THE VOICE THAT STAYS ON.

There is a particular quality of silence that descends on a Queensland town in the hours before a major cyclone makes landfall, or in the small hours of the morning when floodwaters have already cut the highway in both directions and the mobile towers are failing one by one. It is not the silence of peace. It is the silence of severed connection — the moment when the ordinary infrastructure of daily life, the systems and networks that modern Queenslanders carry in their pockets and depend upon without thinking, simply stops working. Power lines go down. Internet services drop. Roads become rivers. The screen goes dark.

What tends not to go dark, if the planning has been adequate and the backup generators are running and the staff have moved to higher ground in time, is ABC Radio. In Queensland, across the long sweep of the state’s documented disaster history, the public broadcaster has occupied a role that is less glamorous than the emergency services charging through floodwaters on jet skis, and less visible than the helicopters lifting people off rooftops, but no less essential. It is the institution that explains what is happening, where the floodwaters are heading, which roads remain passable, and which evacuation centres are open. It is the voice, and in the absence of all other voices, it carries enormous weight.

This is not accidental. The ABC serves an important function in crisis communications as Australia’s official Emergency Broadcaster. That designation carries obligations — obligations that are particularly acute in Queensland, which, as the Queensland Government’s own disaster management resources plainly state, is the most disaster-impacted state in Australia. The combination of an enormous, geographically dispersed population, a tropical north exposed to cyclones for roughly half the year, river systems that can transform from trickles to catastrophes across a single watershed event, and a wet season that reliably tests emergency systems each year — all of this makes Queensland the setting in which the ABC’s emergency broadcasting function is not a theoretical fallback position but a lived, annual reality.

WHAT QUEENSLAND'S DISASTERS ACTUALLY DEMAND.

To understand why ABC Queensland’s emergency broadcasting role is structurally distinct from that of any commercial broadcaster, it helps to understand the scale and character of what Queensland’s disasters actually look like. The 2010–11 floods remain the defining reference point for a generation of emergency management professionals and the communities they serve. In late November 2010, rain began falling in Queensland. By January 2011, flooding had impacted 75 per cent of the state and a disaster zone was declared. The geography of that disaster was staggering. On 25 December 2010, Cyclone Tasha crossed the northern Queensland coast and brought disaster to every river system south of the Tropic of Capricorn, and as far west as Longreach and Charleville. The flooding engulfed Alpha, Jericho, Chinchilla, Dalby, Theodore, Warwick, Bundaberg, Gayndah, Munduberra, Emerald, Rockhampton, Condamine and St George.

This was not a single-city event that could be covered from one studio. It was a distributed catastrophe playing out across a state larger than most nations, with communities separated by hundreds of kilometres of inundated roads, each one requiring locally relevant information — not the generalised bulletin of a national news cycle, but the specific and urgent: which river crossing is open, where can people get sandbags, what is the current gauge reading at the local bridge, when is the peak expected. In total, 33 people lost their lives, with three bodies never recovered and declared deceased by the State Coroner in June 2012. Evacuations numbered 5,900 people from 3,600 homes. An estimated 28,000 homes were in need of rebuilding; scores more would require extensive repairs.

The human cost makes the question of communication infrastructure feel urgent in a way that routine discussions of media policy do not. When people missed critical information as communication systems collapsed under pressure, emergency hotlines crashed when call volumes spiked, power outages cut radio and television access for thousands of residents, and mobile networks failed in flood-affected areas just when people needed them most, what remained? For a great many communities, the answer was a battery-powered radio tuned to the local ABC frequency.

The same pattern recurred when Cyclone Yasi bore down on the Queensland coast in early 2011 — one of the most powerful tropical cyclones to make landfall in Australia in recorded history — and again in the years that followed, in disaster after disaster. Queensland’s emergency managers did not need research to tell them that radio was the last medium standing when everything else failed. They knew it from experience. But the research confirmed it. As the ABC itself documented in a submission to the Australian Parliament, listening to ABC radio services leaps during emergency periods, as there is very high community recognition of the ABC’s role in providing timely and accurate information. Research into emergency broadcasting has shown that listeners are inclined to seek out trusted local personalities and stay with them for the duration of the event.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRUST IN CRISIS.

