#12 Stories, Place, and Dishwashers: Rethinking Community Resilience with Gretel Evans

Can a dishwasher be an indicator of community resilience?

In this episode of It Depends, Matt speaks with historian and social researcher Dr Gretel Evans about the powerful intersections between storytelling, place, disaster, and community resilience. Drawing on her work in oral history, migration, and environmental history, Gretel shares how her research into floods and bushfires led her into large-scale, place-based recovery through the Fire to Flourish program at Monash University.

Gretel touches on the upcoming Community Disaster Resilience Capability Framework, outlining six key capabilities that support stronger, more connected communities before, during, and after disaster. The conversation explores why community resilience is collective, not individual, and how unexpected infrastructure - like community dishwashers- can play a vital role.

The conversation also dives deep into the role of storytelling and oral history in understanding resilience. Gretel reflects on the ethical dimensions of interviewing, data ownership, trauma, and the potential for community-owned story archives as a future pathway. This is a rich and thoughtful conversation about how history, memory, and lived experience shape the way communities recover, adapt, and imagine their futures—and why numbers alone can never tell the full story.

 

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Check out past episodes on Indigenous Data Sovereignty (#3 with Skye Trudgett) and Complex Adaptive Systems in Emergency Management (#8 with Todd Miller) to explore threads that came up in this episode.

 

Links to resources mentioned or relevant to the episode:

• Oral History and Folklore collection at the National Library of Australia
• Oral History Australia - if you want to learn more about oral history 
• Fire to Flourish Knowledge Centre - the Toolkit and other materials will be posted here when they are publicly available
• A systematic review on co-design, place-making and social capital that Gretel contributed towards.