Designing the Kurilpa Flood Library
28 September 2023
The Bureau of Meteorology have officially declared an El Niño, telling us to shift our focus once again to heatwave and drought.
During this year’s peacetime—between past flood and arriving heat—we’ve been designing the Kurilpa Flood Library.
With over 170 cards showing the different experiences and realities of flood impacts, the Library allows us to explore possibilities for life on the Kurilpa floodplain.
It’s also free to download and print, so we can share, talk and plan for future floods with others. Whether that’s among neighbours, support workers, colleagues, students, friends or family members.
At the end of the day, we know that a connected community is the most important tool for strengthening climate resilience.
Image: Children playing in the receding floodwaters, Brisbane, 1893. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
After building out the Library, I think its safe to say that we’ve well and truly moved beyond the novelty of floods. For some it might feel like a brief spectator event, quickly fading into a media-fuelled feel-good memory of shared adversity. But the Library’s stories and studies show that impacts are vastly disproportioned and increasingly so.
Starting from community connections
Resilient Kurilpa members, as representatives of different community organisations around South Brisbane, have played valuable roles in the development of the Library. Writing stories of their experiences and connecting me with key community Elders and knowledge holders.
At the beginning, I partnered up with co-researcher and disability advocate Uncle Willie Prince.
Over a series of meetings, we drew up a framework of cultural safety, knowledge and awareness, noting the Library should:
Contribute to long-term, ongoing learning on climate adaptation.
Promote cross cultural connections.
Acknowledge people’s participation.
Be fully inclusive and explore many points of view.
Be informed by residents with lived experiences.
Honour and make clear the differences between people’s experiences.
Uncle Willie Prince and I beside the Kurillpa Flood Library on noticeboards, at the Kurilpa Derby, 10 September 2023.
Sourcing knowledge for the Library
The Kurilpa Flood Library draws on over 100 reputable sources of local, cultural, and historical knowledge.
Brisbane floods have been comprehensively reflected on by local and nearby community members, historians, and journalists for a long time.
I pulled out key insights from numerous community reports, research publications, news articles, and government agency resources.
We gathered over 38 local stories from Kurilpa residents. Some residents have lived here for over 50 years (shout out Anne!), others just 4 years (shout out Scarlett!). In total they account for 224 years of lived experience in Kurilpa, including the 1974, 2011 and 2022 Brisbane floods.
Patterns emerged from all this rich knowledge and I sorted them into 11 thematic topics.
Drawing on her iconic and familiar ‘Houses of West End’ style, local artist Maeve Lejeune illustrated 11 icons to represent Library topics.
The Library goes to the Kurilpa Derby
We recently ‘test drove’ the Library at the Kurilpa Derby, printing out some of the cards and tacking them to rolling notice boards. In it’s 14th year, the iconic community event was originally inspired by a conversation between Aunty Mulinjarlie and Uncle Willie Prince about a derby for people on wheels.
It’s events like this, underpinned by Kurilpa’s culture of volunteering and inclusivity, that nurture our community’s capacity to respond to disaster events.
The Kurilpa Derby parade goes by as Resilient Kurilpa members, Mary Maher and Melinda McInturff, chat by the noticeboards.
During the event, Melinda (Resilient Kurilpa member and CommunityPlus+ Community Resilience Officer) spoke with over 50 people reading and taking photos of the Library.
Many were locals from the West End area and many more from across the city. All of them, describing their connection to flood.
Some people had helped during the flood clean up, had friends who had flooded or had flooded themselves. One person was studying town planning in disaster-prone areas.
Parents were talking to their children about the photos of flooded properties. One talked about their school friend who's house flooded like the one in the photo. A child talked about how you might lose all your toys in a flood, like his friend did, and you can give them toys of yours to make them happy.
A person with disability spoke about knowing what her risk was and that she wanted to create a P-CEP plan to prepare.
Some people had just moved to West End and wanted to know about where the floodwaters went to and the difference between 2011 and 2022 floods. Others had no awareness of flood risks at all. One lady spoke about how she didn't know that West End flooded and what it might mean for her.
Two people spoke about the Brisbane City Council and the way they arrived to arrange people for clean up, but they were several days too late.
Others mentioned the temporary local planning instrument (TLPI) and how crazy it was to approve development on the floodplain.
A tool for storytelling
At points in this project, I was very focused on how people’s flood stories would help other people, without thinking about the benefits of storytelling itself.
As one person pointed out to me, many people just want to be heard.
There’s value for storytellers in being listened to, as Nicole George wrote about after the 2011 Brisbane flood, and as we saw at the Derby.
Melinda reflected on the Library as a conversation starter. CommunityPlus+ are playing a key role in helping South Brisbane communities prepare for disasters. The Kurilpa Flood Library will act as a learning tool for our neighbouring Brisbane floodplain communities, at upcoming workshops, events, and markets.
There are many ways we can use the Kurilpa Flood Library.
At its core, the Library is an evidence base that we can mobilise however we choose.
It’s designed, not just to elicit conversations between concerned community members or prompt storytelling as a method for healing and learning.
It can also support us to have critical conversations in other spheres of power, planning and policy.
As one Resilient Kurilpa member reflected,
“My view is that groups and people earn the right through action and experience to speak on a topic like community resilience in the face of human induced climate change. The Kurilpa Flood Library, as a collection for stories and tools, gives us as an organisation that right.
We have worked hard to amplify our community's issues and hold their stories up as information for all to see.
The longer the project goes, the more action that is taken, the more stories collected, the deeper the understanding, the stronger that right becomes.
It is a virtuous circle. “
A tool for exposing connections, concerns and clashes
Just like the parent at the Kurilpa Derby, who related to an image of a house on a card, the Library helps us to see and think relationally.
Try putting a selection of cards on the ground and asking a group to choose an image or title that resonates with them. Ask them ‘why?’ (e.g. ‘it reminds me of ___’), then to read the card aloud, and reflect on any connections that come up.
We all have our own unique concerns, whether they’re valuable to others or not. Many cannot be ‘solved’ on their own, which is why we need help visualising the bigger system.
Another way of doing this is by picking two or more cards that tell a bigger story than our own.
For example, one of my favourite stories (albeit sad) is the making of Orleigh Park, documented by local historians Paul Granville and Dr Margaret Cook. I visit Orleigh Park nearly everyday and can hardly imagine life without this space.
Pairing this card with Uncle Willie’s story where he, along with other elders like 99-year-old Anne, expressed concern over losing space for floodwaters and children amidst ongoing urban development.
Can you see a clash? The vision of building a city on the South Brisbane floodplain has emerged again. But we’ve been here before.
As Dr Margaret Cook writes, in the late 1800s the idea of South Brisbane as a city centre was abandoned because of the flood risk.
“After the 1893 floods, some individuals took matters into their own hands to manage areas liable to flooding. Businesses and settlers moved to the less-affected north side of the city, which marked South Brisbane’s demise as an alternative city centre. Collective local action, rather than government initiative, prompted relocation in the Orleigh and Hill End estates.” (Cook 2019, 71).
One big clash: The map of Brisbane’s Inner City Strategy development precincts with the 1.0% AEP Brisbane City Council’s flood awareness map overlaid. The TLPI proposes building 90-storey residential buildings on low-lying land in Kurilpa. Concerns intensified: How will we safely evacuate people in wheelchairs when the lifts stop working or the building is surrounded by flooded roads?
What other connections, concerns and clashes does the Kurilpa Flood Library show?
Let us know if you find others or want to know more about the Library.
We’d love to hear from you.
Paula Hardie is a strategic designer, member of WECA & Resilient Kurilpa.