That phrase — trusted local personalities — deserves careful attention. It points to something that cannot be manufactured on short notice and cannot be replicated by a national broadcast feed reading from the same script as everyone else. Trust, in the context of emergency broadcasting, is built over years of daily contact between a station and a community. It is built when listeners recognise a presenter’s voice, when they know from experience that this station tells them the truth even when the truth is difficult, and when they understand, at a felt rather than an intellectual level, that the broadcaster is local — that it knows their river, their neighbourhood, their roads, their landscape.

This is the civic infrastructure that ABC Queensland’s network of local stations represents. The network operates across the state with stations in Brisbane, Cairns, Townsville, Rockhampton, Toowoomba, the Sunshine Coast, the Gold Coast, Wide Bay, and further into the regions — a distributed presence that maps, imperfectly but genuinely, onto the distributed reality of where Queenslanders actually live. In an emergency, the relevant station is not necessarily the one broadcasting from Brisbane. It is the one whose reporters and presenters know the local catchments, the local road network, the local emergency management hierarchy.

This network dimension was on clear display during Cyclone Alfred in early March 2025, when the system threatened South East Queensland in a way the region had not experienced in decades. ABC Radio Queensland moved its staff out of the Brisbane, Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast buildings as of 5 March to work from home where possible or to other accommodation for those required for emergency and radio programming. The relocation itself was a form of institutional memory in action. The ABC’s studios are built on the side of the Brisbane River, and during the last floods, the building’s basement was flooded out — and with it, the electricity supply. They were taking no chances — so a hotel was chosen that was 57 metres above sea level, rather than the ABC, which is less than five metres above the river.

The choice of a hotel boardroom as a temporary broadcast centre, elevated to safety above the flood plain, is a detail that illuminates the nature of this institution’s commitment. ABC local radio is well-practised at emergency broadcasting, with a clear format that it slips effortlessly into. The output is tight, clear and unsensational — not built for drama, but instead, built for human connection. It is a mix of regular communications from authorities, information from elsewhere, and plenty of “call us and tell us your story from where you are”. Imaging is built to be reassuring; little pre-recorded segments tell listeners how to prepare.

That description — not built for drama, but instead built for human connection — is a precise encapsulation of what emergency broadcasting is and is not. It is not a performance of crisis. It is not the kind of coverage that wins awards for spectacular footage or emotive presentation. It is something quieter and more useful: a steady, structured, reliable feed of verified information delivered without sensationalism, calibrated to the needs of people who are frightened and cut off and making consequential decisions in real time.

THE SIMULCAST IMPERATIVE AND THE TRANSMISSION PROBLEM.

One of the less-discussed dimensions of ABC Queensland’s emergency broadcasting is the technical question of how coverage actually reaches people when normal transmission infrastructure is compromised. This is not a trivial challenge. Queensland’s geography — vast distances, coastal flood plains, river systems that can inundate transmission infrastructure, and populations that may be fifty or five hundred kilometres from a major transmitter — means that maintaining broadcast reach during disasters requires active, pre-planned technical contingency.

During Cyclone Alfred, the ABC’s approach reflected hard lessons learned from previous events. Most of the emergency coverage was simulcast across three ABC local radio areas; and as a tacit acknowledgement that everyone does not have AM radio receivers any more, 612 ABC Radio Brisbane also took over ABC Classic’s transmitter on 106.1FM in the city. This dual-frequency approach proved its value almost immediately. For almost two hours on Sunday the 612 AM transmitter fell silent after a failed generator — and just before it came up, 106.1 also fell silent for two minutes. The fact that both services eventually recovered, and that the simulcast strategy had provided some redundancy in the interim, illustrated exactly why layered technical planning matters.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s own parliamentary submissions have addressed these technical vulnerabilities candidly. The ABC’s transmission services provider, Broadcast Australia, works closely with the ABC and alternative program feeds can be put in place to maintain service continuity. A new operations protocol agreed between the ABC and Broadcast Australia in August 2010 resulted in substantial improvements to the process. During natural disasters, local radio has the highest restoration priority, followed by analogue and digital television.

