This text features Emily Wakeling in conversation with Helen Styles, July 2021. It is published on the occasion of the exhibition Compassionate Grounds: Ten Years on in Tohoku at Composite throughout 2021.

‘Compassionate Grounds: Ten Years on in Tohoku’ is an exhibition held in Composite space in 2021 that showcases creative expressions in contemporary screen arts that observe the ongoing impact of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan. Due to the ongoing pandemic-related travel restrictions, it’s a project I have curated from Mackay, North Queensland, and despite the distance between me and the exhibition’s subject matter, I am interested in seeing these works within a global conversation about the role of creative expression after major disasters—including those happening in my own backyard. Helen Styles is an expert in the field of disaster recovery and resilience, having experience in responding to Mackay disasters including 2017’s Cyclone Debbie, the 2019 Eungella fires, and the ongoing management of Covid-19. In the conversation to come, she has generously provided insight into disaster recovery and how her knowledge can apply to all manner of communities experiencing great loss:

EW: To start, let's talk about what you know about disasters. In your years of working in disaster recovery, what have you experienced, witnessed, and actioned?

HS: I've seen people lose everything. A lifetime of accumulated work to build a home and a life...gone. Their belongings are their memories - a material culture of all their years of life. Sometimes those people work where they live, such as farmers or small business owners, or their workplace is also affected, so they can lose their home and their livelihood all in one hit. They can experience the loss of place, and if they cannot rebuild where they lived, they have to move away. And even if they can rebuild where they live, they are often displaced for a time while their house is rebuilt, and being displaced means losing connections to their place and more critically the people there. So just as they lose everything, they are also removed from the people who would support them to recover or are part of making what is normal, everyday life; the shopkeeper, the barista, or the publican.

EW: A person's home, in that sense, extends far beyond a boundary fence doesn't it? What I’ve observed in the artworks featured in ‘Compassionate Grounds’ is that there are so many external and interconnected elements that create a sense of place—but these aren't really recognised until lost. Would you agree?

HS: Yes, I would. It’s all about a sense of place and the familiarity of what you know and the people connected to that place. And all of that is also connected to identity and your sense of self. The place you know of as home is home because of your memories there and the people you share those memories with. If it’s always been home (and you see this especially with people who haven’t moved much in their lives), you always assume it will be there. So when it suddenly isn’t, or it’s irrevocably changed, it can affect your sense of who are and what you know to be true.

The trauma of all that loss is usually deeply unsettling. When you don't have a home—your home—you don't have a safe and secure place to ground you. You don't have your usual foundation to start each day from and go to sleep in the confidence that all you need, and love, will be there tomorrow. The grief can be overwhelming. I've seen people walk away and not return to their properties for years. I've seen people so paralysed by the loss, that not only can they not decide how to recover (‘Should I rebuild here? Should I rebuild the same home I lost or something different? Where do I even start?’), or whether they should recover at all (‘Should I rebuild my business/farm here or retire and give it all away?’)

EW: You’ve described what disaster can do to people on an individual level, so could I ask about what disaster does to communities?

I’ll share this visualisation that explains the recovery journey, or Phases of Recovery, for individuals and communities. The graph is widely used to train disaster recovery workers. You can see a disaster event initially triggers emotional highs. People are banding together to survive, rescuing their neighbours, and pulling together to get through those first few days and weeks. There’s often a lot of adrenaline and goodwill towards each other. You see a lot of activity in this time featured in the media; large groups of volunteers coming out to clean up communities, feed evacuees at evacuation centres, and countless donated goods piling up. People feel a strong sense of community. These are the Heroic and Honeymoon periods.

Then, as damages and losses are counted and the true toll of the disaster takes shape, the emotions take a deep dive. The realisation sets in about what has been lost, and recovery can feel like an insurmountable mountain rising before you. When the disaster is widespread, with lots of households affected, the wait times become really long to get help, get debris cleared, receive financial assistance, have an insurance assessment, and secure a builder and then for rebuilding to actually start. By the way, there’s some evidence that dealing with insurance companies can be more traumatic than the disaster event itself. People always think things are going to happen faster than they usually do and most do not understand what recovery actually takes. So it’s no wonder this is known as the Disillusionment period. Getting knocked back by an insurer or failing to qualify for government assistance are typical trigger events you see at the bottom of the red line. Triggers can also be events that remind them of the disaster, like earthquake aftershocks, or very heavy rainfall in a community affected by flood.

