'Catastrophic failure' theories and disaster journalism : evaluating media explanations of the Black Saturday bushfires

 In recent decades, academic researchers of natural disasters and emergency management have developed a canonical literature on ‘catastrophe failure’ theories such as disaster responses from US emergency management services (Drabek, 2010; Quarantelli, 1998) and the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (Perrow, 1999). This article examines six influential theories from this field in an attempt to explore why Victoria’s disaster and emergency management response systems failed during Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires. How well, if at all, are these theories understood by journalists, disaster and emergency management planners, and policy-makers? In examining the Country Fire Authority’s response to the fires, as well as the media’s reportage of them, we use the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires as a theory-testing case study of failures in emergency management, preparation and planning. We conclude that journalists can learn important lessons from academics’ specialist knowledge about disaster and emergency management responses.

Colonial girls' literature and the politics of archives in the digital age

In this paper we examine the politics of print and digital archives and their implications for research in the field of historical children's literature. We use the specific example of our comparative, collaborative project 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Cultures, 1840-1940' to contrast the strengths and limitations of print and digital archives of young people's texts from these three nations. In particular, we consider how the failure of some print archives to collect ephemeral or non-canonical colonial texts may be reproduced in current digitising projects. Similarly, we examine how gaps in the newly forged digital "canon" are especially large for colonial children's texts because of the commercial imperatives of many large-scale digitisation projects. While we acknowledge the revolutionary applications of digital repositories for research on historical children's literature, we also argue that these projects may unintentionally marginalise or erase certain kinds of children's texts from scholarly view in the future.