On the Australia Day long weekend in 1974, the city of Brisbane experienced devastating floods which resulted in at least 16 deaths and were to become the most expensive urban flood in Australian history. In January 2011, another flood struck the city, again resulting in extensive damage and leaving many residents traumatised. This paper examines some of the multiple ways in which memories of 1974 were drawn upon by Brisbane residents, the news media and Queensland politicians during the 2011 event. The 1974 floods had often been labelled ‘unforgettable’ and memories of the disaster had developed an important place in local identities. The paper explores how memories of 1974 were reconstructed and put to use as a means of preparing for, recovering from or making sense of the later disaster. I argue that, in planning for disasters in the future, it is important to attend to the ways in which the memory of past disasters continues to be developed, maintained and contested in the present.

From 1946, the United States Air Force began to produced a number of global indexes of strategic targets known as the Bombing Encyclopedias (BE). As handbooks of thousands of industrial and urban installations or a database of computable punchcards, the BE system presented targets as abstract lines of numbers made up of coordinates, grid references and category codes. Before the advent of systematic aerial surveillance, the most important source of intelligence on the Soviet Union were the memories of people who had been detained there. Project Wringer involved the interrogation of over 300 000 ex-prisoners, displaced persons, and other people who had been imprisoned or forced to labor there. It was a massive effort of memory ‘extraction’, tabulation, and translation. Behavioral scientists were called upon to inject analytical power into a process that juxtaposed visualization techniques, human science, and data management. Overall the BE-Project Wringer system operated as a technocultural apparatus that scrubbed memories of subjectivity so that they appeared to take on qualities of abstract ‘data’. By the time coded lines were entered into the targeting indexes they appeared not as indeterminate ‘human intelligence’ but simply ‘intelligence’ that had been collected but not made.

While the iconic foreign war in many Australians’ minds remains World War I, other conflicts have had significant impacts upon Australian society and how Australians think of themselves within the wider world. One recent societally contested conflict, the Vietnam War, was a particular source of controversy among the Australian public, with some strongly in favour of the war, and others vehemently opposed. In particular, an area of contention was the draft, which obliged individuals to participate in the conflict without their consent. In this paper, we conduct a geographical analysis of which parts of Australia felt the impacts of the war most strongly on their population. In so doing, we draw upon geocoded birth locations of servicemen from Department of Veterans’ Affairs records of service and differentiate between those who volunteered for service and those who were drafted, the National Servicemen (or Nashos as they were colloquially known). We examine the impacts in terms of numbers of soldiers serving and deaths to identify the extent to which particular parts of Australia were affected compared with others.