The trauma of climate-related disasters has long-lasting consequences for individuals and communities, with a documentary set in Australia’s “flood capital” – Lismore in northern New South Wales – providing many useful insights, reports Alison Barrett.
Alison Barrett writes:
As climate emergencies increase across the globe, an award-winning Australian documentary, Floodland, offers some important lessons for how communities can better be supported following catastrophic events.
The importance of having access to safe places to heal, listening to First Nations’ knowledge and understanding of Country and holistic healing, and prompt government support are key messages throughout the documentary.
Floodland follows several people in the immediate aftermath and year following the dual catastrophic floods in Lismore, northern NSW, on the Country of the Widjabul Wia-bal people, on 28 February 2022 (which peaked at 14.4 metres) and a month later, on 29 March 2022 (peaked at 11.4 metres). Five people died during these floods, which destroyed the homes of an estimated 2,000 people.
A screening was recently hosted in Adelaide, by Associate Professor Toby Freeman and Associate Professor Ania Kotarba-Morley, from Adelaide University’s Environment Institute, during Nature Festival. They also hosted the Climate, Community and Resilience Forum during the Festival to enable discussions on how climate and environmental change affect communities, places and mental health.
Freeman and Kotarba-Morley, with a team of researchers from Adelaide University, University of Canberra, University of Queensland, University of Sydney and Rosemary Wanganeen from the Healing Centre for Griefology, were recently awarded a Medical Research Future Fund grant for a project to develop a toolkit for community-scale mental health interventions to minimise psychological distress associated with climate change related loss.
Focus on prevention
“As climate breakdown intensifies, communities are increasingly experiencing psychological distress,” said Freeman, who is also Director of Research at Adelaide University’s Stretton Health Equity.
“People experiencing climate change-related distress must be able to access services, but health service provision alone is unlikely to be sufficient to address the escalating community and population mental health impacts of climate change and heritage loss.
“A much broader, whole-of-government response is required to avoid defaulting to individualised, medicalised approaches to mental healthcare, which would contribute to mental health services becoming increasingly overwhelmed by demand.
“Prevention and health promotion approaches are crucial to the long-term availability of mental health services to those who need them.”
These strong messages came through in Floodland, which highlighted complex and long-lasting mental health impacts following the catastrophic events.
Following the second flood in March, Harper, a local resident profiled in the documentary, said: “How often can you keep saying, Oh, it’s resilience. Oh, we’re increasing your resilience.
“People don’t want to be resilient anymore. We actually want safety, and we want to feel safe…I don’t want to live under threat for the rest of my life.”
Another Lismore resident, Eli, said after the second flood: “We’re all fucking traumatised. Some days I’m still on the roof, hearing the screams.”
“It’s never been this bad,” Eli said. “Of course we have floods. But not like this. This is next level. This is catastrophic.”
Another resident, Trent, said he no longer wanted to live in the area: “It’s got too much torment.”
Indigenous knowledge
Associate Professor Carlie (Caroline) Atkinson is a Bundjalung and Yiman woman and accredited social worker who founded the Northern Rivers Community Healing Hub following the floods.
The hub still operates today as a community health space, grounded in trauma-informed practices of First Nations Peoples.
“Trauma is stored in our body. The body bears the burden,” Atkinson says in the documentary.
She said the first response when there’s been a disaster is “I’ve got to get into the community and help them”.
“That first conception, certainly in my head, was a whole healing hub. Part of healing is finding a safe place. And the only place in Lismore that had some semblance of a home, or a safe place was here,” she said.
“As human beings, we live in this environment. And this environment is Country, and it’s a living, breathing thing.
“So, from an Indigenous perspective, one of the most important things is how we heal with the river and develop a relationship with the river.”
Social determinants
Watching Floodland through a public health lens, the impacts of the social and structural determinants of health in Lismore are evident.
Residents highlighted inequitable outcomes from the catastrophic flooding and how systems had failed them.
Harper said that North and South Lismore are the cheapest areas to live “because they were considered the most flood risk”.
“It really highlights the difference of where some people have that luxury to not feel like you’re ever going to get flooded. For me personally, I guess it makes me wonder whether I’ll ever be able to get out of it, get out of the flood plain, and be safe,” he said.
Prior to the 2022 floods, Harper was on a waitlist to raise his house through the Lismore voluntary house raising scheme. At that time, he was told it could be up to 10 years before his house was raised.
Floodland was released last year, and won the Sydney Film Festival’s Sustainable Future Award in 2025.
Jordan Giusti, Floodland director, said about winning the award: “I think it’s going to mean a lot to a lot of people up there in Lismore, and hopefully winning an award like this, for a film like this can spur some change.”
• Declaration from Croakey Health Media: We will be producing journalism around this MRFF-funded research project, with the details of these arrangements still to be officially announced.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on extreme weather events and health
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