An endless present: Experiences of time through multiple disasters in Australia

Disasters rupture everyday social orders and relationships, including the experience of time. This article examines social narratives of time in the context of multiple disasters in rural and regional Australia. It presents findings from semi-structured interviews with community-based disaster recovery workers who were deployed in places that experienced multiple disasters between 2017 and 2022. We explore the interviewees’ own experiences of work and time, as well as their perceptions of how communities understand and negotiate time in the context of multiple disasters. The findings demonstrate community experiences of a stagnant ‘present’, where the impact of multiple disasters stalls their sense of moving towards the future and is simultaneously dislocated from experiences of the past. In engaging with these communities, interviewees’ experiences of work time in the context of multiple disasters highlight difficulties in relation to the structures of their work, and the stresses of supporting communities through multiple disasters.