With ‘piecemeal’ funding, these workers are preparing Brisbane for the next flood

Long, grassy parks stretch around its wide streets, connecting football fields and large blocks of netball courts. If you know this city, you know these places go under water every time.

Sandiellen Black and Dr Paula Hardie are at the front line of preparing the community in this flood-prone part of the world for the next deluge.

Their headquarters are a humble neighbourhood centre called Benarrawa. The word is the Indigenous name for the creek a few blocks away – better known as Oxley Creek – which lapped at the centre’s door in 2022, and well up over its windows in 2011.

Black works 12 hours a week as a community development co-ordinator, and Hardie is employed two days a week as a neighbourhood resilience worker.

Together, they help seven neighbourhoods develop disaster plans, but the work doesn’t come easy.

“Piecemeal” is how Black describes the money the centre receives, adding that Hardie is on a 12-month contract funded through three separate streams.

Under the formal framework for disaster management, councils oversee local planning. But Hardie says this is a problem because Benarrawa’s LGA – the Brisbane City Council – is massive.

In 2024, the Benarrawa team knocked on Jessica Tovey’s door – upstream in the suburb of Oxley – looking for volunteers.

“I’m pretty much all in now,” Tovey told this masthead this week.

She has since set up the Oxley Creek Flood Action Group, which meets once a month, and has surveyed the neighbourhood, finding out what people will need when it floods, and what they can offer to the community.

She now has a list of “who has chainsaws, who has spare bedrooms and can accommodate people, who has space on their land for cars on higher ground, [and] who has skills we can put to use so we’ll be able to match people together”.

Tovey introduces herself to any new people moving into the area, survey in hand – and is surprised how often people say they don’t know it floods.

“Either they don’t know or they don’t know the extent, so I make sure I get around to everybody in the neighbourhood who either buys or rents,” she said.

Margaret Cook – a research fellow at Griffith University’s Australian Rivers Institute and the author of A River with a City Problem – says groups like Benarrawa and their networks are integral to ensuring the city is ready for the next flood.

“They keep an eye on their community. They learn who’s vulnerable. They learn who is getting older. They learn who has a disability. And that’s an ongoing responsibility,” she said.

Cook is studying the relationship between community groups and the gover