Meanings on Music in post NYE Mallacoota Firestorm, 2019.

Abstract

I. Context This thesis investigates disaster response systems within a single localised disaster event, i.e., the Mallacoota firestorm, New Year's Eve, 2019. The inquiry is a temporal spatial field study of a natural disaster's impact on the socio-cultural human sphere as viewed through the autoethnographic scope of a resident citizen musician. The firestorm and post-fire period is viewed as a Critical Event (C.E.) which primary node occurred on NYE 2019 and the weeks following. The paper's temporal focus will straddle the time period from the December 31st, 2019, to December 31st, 2023, and incorporates extensive (16 years) pre-fire normative infield experience, knowledge, data, and observations as a musician living in a regional remote Australian community, and 5 years post-fire in-field as an activist responder and researcher. In addition, the discussion straddles the CV19 long term crisis, ca. July 2020 to Sept. 2021. II. Abstract Not all systems of response are suitable for all spheres, elements, and temporality in disaster recovery and response scenarios. In particular, infrastructural organisation paradigms appropriate for Emergency Management (E.M.) such as unity, utilitarianism, and human managerial countenance may not be wholly transferable or appropriate in the social and cultural spheres. This countenance and overlay, arguably enhanced by Australian systems of cultural over-management, is also a part of a disaster response reflex, the impact of which, whilst seemingly secondary, subtle, and nuanced in comparison with the firestorm itself is nonetheless deeply experienced and felt by end users or citizens in the cultural and social space seeking to recover or to get back to pre-fire lived experiential equivalence, or other intentioned outcomes. Show more