Kurilpa Flood Library

Hi, my name is Paula Hardie. I’m a Kurilpa resident, graphic designer and volunteer with the West End Community Association.

I'm also a member of Resilient Kurilpa, a network of community representatives who work with flood-affected residents to strengthen resilience on the Kurilpa Peninsula of West End, Highgate Hill and South Brisbane.

Resilient Kurilpa are raising money to build an online library of Kurilpa flood knowledge as told by our community.

Our collective memories of 2022, 2011, and even earlier floods, are a vital source of knowledge to inform how we prepare, respond and recover from floods. They also allow recognition and learning about what our community does each time floods occur.

This dedicated library will hold valuable stories and lessons from our experiences with floods in Kurilpa, enabling us to easily share how flooding impacts us with old and new residents, visitors, decision-makers and other flood-impacted communities.

Collecting, cataloguing and sharing this knowledge will only grow in importance as we face a future of flooding exacerbated by climate change.

Without this library, we have no central repository of community flood knowledge. No way to learn from the experiences of those who were here in the last flood. No place to store our collective memory for future generations to draw on.

For the years (and floods) to come, the Kurilpa Flood Library will provide a place where people can visit, read our stories, and learn about flooding on the Kurilpa Peninsula from those who have experienced it.

With the funds...

Our goal is to raise $10,000 to design and build two creative resources that share the knowledge held in the Kurilpa Flood Library. This includes the Kurilpa Flood Library website and knowledge cards. The website will be accessible, beautiful, and free, with illustrations by local artist Maeve Lejeune (Houses of West End). It will host our existing toolkit of co-designed resources and important links. The knowledge cards will be available in two formats: as a free downloadable resource on the website, and as high-quality printed decks to support face-to-face learning for various groups in our community, like schools, NGOs, service providers, body corporates and residents as they plan for the future.

The Kurilpa Flood Library project is a highly collaborative creative, volunteer and research partnership, involving Resilient Kurilpa members, local creatives, and my doctoral research on designing tools for community-led adaptations to climatic events (Griffith University).

Kurilpa is renown for valuing the arts and cultural expertise. This crowdfunding will support the professional creative services for the project, including:

In-kind research and volunteer hours will contribute to:

Why crowdfunding and who gets acknowledged?

Community crowdfunding enables the Kurilpa Flood Library to be supported by the people who contribute the stories and benefit from the knowledge. All crowdfunding supporters will be acknowledged on the Kurilpa Flood Library website.

How will the Kurilpa Flood Library be managed?

The Kurilpa Flood Library will be developed in partnership with Griffith University, as a component of my doctoral research. This means the project's data collection process will follow national ethical guidelines and data will be stored securely on Griffith University servers. However as a community design project, the focus of the Kurilpa Flood Library is to communicate it, share it, and use it via the website and knowledge cards. If you have any questions about the research, please contact me using the button below.

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