That priority ordering is significant. In the hierarchy of restoration when transmission is disrupted, local radio sits at the top. This is not sentimental. It is a recognition of where the need is greatest and where the medium is least replaceable. Television requires power, a functioning screen, and typically a fixed domestic setting. The internet requires power, devices, and network connectivity — all of which tend to fail simultaneously during major flood or cyclone events. Radio, particularly battery-powered radio, can operate independently of the mains grid, independently of telecommunications networks, and independently of the fixed domestic infrastructure that disasters regularly destroy.

The Queensland Government’s own emergency preparedness guidance reflects this reality. Its official channels actively encourage Queenslanders to pre-program their local ABC radio station into their preferred digital music service and on their battery-operated radio, so that they can tune into warnings if the internet goes down.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE BLENDED MODEL.

None of this means ABC Queensland has stood still on the medium of broadcast radio. The 2010–11 flood season was, among other things, a formative period for the ABC’s understanding of how social media could function as a complementary layer of emergency communication — not as a replacement for broadcast, but as a means of expanding the reach and interactivity of coverage that was still anchored in radio.

By the time Cyclone Yasi was bearing down on the Queensland coast, all of those relevant account owners recognised the importance of giving each account the thought and attention it required. Very often social media and traditional broadcast media activities are discussed as separate spheres of activity, whereas in reality, for the ABC the approach is much more blended than that.

During the 2011 floods, research by academic analysts Bruns, Burgess, Crawford and Shaw found that the Queensland Police Media Twitter feed was the most visible presence in the flood of information emanating from Twitter. In second place was the ABC’s Twitter account @ABCNews. The significance of this finding was not simply that the ABC had a social media presence, but that the presence was trusted — ranked alongside official emergency services information in terms of its perceived authority and reliability.

The blended model that emerged from this period has continued to develop. During disasters, ABC Queensland now operates across radio, its website, the ABC Emergency app, and social media channels — each serving different audiences with different connectivity profiles. A farming family in the upper Burdekin catchment who has lost power but retains a battery radio is served by one part of the system. A resident of an inner-Brisbane suburb who retains internet access but has lost electricity to the television is served by another. The architecture of modern ABC emergency broadcasting is designed, at least in principle, to reach people wherever their remaining access to information lies.

But it is the radio signal — AM or FM, depending on location — that remains the non-negotiable foundation. Social media presences depend on platforms that may themselves be overwhelmed or inaccessible. Websites require connectivity. The radio wave, generated from a transmitter running on backup power, requires nothing from its recipient except a working receiver and a battery.

THE LIMITS OF THE MODEL AND WHAT THEY REVEAL.

Honest civic writing about ABC Queensland’s emergency broadcasting role should not elide the tensions and limitations. The institution has not always succeeded. Research conducted after the 2010–11 floods noted that in some communities, known and trusted sources of information — including the SES and ABC Radio — were unable to provide appropriate, relevant and timely advice to residents, and on the whole, residents lacked knowledge of the various measures that could be taken to reduce the impact of flooding on their home.

That failure was not primarily a failure of intent. The scale of the 2010–11 disaster was, in important respects, unprecedented. During the floods, some account owners recognised the critical importance of proper planning and resourcing of social media activities sooner than others — and in the spirit of learning from each emergency, by the time Cyclone Yasi was bearing down on the Queensland coast, all of those relevant account owners recognised the importance of giving each account the thought and attention it required. The lesson being encoded here is that emergency broadcasting capacity is not a fixed quantum. It requires ongoing investment, training, and adaptation to changing disaster profiles and changing media environments.

The question of funding is therefore not separable from the question of emergency broadcasting capacity. The ABC is a public institution funded by federal appropriation. Reductions in that appropriation reduce staffing, reduce regional bureau presence, and reduce the depth of local knowledge that makes emergency broadcasting genuinely useful rather than generically adequate. This is addressed in another part of this topical map, which examines the specific impacts of federal funding decisions on Queensland’s public broadcaster — but it is impossible to write about emergency broadcasting without acknowledging that the service’s capacity is a direct function of the resources available to maintain it.

ABC regional stations are currently limited to 1 Mb/second network links, which are too narrow to handle high volumes of network traffic. Reporters using domestic internet connections in the field have also encountered local congestion during emergencies, making it more difficult to access the internet and in turn affecting information gathering. These are not hypothetical constraints. They are structural limitations that affect what the broadcaster can actually deliver when communities most need it.

THE CIVIC CONTRACT AND ITS INFRASTRUCTURE.

