Dr Margaret Cook’s National Library Fellowship - Histories of Cyclones in Australia: Culture, Memory, and Response – explores the historical, cultural, and social dimensions of cyclones, one of the most powerful and devastating natural forces experienced in the Australian climate. Cyclones are often treated as isolated, episodic disasters rather than as historically significant events that have shaped and reflected Australian society over time, events that are deeply embedded in the dynamic relationships between people, place, and nature.

Margaret Cook is a Research Fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University. An environmental historian, her research has a focus on water and climate-related disasters. She has published extensively including A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods and co-edited Disasters in Australia and New Zealand with the Library’s own Scott McKinnon. Margaret’s research challenges the idea that disasters are purely “natural”, emphasising their cultural and historical dimensions.