the town that wasn't there. It was three months after the wave receded, and the network wanted a report on conditions in the north. They sent me in the first time, just after the wave struck. I...
Babo
THE GREY LIGHT of the cold November afternoon, like tracing paper, was getting weaker as he reached the southern edges of the Arizona flea market on the northern plains of Bosnia. The fear of war was creeping like a slow and silent beast into...
The sleepers (from the Futures Museum)
resin, oils, human hair, camphor solution (potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, water, ethanol, camphor), fishing wireIn this display the artisthas wrapped life-cast figures in a hand-made net of fishing wire - Figurespainted with a one-hair brush and trueeven to the number of their eyelashes, the...
Auntie May, 1953
Twenty years ago last Augustthey had me running down the platform,howling in that flannel dress,those two from the ‘Protection' Board,the woman with the narrow mouth,the bloke there with his suit and glasseswho wished that he was somewhere elseand Jeanie screaming for me still,not likely...
Crime scene investigation
The car deaf as a hearsefrom the screaming weightof all that came before,we drive down a tarmac slashedby white line, white line,into the splintered lightof the woods waiting,like eternity, just outside town.We seek loam incestuouswith sodden bracken and leaf-rot,homing to the earth that gruelshair,...
Suddenly
Suddenly the place is overrun with Europeans.Suddenly there is a Maori in your backyard.Suddenly you need to shit but can't and need to hold on because suddenly where and what you grew up believing would always be there is no longer.Suddenly you are eyeing...
Featured Contributors
Kathy Marks
Kathy Marks is a freelance journalist and former foreign correspondent for The Independent. Her book on the Pitcairn child...
Tom Griffiths
Tom Griffiths is the author of The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft (2016) and emeritus professor...
Sophie Cunningham
Sophie Cunningham is the author of six books including City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need...
Matthew Condon
Matthew Condon is the author of ten novels and story collections, including A Night at the Pink Poodle, winner...
