From Cyclones to COVID-19: Yolŋu perspectives on Disaster Management

For a number of years, Yolŋu researchers in Arnhem Land and the Ground Up team at Charles Darwin University, have worked collaboratively on research projects associated with disaster resilience and emergency management. This presentation draws together two threads from this work – stories arising from previous disaster management events and stories of the current situation surrounding COVID-19 and its impacts in East Arnhem Land. We present accounts delivered by a number of senior Yolŋu CDU researchers and lecturers, noting differing ways that emergencies are enacted within biomedical and traditional practices, as well as new forms of collective organisation emerging around disaster response. Drawing on these accounts, we suggest that it is productive to recognise resilience within these communities as a collective achievement involving not only local Indigenous people or emergency services, but which arises in appropriate forms of partnering and collaboration being fostered between the two.