Queensland’s disaster calendar is not going to become less demanding. The 2025 floods — among the most extensive in recent memory — reminded the state, as if reminder were needed, that the combination of climate variability, a vast and sparsely settled interior, and densely populated coastal strips vulnerable to cyclone and storm surge is a permanent condition of life in Queensland. The 2025 Queensland floods refer to significant flooding that impacted the northeast Australian state in late January, early February, into March and April 2025. The disaster resulted in at least two fatalities from flooding, 31 fatalities from a disease outbreak and prompted mass evacuation orders in Queensland’s coastal regions.

Tropical Cyclone Alfred affected Queensland and northern New South Wales between 21 February and 8 March 2025, bringing strong winds, heavy rainfall, flooding, power outages, and coastal erosion. More than 500,000 people lost power at some point during the event. Five hundred thousand Queenslanders, without power, making decisions — where to shelter, whether to evacuate, whether to cross a road that may be inundated — on the basis of whatever information they could access. For a substantial proportion of them, that information came through a radio receiver running on batteries.

The civic contract that underlies this function is rarely articulated explicitly, but it is real. The public broadcaster receives public funding in part because there are services that commercial broadcasters will not reliably provide — not because commercial broadcasters are unethical, but because the economics of emergency broadcasting do not reward it. Radio’s place in times of emergency is something of a trope — and, in many cases, is not really a given, with many broadcasters eliminating local broadcasting altogether. At least one Brisbane commercial broadcaster thought it was fine to broadcast non-stop music between 9pm and midnight during the Alfred emergency. That is a reasonable commercial decision in an environment where listener numbers drop overnight. It is not, however, what communities need when they are waiting for a storm surge to peak.

The ABC does not make that calculation. It is not structured to make that calculation. Its charter obligations and its emergency broadcaster designation mean that when a cyclone is bearing down on Moreton Bay at three in the morning, and the normal programming schedule has long since been set aside, and the commercial alternatives have quietly retreated to their auto-play music rotations, ABC Radio Queensland stays on. That is the civic function. It is not glamorous. It is, on some fundamental level, exactly what a public broadcaster exists to do.

PERMANENCE, IDENTITY, AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF RECORD.

There is an argument, worth making plainly, that the civic identity of an institution like ABC Queensland should be represented not only in its broadcast frequencies and its website addresses — both of which are subject to the contingencies of technology change and administrative decision — but in something more permanent. The onchain namespace project that anchors Queensland’s civic institutions to a permanent identity layer recognises this. The address abc.queensland represents, within this framework, a permanent civic identifier for ABC Queensland — a way of saying that this institution has a fixed identity within the digital landscape of Queensland, independent of whatever domain registrar or government IT decision might shift its conventional web address in the future.

This may seem abstract alongside the concrete realities of emergency broadcasting — the failed generator on a Brisbane AM transmitter, the hotel boardroom repurposed as a studio, the battery radio in a Ingham household cut off by rising water. But identity and infrastructure are related. The permanence of the ABC’s emergency broadcasting function depends, in part, on the civic recognition of that function as foundational rather than contingent. An institution that is understood to be permanently, structurally part of Queensland’s civic infrastructure is harder to diminish than one whose role is seen as provisional or replaceable.

The Queensland disasters of the past decade and a half have provided, at considerable human cost, a series of proofs that the public broadcaster’s emergency function is not a historical artifact or a policy aspiration. It is a living, operational reality — one that is tested, under pressure, multiple times each year. What ABC Queensland has been in those moments — the signal that does not go dark, the voice that stays on, the institution that knows what it is for when everything else fails — is a civic achievement that deserves to be recognised not only in the heat of each individual crisis, but in the permanent architecture of how Queensland understands its own institutions.

When the next major event comes — and in Queensland, it will come — the communities affected will not be thinking about namespaces or civic identity frameworks. They will be thinking about whether the radio is working and whether the battery holds. But the systems that ensure the radio is working — the planning, the investment, the institutional commitment, the civic recognition that this function matters — are built in the quiet years between disasters. abc.queensland, as a permanent civic address in the onchain identity layer being built for this state, is part of how that recognition is encoded: not as a commercial asset, but as institutional fact — fixed, verifiable, and belonging to the public record of what Queensland has decided to be.