Origins of the Research
In 2014, at the height of an unprecedented drought, Dr Anne Suse Smith was invited by Centacare to Central Western Queensland as Drought Facilitator — documenting what the land and its people were living through. That work became the exhibition Drought…What Next? (2014).
Those words came from a landholder among the images. He did not live to see the exhibition open. His words — and his loss — became the catalyst for the research that followed.
The exhibition toured Queensland, and a calendar of the images was sent to every Member of the Queensland Parliament — credited by the Member for Gregory with helping secure drought relief and psycho-social funding, and nominated for the Resilient Australia Awards in 2015.
The doctoral research that followed — spanning the faculties of arts and business at the University of Southern Queensland — investigated how resilience, wellbeing, and capacity can be deliberately built in crisis-impacted communities. In the Barcaldine-region project Our Strength During The Drought (2018), local volunteers and thirteen primary school students — some of whom had never seen rain — told their community's own story. Images were simply the tool; the model works with any medium a community chooses.
The impact reached far beyond the region: national media coverage carried the community's story across Australia and internationally, putting them on the map and giving them a genuine sense of contributing to the country's understanding of drought — before the exhibition travelled on to Emerald in 2019.
Key finding: without prompting, every participant oriented toward hope. Wellbeing proved relational — the act of creating and sharing measurably strengthened resilience and community capacity.
Resilience and Wellbeing Through Photography: How Might Images Influence Community Capacity Building?
Anne Suse Smith, PhD — a doctorate spanning the faculties of arts and business, University of Southern Queensland, 2019.
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