This is also when you might see what is known as cleavage planes emerge in communities. Pre-existing divisions or differences in communities can be exacerbated, leading to open conflict. For example, a family in its fifth generation of farming a large property might have hobby farmers as new neighbours. They don’t think much of the hobby farmers and recognise they have a lot to learn about living on the land, but they’re not affected by how their neighbours do things on their own property so they aren’t bothered. Then a bushfire comes through both properties and the fences between them are destroyed. The experienced farmers know how to quickly rebuild an effective fence to keep their animals penned in and predators out. But the hobby farmers don’t have the same skills or knowledge, and their animals escape and cause havoc on neighbouring properties, leading to conflict between them. Disasters and the way in which the recovery goes can also create new divisions. For example, the distribution of recovery funding can often feel inequitable. In the previous example, the hobby farmer might qualify for a government grant but the experienced farmers may not—and I have seen just this type of thing happen. Now the experienced farmers hate their neighbours even more. These types of cleavage planes really hinder community recovery, because communities recover quickest and best when social capital is strong. This is when facilitating community recovery activities, like fence building skill-building workshops, for example, can help heal those divisions.

Most people will hope they’ll be back on their feet or back in their homes by the time the first anniversary of the disaster event arrives, but that often isn’t the case. You can see there is a dip in emotions at that time. Anniversaries can trigger anxiety, sadness, and grief. People may be thinking about what happened a year ago, reliving it in their heads, seeing images again in the media, thinking about who or what they lost. When there are deaths, discussions about memorials can lead to further cleavage planes as different people argue about what the memorial—whether it is an event or monument—should be. Grief can be a powerful emotion.

Things usually gradually improve from there, as Reconstruction builds momentum and some sense of normalcy eventually returns. Most people do work through their grief in one way or another. Seeking support for mental health is a really good thing people can do for themselves. For some individuals and communities, the reconstruction phase can go on for many years. So the red line in this chart would continue on, with emotions dipping through anniversaries, other severe weather events and rebuilding setbacks; and rising through the wins, such as when a family moves back into their repaired home, or that beloved community venue reopens. A catastrophic event can stay with people for years to come, but on a positive note most people do not know the strength they have inside, and together as a group, until they have to draw upon it. People are usually surprised at how much they can endure when they have to and this strength will get them through, eventually. Most recognise that life doesn’t return to normal because they and their community, have been changed by the event. Instead they talk about a ‘new normal,’ as we hear frequently in mainstream media now when discussing the pandemic and lock-downs.

EW: This is really illuminating for me, as I think about the range of survivors’ voices represented in the exhibition’s artworks. ‘Compassionate Grounds’ observes the ten-year mark after first impact. What do you know about this far along in the disaster timeline? Can communities still be recovering ten years on?

HS: I’ll start with a personal story. In 1918 my hometown was devastated by a cyclone which was accompanied by a storm surge. Scores died and a third of the residents lost their homes. My grandmother was a small girl at the time, living with her parents, an older brother and sister, and the whole family were nearly drowned by the storm surge. Her mother, my great-grandmother, saw the surge coming and screamed in terror. The house filled with water quickly and the family scrambled into the ceiling where they became trapped. Neighbours arrived in a small boat and helped to open a panel to the roof, rescuing them. They lived with another family for the next six months, one of two homeless families taken in by that household, before eventually moving into a new home. They rebuilt their lives, had three more children, and became a successful, leading family business in the town. However, for the rest of her life, my great-grandmother would become highly anxious whenever rainfall became very heavy and prolonged, which is often when you live in the tropics. And every time she did, the family would gather around her and they would tell the stories of that night and how they all survived, which usually helped to calm her down. They remembered how strong they were and it comforted them. My great-grandmother and most of her children lived well into their nineties. They were changed by that disaster event, but life went on.

In my professional capacity, what I can say about long-term recovery timeframes is that they depend largely on the severity of the event. For an event as severe as the earthquake and tsunami in northeast Japan, to see many people still struggling ten years on is not unusual. There has recently been some substantial research published in Australia about the 2009 Black Saturday Bushfires to measure the impact ten years after that catastrophic event. In the communities that experienced high impact, with many deaths and homes lost, two thirds of people felt their community had not recovered a decade later. That’s significant and is evidence that recovery can be a very long road for some communities.

EW: I’m also really interested to know more about the creative projects you’ve facilitated as part of a community’s recovery.

HS: I’ve been involved in a few creative recovery projects for very different types of disaster events and their impacts, but there are probably a few key similarities between all of them. The ideas and the desire to undertake them started with the affected communities, and their core was the desire to create shared memories and bring people together. One was a school community that was split in two—the several students who lived on the mountain-top and the rest who lived in the valley—for a period of 18 months when its only road was destroyed by heavy rain. So there was a small temporary school for them at the top of the mountain and one teacher had the idea to create a mural to commemorate this period in the school’s history. The children at the top painted part of the mural and children at the bottom, in the main school campus, painted the other part. They worked on it as two separate groups for months, sharing pictures so they could see each other’s progress. And then when the road was fixed, and there was no need for the temporary school anymore, the two parts of the mural came together in a beautiful reflection of the two parts of the school coming together again as a whole. The support for this kind of project has been the same for all the projects I’ve been involved in and there are key ingredients that make them succeed: funding; community-led planning; technical, practical and emotional support; and customisation to suit each community’s needs.

EW: What makes creative projects so effective in recovery, rather than say economic boosts or entertainment events?

HS: Activities such as entertainment have their place in recovery for providing a leisurely break from the work of recovery, and economic recovery is incredibly important for underpinning community wellbeing and building resilience. There are benefits of creative recovery that you don’t tend to see in the other types of recovery activities. Creative recovery projects facilitate storytelling, which is essential to the human condition. We are built to share stories as a way of making sense of experiences, connecting emotionally with each other, and creating memories, both individually and collectively. All of these things are critical to healing, to emotional recovery. There’s some really interesting research into the neurological effects of creative activity and how it enables emotional expression. When people are engaged in creating something with their hands, it encourages the opening of neural pathways to express verbally what they’re feeling. Time and time again in creative recovery projects you will hear of a participant suddenly opening up about what happened to them for the very first time…and this might be years after the event. The arts also give people an outlet to work and be together that is different to what most people usually do collectively, such as work, school, sport, or go to the pub. When they create together, they are drawing from something deep inside themselves, and putting that on show. And that being accepted by the group is very empowering. Creative recovery activities can also provide opportunities for posttraumatic growth—a positive psychological change that can happen for people after a disaster, more colloquially known by ‘what doesn’t kill you can make you stronger.’ It recognises the positive changes in a person, such as discovering strengths they didn’t know they had, developing new skills, and the benefits from building new relationships.

EW: What are some of the challenges of realising these creative projects?

Unfortunately, in Australia, government funding for recovery services is only for up to two years following the disaster event. This can be really challenging for supporting individuals and communities that need more time. I’ve been involved in one creative project that took four years to be realised and we had to scrounge for funding to keep it going. For communities that need longer, such as the Black Saturday communities mentioned before, philanthropic funding is what has sustained recovery activities there.

EW: And how does witnessing these communities go through disaster recovery affect you, since it must be very emotional work?

As a recovery worker, it's my job to assist people and support them through recovery, but you can't help but be impacted yourself by the disaster, especially when it happens where you live. Your home might not have been affected, but disasters change where you live, and you can lose places you love or see them changed forever. Watching people struggle through can be heartbreaking.

I’ve seen some amazing examples of communities coming together to recover. People pitching in to help one another. Groups in a community that may not usually mix, gathering to share stories of survival. Meeting to plan together what recovery should look like, how they’ll rebuild and what they want their community to be when it’s all done. I’ve seen community arts projects be very successful at bringing disparate groups together and assist recovery, and social gatherings with plenty of food really help. That makes the work incredibly rewarding.

This interview was held on Yuwi country, of the Birri Gubba Nation. The author pays respect to elders past, present and emerging.